A little more than 12 years ago, Bungie made a name for themselves when they released Halo: Combat Evolved. A first-person shooter with an interesting narrative, that wasn’t on PC. At the time, this seemed like an almost unheard of move, with the PC crowd looking down on consoles as a platform for “children”. Regardless, Halo quickly established itself as one of the finest shooters ever created, with the franchise continually producing more and better sequels. My point exactly? Bungie took a risk that not many people would dream of back then and that’s exactly what they’re doing with Destiny.
We’ve known about Bungie’s involvement with Destiny for a long time now. After the developers left Microsoft, they signed a ten year publishing deal with Activision. Soon after they announced Project Destiny, a first-person shooter with unparalleled online capabilities. Everyone immediately jumped and claimed that Bungie was building an MMO, but the developer stayed quiet, for a few years in fact. That silence was broken yesterday as Bungie officially unveiled Destiny to the world, and boy did it make a good first impression.
First and foremost, Destiny is a first-person shooter. Bungie is good at making them, so it should be no surprise that they’ve stuck to that genre. Additionally, the setting of Destiny is very familiar to a Halo title. Humans are fighting an alien attack that is threatening their existence, much like Master Chief and the Covenant. Humanity has retreated into one last city, with the rest of Earth being left to waste. Several years have passed and the humans feel confident in going out to explore and reclaim some regions of the planet, and that’s where players come in. You play as one of the “Guardians” of this last remaining city, sent out to scavenge and explore lost regions on earth and other nearby planets such as Venus and Saturn. Bungie have promised that Destiny will be heavily story-driven, so don’t let the scarce narrative news at the moment scare you off.
On top of that there are competitive multiplayer modes and co-operative capabilities, but it’s how Bungie has brought these together that makes Destiny so unique and interesting. Destiny is going to be a very sociable experience, but it’s not an MMO. Players will be able to interact with other players at central hubs in the game’s campaign, trading loot, gambling and accepting side missions. Players will also have the option to play with others during missions, although the way this is done differs slightly from nearly every co-op game out there. Instead of being in an online lobby and inviting people to come play, Destiny’s servers are constantly working to pair you up with players on the same level of skill as you and busy with the same objectives. What happens then is a seamless connection of the two games, literally allowing you to bump into another player as if you had just met them in the game itself. Think of it like a shooter with Journey’s online capabilities, because that’s the closest example I can think of.
Sure, you can still restrict you game so that you only play with friends of yours, but Bungie want players to go out and explore their world with complete strangers. It makes the experience feel like a series of chance encounters, allowing you to forge new alliances with people and take on missions in the future. Much like guilds in an MMO. But while Destiny borrows a lot from the MMO genre in terms of a persistent and always online world, they stress that they’re not build an MMO because you always have the choice to take things offline. Also, there’s no subscription fee, so that helps in their argument somewhat.
“These are living, open worlds with evolving stories, changing time of day…and every one is full of players. Destiny is an always online experience, but it’s not an MMO.”
Destiny’s worlds are forever changing, making the game feel different every time you turn it one. Think of Destiny more like a platform than a game, because that’s actually a more accurate description. With this ever evolving world, players have an endless amount of opportunities waiting for them. Landscapes will shift and alter, dynamic events and missions will be created randomly and Bungie will continually add more and more to this living world throughout the next ten years, or maybe even more. What Bungie are trying to achieve here is rather monumental, creating not a singular experience on a disc but rather one that players could possibly play for the next decade, again like an MMO.
“If you enjoy shooters, Destiny is going to be the best game you’ve ever played. Destiny is Bungie’s next great shooter and is set in an amazing new world that we’re building. In Destiny, players get to build their own characters and grow them over time. We’re really putting players in the center of the world and giving them control over their experience. From the ground up we’ve built this game to be social and cooperative.”
And what better way to keep players updated about Destiny than a mobile app. Bungie.Net is coming to mobile devices so that players will always stay up-to-date when things change within Destiny. The aliens could launch an attack on a nearby planet, and you’ll receive a message saying exactly that. An event could be occurring on Venus at a particular time, and a player that you randomly ran into a couple of nights ago could message you to see if you’re interested in tackling it with him/her. This has the possibility to create a truly unique meta-game for Destiny, as players will constantly be thinking about their character, about their world even when away from their consoles.
But the best news is still to come: Destiny is a current-gen title. From the small snippets of gameplay in the video above, it’s a bit hard to judge visuals, but other journalists around the world who have seen the game in action are claiming that it looks absolutely gorgeous. Bungie have confirmed that Destiny will come to Xbox 360 and PS3, with the Xbox release seemingly at the end of the year. When asked about next-gen releases, they simply stated that they would not comment on it, which could mean a host of things. I highly doubt Bungie would build something this ambitious and then risk it failing because of new hardware.
And that, in a nutshell, is what Destiny is all about. If done right, Destiny has the chance to change the first-person shooter scene forever. The idea of blending a narrative-focused single-player campaign with ideas that make MMO’s so social sounds absurd, but in a day and age where nearly everything is online constantly it really is a wonder why something like this wasn’t attempted before. Bungie has already been working on Destiny for a few years now, and it’s good that they chose to only show it when they were confident in what they were building. It truly does show, making Destiny one of my the most anticipated titles for 2013 .
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