Absolute shitshow. (Read Blood, Sweat and Pixels by Jason Schreier for more info. To summarise,) Between 2000 and 2007 Bungie had been part of Microsoft. Project Tiger was the first big non-Microsoft game. Bungie Co-Founder would later discuss in an interview with IGN how he considered it tragic "...we provided people with almost no fun incentives or exuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay [Halo].
Pre-production began prior to the release of ODST which provided financial security for Bungie, with the teams for each game moving to Destiny development following the release of their game.
The project started out as a 3rd person fantasy game, but morphed in to a sci-fi (future fantasy) FPS. If you have played D1 the fantasy elemnents are not hard to see. "It was a sci-fi space opera. Shooter meets MMO." Bungie veteran Jamie Griesemer was so frustrated with the similarity of Destiny to Halo he started picking fights with other developers, eventually leading to the board of directors asking him to resign. During development, most elements were disparate. As is discussed in Blood, Sweat and Pixels (it's a really useful source for this bit), shit really hit the fan when The Supercut™ was released internally by joe Staten.
The Supercut was an overview of the plot of Destiny 1 vanilla as it existed in the Summer of 2013. Following the release of The Supercut, Jason Jones advised that the entire game's plot was to be reworked from the ground up. Destiny's original release was due for Autumn 2013, already having been pushed back to Spring 2014 prior to the story reset. Multiple locations such as Mercury and Saturn were removed to reduce the scope of the project.
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