14 DAY TRIAL // Bungie emphasizes that it won't stop improving Destiny, its upcoming multiplayer-only first-person shooter, after launch, as it wants to make sure that all players are having a great time with the experience for many months to come.
Bungie has been working on Destiny for a very long time, with the studio taking the expertise it gained in the first-person shooter genre thanks to the Halo games and using it to craft a brand new game in the genre that's deeply engaged into the online multiplayer experience.
Destiny is set to launch next week and developer Bungie already finished working on the game's final build a few weeks ago. However, this doesn't mean that it's abandoning the project. Quite the opposite, according to the studio's Derek Carroll, who talks with PS blog.
"In the past you would make a game and ship it, and only a catastrophic failure would be something that you’d patch. With Destiny we’re making a commitment to tune this and grow for a long time to come. It’s great to have those second chances where if we made that one tweak we’d be that much happier."
Bungie's Jonty Barnes also emphasizes that, if the beta stage for Destiny that took place in July had resulted in massive bugs or problems being found, the team would have seriously considered delaying the game just to make sure that the final experience was as great as it could be.
"If the beta had gone really badly then we would have had to have some serious conversations," explains Barnes. "There’s no world where we want to release the game and have a bad experience for our players. We make games for players and if we had something on our hands that was compromised, then we wouldn’t have been able to release it."
To put the beta into perspective, Carroll also mentions that the test phase for Destiny saw a huge number of players join in, more than in any previous game made by the studio up until now.
"To have 850,000 people playing all at once on that Saturday on the moon was just amazing," he admits. "The number of concurrent players during the moon mission was higher than any other Bungie game in history."
"Having that many people allowed us to test better, to kick over some of the systems so that we could get some meaningful data – we can ensure that certain problems, some of which we created on purpose – would not occur at launch."
Bungie, together with publisher Activision, is going to deploy Destiny next week, on September 9, for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One around the world.
