Bungie's Destiny is not a MMO, but you'll play it for the next 10 years

Apparently.



It looks... I don't know, but there's some bold claims, a promise of greatness, a tried and tested studio and a 10 year publishing contract.
I don't know what I think, so I'm posting this so some of you more informed people can tell me.

Well... Let's break down the video from our perspective as consumers. Here we have the excitement they feel about making the game being sold alongside the game. So, let's separate those two. On one hand, you have the promises they're making and the fear they feel as they venture into this unknown realm they're creating, putting it in parallel with the journey that the player will undergo through their game (according to them). Then you have the Quintessential Space Marine, with a suggested sprinkling of Aragorn Ranger-like qualities, being suggested by a voiceover, but not by the developers themselves. The developers are just making statements along the lines "we cray cray lol", while the voiceover is talking to the would-be player, talking about the history of the game and the breadth of the universe. There are some shots of something rendered in a game engine, but they're presented without context. They suggest spaceships, but you don't see them do anything.

So, we have developers on one hand trying to boil up some hype for their game without telling you what it is, while you have voiceovers and videos that, without putting anything into context, show a few things that could mean anything.

In essence, they're selling us the game, whatever it may be, that we as consumers sigh about, look up and go "No no, they'd never make anything like that these days..." It doesn't matter what game we have in our heads, or whether that is the game they're making, they're trying to sell us that game that we (they posit) have been thinking about for so long. And while they're doing that, they're selling us on being part of the developers' journey as they make this game, promising that we will play it for the next ten years (because it's the game "we" always wanted), and getting us emotionally invested in their success.

It's not bad, as far as marketing strategies are concerned, but it doesn't really say much about what the game will actually be about.

They don't want to show the 360 or PS3 versions, instead they're waiting until Microsoft and Sony show their new systems so they can go all out with really pretty screenshots and gameplay videos. Until then, all they can do is tease.

Yawn.

It's not an MMO, but it's always online, and there's a persistent world, and you can play solo but you'll never really be alone. But it's not an MMO.

And Activision would also like you to know that this will not be a subscription-based game.

Anyway, here's Adam Sessler's account of what he was shown.

I guess this answers the question of whether Bungie would break out of the Halo mold after leaving Microsoft.

Thing is we already played it for the last ten years.

We should just shunt this into the MMO forum now so we look like the omnipotent gods that we know ourselves to be.

I really like the concept art so far, and the in-game footage looks cool too.

So this is Planetside-but-Halo?

Wow! Thats the game I've always wanted! How did Bungie know?

So it's a shooter with invisible matchmaking?

Color me cautiously optimistic. The key notes for multiplayer they seem to be harping on sound both solid and sufficiently evolved beyond Halo for me to be interested; as someone who has probably logged more time in Halo than this entire forum put together, that's not a small thing for me to say. I like the aesthetics, too.

People tend to forget that Bungie essentially prototyped what we came to expect as the Xbox Live experience with Halo 2. Modern console multiplayer has been built on that, and it sounds now like they are borrowing some core ideas for Dark Souls. Like I said, cautiously optimistic.

Charles pointed to the IGN article that goes more in depth, and it's probably worth looking at that over the trailer thingy for more specifics, such as they are. Bungie has a lot of credibility with me in terms of mechanics and design. It's pretty much the only traditional FPS series that I've spent a lot of time with in coop and multiplayer, and a lot of that is the small stuff that wasn't so small when they got it right the first time. I don't have much confidence in their writing, and I am pretty tired of their art design, but here's one thing that gives me hope on the second page:

Now, before your knee jerks off your leg at all those goddamn philistines who don't want to read books and learn good, think about it in terms of game design, and then put it together with what Charles has dubbed "mingleplayer" (which should give you another lightning rod for hatred). If a more mechanically competent, huge tracts of resources dev like Bungie can take on the promise of games like Dark Souls and the better aspects of always-online Diablo III, I'm pretty excited.

Here's a bold new marketing concept - don't announce a game till you've actually got some gameplay footage to show ffs.

I'll have to disagree on your Halo proficiency. I was in High School when halo 2 came out. I have months of playtime on that thing.

But I'm basically with you on everything else. It all seems like the perfect "next-step" for Bungie; not too ambitious that they could flop horrendously, but sufficiently evolved that I'm not like "well this is my Master Chief- err I mean Guardian." Having individually customizable Guardians is going to be awesome. I want a holographic hood that probably does nothing to keep the rain out.

