Apparently the wiping of beta profiles isn’t the biggest change Destiny’s world will undergo.
Yes, Destiny, the upcoming shooter from Bungie and Sony’s current Sacred Cow, is not going to be relatively static content-wise like your average online shooter. Jonty Barnes, the director of production for Destiny, recently made a number of statements pertaining to player-world interaction in the game.
“Already from the beta we learned about how to tune the players’ experiences to be better experiences. We’re going to continuously update the game from now until the end of time. That’s always going to be part of the philosophy of Destiny. We always wanted to build a new universe but keep building upon it, rather than to do a complete and utter restart periodically.”
In spite of the reported 10-year plan for Destiny, Barnes here clearly states he wants to update the game continuously until the end of time. While I am skeptical that one will be able to update so frequently and consistently until the sun burns out, his comments here serve to highlight the MMO aspect of Destiny. The idea of paying once for a game and receiving updates until the sun goes supernova hearkens back to games like Guild Wars or the more recent Guild Wars 2. As a purist who doesn’t particularly like the idea of DLC, this is music to my ears.
“We call it [The Dark Below] an expansion because it has one of all the activity types from Destiny, so it’s story, strike and beyond – and competitive and cooperative experiences in there. As well as new gear, new armor, new weapons and everything else. Some of that attaches to existing places that you’re familiar to, so you might find that as you’re going through new areas, that you actually collide with players who are just playing the existing Destiny content. You’ll have those collisions. We always want to create spaces where people can get together and cooperate, and we feel like that is a big innovation in Destiny.”
Innovative indeed, Mr. Barnes. Anyone who’s played an MMO during an expansion release knows that, for the most part, the expansion areas tend to be utterly separated from the normal world. It feels like someone started a new game, ran out of money, then fused it onto the back of an older one with a blowtorch. Incorporating Destiny’s DLC with the original Destiny game in such a way that the two can intermingle, that there doesn’t feel like a VIP rope is blocking normal players from sections of the world, is a much less coercive and much more player-friendly way to show off DLC to normal players. The DLC players will still be walking around in their shiny new armor, but won’t be magically severed from the plebian population of the game.
I’ve never really been on the Destiny hype train, but with such big promises and such a big budget/long production time, what could possibly go wrong?
Oh, right.
