Some of the original plans and the first prototype for the first raid in Destiny 1 was to create a much more massive experience, which never fully came to fruition and was replaced with the now-iconic Vault of Glass. However, many of the concepts from that first raid did make their way into the game at some point throughout the lifespan of Destiny 1.
Destiny franchise director Luke Smith revealed on the "We Have Cool Friends" Kinda Funny podcast that Crota's End and King's Fall were originally one massive raid. Although not all the encounters that would eventually make up each of those raids were in those original plans for one massive raid experience, the pieces were there.
Much of it began with the very first prototype to demonstrate what raiding could be in Destiny 1, which was a very early version of what would become the bridge encounter in Crota's End. At the time, that prototype was built in the Halo engine, but it involved carrying a "heavily modified Brute hammer," as Smith described it, across a bridge.
This "hybrid, mega-raid" that Bungie never made as it was originally planned would have included somewhere in it an encounter that was basically the opening encounter to King's Fall where players have to collect the orbs on two different sides of the area and then bring back to the center to slam into the statues. The raid would have ended in the boss room for Crota's End with the giant Oversoul looming in the distance. Smith also said that the boss room for The Summoning Pits strike where players fight the giant ogre Phogoth was also originally a raid space for this early raid concept that was redesigned and repurposed for the strike instead of being used in a raid.
Smith said Bungie redesigned all the rooms and encounters when it came time to actually create Crota's End and King's Fall, but that the skeletons were all there from this previous raid idea. Smith said that is very much a reality of game development:
"The reality of making games and generating ideas is a bunch of your stuff is going to be built on the bones of the ideas that you didn't get to see through. [...] You end up going back to those things you didn't get to do and being like, 'Why didn't that work? I still want to do that. Let's do that.'"
So, then why was the Vault of Glass (which Smith said the writing team at Bungie originally wanted to call The Glass Throne) the first raid and not this Hive-based mega-raid? The answer, according to Smith, is because the campaign of Destiny 1 ends with the Vex as the main threat so the raid team felt like they wanted to make a raid that was Vex-themed. As a result, the Hive raid idea was shelved and was later drawn from when Bungie started on developing Crota's End, designing the opening lamp lighting encounter from scratch, bringing back the bridge encounter idea, and using the Oversoul room for the Crota boss fight.
Destiny is available now for PS4 and Xbox One.
Source: Kinda Funny