You can preorder Destiny now if you like.Activision would like you to. Get on the Halo / Planetside 2 / DUST 514 / space marine hype train while there's still room!

EDIT: Do you know what other game you'll be playing for 10 years? Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Anyone who preorders this thing right now based on one YouTube video and a handful of previews that say nothing more than the video does is a sucker.

Not quite. One of Bungie's biggest strengths is fiddling around with the systems and variables they give you - if nothing else, I think we safely expect the game mechanics to be polished and tight. This especially so considering the lessons they learned from churning out a successive series of massive multiplayer blockbusters - Halo 2 development essentially restarted stupidly late in the schedule, and since then they've learned how to be realistic and hit goals.

Of course, you don't see me plopping down my debit card either, so take that as you will.

I like Bungie and their work as much as the next person, but it takes balls to put up a "preorder this game now" notice at the end of your video when:

1. No one other than Bungie has actually played it and can give a report on it (their journalist preview event sounds like it was a joke)
2. They haven't even told us really what the game is - the whole thing was just them telling us it was awesome and talking about the fiction
3. It doesn't have a release date
4. Which means it has a release date that is certainly beyond when the new consoles are on the horizon

Again, I love Bungie. I have loved them since Myth. But the vidoc they posted was pure masturbatory PR bullshit. Their current strategy around talking about Destiny is raising nothing but red flags for me.

I suppose I should be happy they released something, because with as long as they have been squirreling this thing away, I was becoming convinced it was nothing but vaporware. TBH, I'm still not sure it's escaped that definition for me.

That video reminded me of the ArenaNET Guild Wars 2 ones where they talked about reinventing the MMO genre and really puffed themselves up. Even the "moving artwork" was familiar. Bungie managed to be more pretentious while telling us absolutely nothing useful.

I don't know what the better online aspects of Diablo 3 were, Lizard_King - Blizzard seemed to completely waste an opportunity to do something useful / innovative / cool with their forced online architecture.

I thought the always online and the ease of keeping track of other people, in a game that was otherwise kind of messy in terms of structure and segmentation, meant that I spent a lot of time doing things in a "community" sense as well as just generally playing. I also really liked the concept of the auction house, even if the implementation took a long time. But mostly they were things that I didn't appreciate until I played Torchlight 2 and realized how much I missed Blizzard's more aggressive approach even if I liked T2's design more in terms of raw, moment to moment mechanics.

Now, obviously Blizzard's paranoia about DRM and controlling the game was a bigger priority than the quality of the experience, as the downtimes and patches and bullshit showed, but the numbers (hours and hours of Diablo versus relatively little in T2) are pretty clear to me in terms of how much that always-online stuff worked. With a company that hates its players less, you could get some good things with that kind of infrastructure and resources without even reinventing the genre or anything of the sort. Always-on internet and social networks are just waiting for real games to use them better, but its successful implementation at a basic level is a big evolution of the experience in its own right.

But seriously, I know some but would be interested to hear more from you on that at your leisure.

I have totally figured this out. They're doing a Molyneux Cube, except instead of just tapping the cube to get pieces to fall, you have to do a multiplayer FPS mission. They know how many mulitplayer sessions happen in Halo over Xbox Live in a year, so they can tailor their cube to need about that many sessions before the next layer is revealed. One layer every year for ten years, and then there's a gateway to the next game in the middle (or "the best thing ever" whichever they decide). You come home from work, play some missions, and you've helped the world get to the center of the cube, so there's a "sense of accomplishment."

Oh, and it's a giant sphere instead of a cube.

Unrelated: Didn't that concept art look like Mass Effect + early Star Wars concept art?

I'd swear there's a Volus in there:



And god knows there were plenty of Quarian-types and Geth-types running around.

And a lot of those shots reminded me of this:

Did anyone ever open the molyneux cube? Is that what really happened in russia?

The game sent the dude a text message? Reminds me of that one game maybe ten years ago, i think called Majestic?

If part of the ten years is an ongoing, real time development of the world in response to gameplay, then that could be very cool. Indie MMO A Tale in the Desert operated similarly.

But you also get a double-sided poster! Exciting!!

Just looked and its still going. 202 layers removed.

Right now I think the Curiousity from Molyneaux is, "How long can we make people do this?".

This is what happens when you open the Molyneux Cube:

(What's In The Box Test Film)

We're talking about this thing, right?

The best thing to come from this thread so far is the term "mingleplayer, love it! Well done Charles!

And it's fucking awful.

No! :(

Multingle?
Singulti?