Someone’s suing Bungie for allegedly stealing Destiny 2: Red War ideas

As Destiny 2: Episode 2 – Revenant‘s Act 1 unfolds with questionable gusto, it seems that game content problems aren’t the only issue Bungie is currently facing. Notably, there’s a new lawsuit cooking, alleging that Bungie’s writers had stolen the concept of Year 1’s (now sunset) Red War campaign.

Specifically, the word of the lawsuit was first brought to light by The Game Post’s Zuhaad Ali. The legal dispute was filed earlier this month by author Kelsey Martineau in Louisiana, alleging that many of the concepts and characters from Red War were “directly” taken from one of their science-fiction short stories. The lawsuit states that “The creators of Destiny 2 did not independently create their version of the Red Legion but instead of have wrongfully copied Martineau’s original creation,” and though Bungie is yet to respond to the allegations, it will have to, at some point.

Image via Bungie

Destiny 2’s latest lawsuit is all about the sunset Red War campaign

The claim, which is available for reading via Scribd.com, comes with a whole slew of alleged similarities between Martineau’s fiction and Destiny 2‘s Red War. Before going deeper into this, I’d like to use this opportunity to highlight the fact that almost all the key elements that appeared in Year 1 of Destiny 2 had been fairly well established in the years prior. After all, Destiny 2 is a sequel, and Bungie cooked up Cabal lore a fair few years prior to the release of even the first Destiny title.

With that in mind, here are just a few highlights from Martineau’s library of allegations:

• The name “Red Legion”
• An alien faction of warlike Legionnaires
• Similarities between Dominus Ghaul and Martineau’s Overlord Yinnerah
• The presence of a large celestial object in the Earth’s low orbit, which the Red Legion attempts to capture
• The use of the word “failsafe” in both narratives

The list goes on and on. A particularly interesting highlight can be found on pages 7 through 9 of the document, stating that it was “well publicized that the development team for Destiny 2 was forced to scrap a majority of their work midway through development in order to start over again.” This is, presumably, used to suggest that Bungie might’ve read Martineau’s self-published works and attempted to leverage it for the flagship title.

For those who didn’t have the chance to enjoy Destiny 2‘s old, now sunset content, there is a somewhat acceptable solution: YouTube preservation. The only way to currently get a sense of what it all looked like is to check out the cutscenes and gameplay footage that veteran players had previously captured, as there’s no way to actually engage with the Red War campaign in-game at this time. Will this play a role in the lawsuit? I don’t know, but it sure will be interesting to see how the situation develops.

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