A million people and fantasy elements for Destiny

It’s been a bad year for games launching much vaunted online components this year. GTA V has had one hell of a rocky start so far, while Battlefield 4 is also home to numerous game-breaking bugs. Bungie has seen that, and obviously wants to avoid it for Destiny. So they’re throwing as many folks as possibly can into the beta.

Bungie isn’t holding back on what they want from the beta. They want gamers hitting servers so hard, they’re going to be “crashing against it”.

“From our perspective as a developer, it’s hard to fault GTA Online for caving under something like 10 million players trying to hit servers at the same time,” Bungie’s Eric Osborne said to IGN.

We need people to play story, multiplayer and co-op. We need them to go and create characters so we can understand those systems and what they mean for us.

We need lots of people to hit the servers at the same time, see how they use guns and play the early stuff, what the competitive multiplayer looks like with many different levels. Working on Destiny every day doesn’t compare with a million gamers crashing against it.

We’ll forge it in fire and hopefully that’ll make it a better experience day one for everybody.

Bungie is going to need a million pre-orders for the game to get that Beta into maximum overdrive testing mode, something that could be difficult to achieve. Moving on, Destiny is looking a great mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

There’s a reason for that though. After working for years on the Halo franchise, Bungie wanted to make a game that people would not confuse with the signature shooter on the Xbox, a concern that manifested itself in the design for Destiny.

“Really, the artists were trying to push hard away from sci-fi because of the Halo legacy and history,” Bungie writer Eric Osborne said to IGN.

They were just thinking, ‘What can we do that’s radically different after 10 years?’ So there’s actually some concept art that you can find online of a very fantasy-driven world of knights, swords and sorcery in a white city on a hill.

That was very much pure fantasy, but the more they continued to work and the more their ideas formed over time, the more they realized that the lure of sci-fi was just something they loved and they were denying themselves that creative space. So they thought, ‘What if we just take these two things and smash them together?’

Works for me. I don’t think Bungie will ever completely escape comparisons to their work on Halo, but they’re doing a bang-up job so far in creating a new universe that has plenty of legends and lore attached to it when it arrives next year.

It worked for Star Wars after all.

Last Updated: November 4, 2013