Bungie's Destiny (har har)

Title card for Destiny

First I must apologize for not posting anything over the weekend. Between School work, work around the house and Mass Effect my attention was at other places. Anyway, lets jump into this.

Since Bungie's departure from Microsoft and new attachment to Activision, they have announced a new game that will be released on the PS3 and Xbox360. There has been no announcement on the new generation that should be coming out later this year or next year. I also believe I have read somewhere that Bungie said that this game will not be releasing this game for the PC, which seems a bit odd but maybe they think that the current generation of basic consumer PC's wont be able to handle it. We won't find out until it's released however.

So when Bungie leaked this game, its working title was "Destiny" and now that it has been officially announced the game will be called "Destiny" (ground breaking stuff here). Bungie is calling this the "First Shared World Shooter", what they mean by this is that everyone in the game has a way to effect your game. You will do something to one world that will effect the experience another player will have there. This also means that the all of the games will be seamlessly shared. One person could be in the middle of a mission on another planet and if you see that they are in trouble, you can just hop in and help them, or go against them I guess. With that though, Bungie has said nothing about arenas or any kind of PvP, just seamless PvE.

The story is, as per Bungies usual, many years in the future a weapon was created that ended 90% of the world population and cities. Some point after that everyone that was left found the first city , and apparently only, they could inhabit and protect it with their lives. Now, sometime after that a strange Death Star looking thing appears to descend directly over the city slowly moving towards it Majora's Mask style. This orb is called "The Traveler" and no one knows why its there.

Your character is part of a group called "The Guardians" and it is your main purpose to protect the city. You can chose what style of Guardian you want to be The Old Republic style, what I mean by this is you can be strictly guns or use "magic" powers, I suppose there will be a class that is a mix with several different variations in the classes.

Art for the gameplay

Now after all that I have to say, what the hell is going on? If your characters main purpose is to prtect the city how is there as much to the game as they say there is going to be. Do you get kicked off the team and become a rogue protector of the galaxy? Where I'm coming from is that Bungie has mentioned that "you can see someone having trouble with a quest on mars and jump in and help them." Now if your purpose is to solely protect the only city where the only humans left, why are you on mars? Are you looking for minerals that have long been lost on Earth? If so then you are not protecting the city, you are still helping the city but you are not "protecting" it. I may be nit-picking but it still seems like a glaring issue with how its described.

Another thing that seemed to stick out for me. Think about this, the world is supposedly in a world where almost all life has been destroyed and you are living in a small city that is all that is left. Now put into perspective the number of players there will be. Lets say there are roughly 50% (that's correct statistics, I looked it up) of the worlds populations plays video games, currently that's almost 3.5 billion players. Now break it down into who owns what consoles, lets split that into thirds, for arguments sake, that's roughly 1 billion players on each world, saying every one of there gamers is playing. While that is much smaller than the current world population, that still isn't "almost all." Again, I'm nit-picking but it's something that would stick out to me while I was playing the game.

All in all this just kind of sounds like Bungie took a bunch of ideas and slapped them together and called them new (hopefully this will do better than Darksiders).

1. The game have seamless multi-player. Like Journey.
2. Set far in the future. Like Halo (gee I wonder why).
3. Different yet very similar classes, that are either guns, powers or a mix. Like SWTOR.
4. The future isn't bleak. unlike, but based opposite of, Gears of War or Fallout.

If they can pull this off, which I don't see why this game would be horrible (but that's me having optimism). 

What I mean by that last one, about the future not being bleak is that the game is suppose to have a positive outlook. In Gears and Fallout the atmosphere is very bleak, the world is on the brink of ending and there isn't much chance for the world to go on a positive track, at least not for some time. This game is going to try to allow the story to progress in a way that will give the world more of a positive outlook.

Martin O'Donnell

What I can only describe as odd, is the two things I am most looking forward too. One is the Grognok World Building Tool and the in-house composer. The Grognok World Building Tool sounds interesting doesn't it? Well this is a tool that Bungie had put together that will allow them to change the world on the fly. This will allow the players to change the world with their actions and will give Bungie the ability to add in content as seamlessly as their alleged PvE. This will allow for a different experience almost every time you log into the game. This could lead towards different MMO's releasing new material even quicker and possibly for cheaper costs.

The other thing I mentioned was the in-house composer. Now this might now seem like much, but generally game developers hire freelance artists or composers for their sound track, which can lead to different music styles when a new add-on comes out. However Bungie has hired Martin O'Donnell as their main composer. Now in Bungies previous games the sounds track were beautiful. I can only imagine that this game will follow that pattern and as new parts of the game come out I can only hope that the sounds will match the sites in consistency and beauty. 

In the end, there is not much can be said (the past 10 paragraphs would beg to differ). The game hasn't come out yet and we are only left with speculation and what has been leaked. However whatever has been leaked can be changed just as easily as we heard about it. The concept sounds interesting and Bungie is a very competent game development company, now them being Independent with a small attachment to Activision, we can only hope that this next installment to their game library will be worth the hype and wait. If this game follows most of the game that have come out in the past, it wont, but we can hope.