14 DAY TRIAL // Bungie has confirmed that its long-awaited Destiny first-person shooter was envisioned right from the get go as a shared universe experience, as the studio wanted to once again capture the multiplayer popularity of its previous project – Halo.
Bungie has been around for quite some time and for a very long part of that, it was known for creating the Halo franchise exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox platforms.
However, a few years ago, the studio broke off from under the Microsoft corporate umbrella and started working on a brand new intellectual property, with the help of large publisher Activision.
The result is set to appear one week from now, in the form of Destiny, a multiplayer first-person shooter experience designed to create a huge community and emphasize exploration, cooperation, and competition.
Ahead of Destiny's actual launch, Bungie has looked back on the game's creation process with The Guardian and has confirmed that, ever since the beginning, the emphasis on multiplayer was a clear aspect of the project.
"We started Destiny in the summer of 2009," Head of Production Jonty Barnes said. "It was a very small team, less than five people, talking about what we wanted to explore, the vision behind it all. We absolutely wanted to create a shared universe – things are better with your friends."
Bungie wanted this aspect because of how popular Halo had become just through its multiplayer mode all around the world.
"Church groups used to play Halo together; families could play together on the sofa. We wanted to recapture that. So we started building an action game – it had to be a very hopeful place, a place people could go back to time and time again, we wanted to create many different activities and it had to be accessible."
Besides the online elements, Bungie also wanted to deliver a great open world experience in which players can do whatever they want with whoever they want, without any sort of arbitrary limits.
"People can decide what they want to be in this world," Community Manager David Dague explained. "We don't know what they will do, so let's build them an amazing sandbox. The next innovations that come to life in this game will most likely be inspired by the first people who go in and throw down roots. Players will be able to express themselves and have a great time in ways we could never have anticipated."
Bungie already had plenty of material to study after the Destiny alpha and beta stages, so expect to hear more of the game as we get closer to its release on the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One platforms next week.
