The studio also wants to present players a lot more choice, small and big. Destiny’s world is to continue evolving much like a typical MMO’s world would, but they’re still figuring it out.
Destiny is Bungie’s next major project and it’s a multiplayer shooter for current and next-gen. The world is in trouble with humanity on the brink of extinction, but help shows up.
”In the same way we’re making your heroic story, your legend, that carries over into the cinematics. You’re the star of the cinematics as much as you’re the star of your own heroic tale,” design director Joe Staten told IGN.
”So if you’re playing in a co-op way, we’re not going to do that crappy thing that happened in the old Halo games where, if you’re playing co-op, you don’t show up…you’re not the primary role.”
”Putting a history into the world was extremely important, something you felt you were fighting for, the civilization that was once yours that’s fallen, that’s trying to recover,” he said. ”But it also goes to player choice, too, and not just choices you’d get in a Halo game, the moment to moment of how I’m going to take apart this encounter, what’s my combat toolset?”
”What kind of character do I want to be in the world? Do I want to be a man or do I want to be a woman? That’s a choice we never gave someone in the Halo games.” The team at Bungie is still unsure how they intend to roll out the continued changes they plan for the world of Destiny.
”The goal with everything in Destiny is to continue to add to the world, but we still haven’t figured out exactly what that means in terms of a cadence,” continued Staten, ”but given our plan to build this big world and then evolve it over time, we’re absolutely going to have some cadence for that.”
Another focus is creating truly varied enemies to fight which is why Destiny has four enemy races to pick apart. It’s no good if they all feel the same but just wear a different skin.
”Way more characters than we had in the Halo games, I think with all our systems, most of them are brand new from the ground up, and that includes our AI and the way we script character behavior,” Staten explains. ”Our goal is definitely to give people as diverse a combat experience as possible. Hopefully we’re able to pull that off.”
Destiny releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PS4 at an undisclosed date.
