14 DAY TRIAL // With Bungie's sci-fi first-person shooter Destiny less than a week away from launch, the whole world is getting ready to start the adventure, on both last- and current-gen consoles.
However fine that would sound for the developer and publisher of the video game, the widespread appeal and hype that led to Destiny's popularity are also cause for concern, with many gamers worried that the game's servers won't be able to handle the massive load placed on them at launch.
Considering the fate of similar highly anticipated video games before it, like Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo 3, Ubisoft's Watch Dogs or Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall, all of which faced technical difficulties at launch, the worries seem to be legitimate.
However, both developer Bungie as well as Activision, the game's publisher, have told gamers that although it often happens to the best of them, they're going to great lengths to ensure that everything will work smoothly on September 9.
The game already underwent a massive beta test on all platforms, that registered over 4.6 million users exploring Destiny's planets, marking the biggest such event on next-gen systems and putting the underlying infrastructure to the test, and everything seemed to be working fine.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons made an interesting reveal, stating that the company's efforts to insulate the launch from unforeseen disasters went as far as housing Destiny's data servers in a bunker in Las Vegas.
"The interesting thing about Las Vegas is, you get a lot of natural disasters walking down up and down the strip, but you don't get a lot of true natural disasters affecting the landscape. There are no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no floods – it's perfect," Parsons explained.
The data center employs "well north of 100 engineers," making sure that the links to Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network and other servers that the company rented all across the world are maintained.
"It is the largest engineering team we could imagine," Bungie Director of Production Jonty Barnes chimed in.
This is hardly a surprise, since Destiny is said to be one of the biggest video games ever created, with a total budget surpassing that of James Cameron's "Avatar."
The first-person shooter is poised to become Activision's third billion-dollar franchise, following Skylands and Call of Duty, and the publisher has long-term plans for the franchise, involving DLC and expansions over a number of years.
Destiny is scheduled to take off on September 9, headed to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 home consoles from Sony and the Xbox 360 and Xbox One computer entertainment systems from Microsoft.
