Bungie was apparently afraid that if they made another straight-up sci-fi shooter everyone would confuse it with Halo even if it were not called “Halo.” So they kept that concern in mind when they were creating Destiny.
“Really, the artists were trying to push hard away from sci-fi because of the Halo legacy and history,” Bungie writer Eric Osborne told IGN. “They were just thinking, ‘What can we do that’s radically different after 10 years?’ So there’s actually some concept art that you can find online of a very fantasy-driven world of knights, swords and sorcery in a white city on a hill.
“That was very much pure fantasy, but the more they continued to work and the more their ideas formed over time, the more they realized that the lure of sci-fi was just something they loved and they were denying themselves that creative space. So they thought, ‘What if we just take these two things and smash them together?’”
