14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Bungie says that its upcoming Destiny shooter will have an extensive set of customization options that will allow gamers to create complex characters with a lot of individuality, but will also have a clear role on the battlefield.
Scott Shepherd, the technical art lead working on the shooter, explains during a Game Developers Conference session focused on Destiny that his team aims to create a wide variety of armors, skins, weapons and other cosmetic elements.
All of them can be collected as the player explores the world and battle enemies and they are designed to offer a solid mix of aesthetics and functionality.
The customization system needs to be complex from the start because players will create characters that they will be able to then use for a ten-year period, according to Bungie.
The developer is quoted by Polygon as saying that, “We’ve seen the system get better and better the more content we add to it. This bodes well for a franchise we want to expand on for years and years.”
Shepherd also says that gamers need to believe that they can express any aspect of their personality via their characters and that there are plenty of ways to also role play a certain role, which might require modifications of their appearance over their life time.
Bungie has recently announced that it is using technology from Faceware Technologies, which allows for marker-less 3D motion capture, in order to make sure that all characters included in Destiny are expressive.
Bungie has not said whether it has plans to make some customization options for characters available only to those who are willing to pay for them via microtransactions.
The company has said that its upcoming title will focus on classic first-person shooter mechanics, while also borrowing some concepts from the role-playing and the massive multiplayer online genres.
The studio is also trying to create a social experience that also offers plenty of opportunities for solo play.
Destiny will take gamers to the far future and will task them with exploring a complex universe, with plenty of factions and alien races, in order to get the resources required to make sure that the last human city on Earth remains safe.
Destiny is currently set to arrive on September 9 of this year on all major markets and will be available on the PlayStation 4 from Sony, the Xbox One from Microsoft and current-gen devices.