Destiny is easily one of the top titles of the coming year from Bungie with its RPG-styled FPS genre looking to go head-to-head with Ubisoft Massive’s The Division that’s set to arrive alongside Destiny in the later part of the upcoming year.
The game, first confirmed at the PS4 reveal event back in February this year, is set seven hundred years into the future in a post-apocalyptic setting, where a massive alien ship humans call "the traveller" orbits the Earth, protecting the last human city for reasons unknown. Despite their help, hostile aliens still attack the planet, and a group of "knights," including the protagonist, defend the last of the human race from hostile invaders.
There was recently a massive reveal about the game thanks to the latest issue of Game Informer where the game was discussed in details. And although we had carried a story in the recent past about what that the issue had uncovered about the game, all the info related to it were still unconfirmed since it was revealed via a Reddit thread.
However, the entire interview regarding the game has now been revealed entirely and it seems like there’s more to be found out than it actually meets the eye with the developer heading into an in-depth analysis of the game that’s expected to raise a eyebrows on release with its futuristic detailing and evolved gameplay mechanics.
Bungie co-founder and design director Jason Jones was available to answer a few queries about the game, and on asked as to what inspired the developing team at Bungie to go back to their sci-fi alien shooting roots for the new game, he stated: “I would say that this place we’re going it is exciting to me. It’s different. There’s more – there’s so many bad ways to say it – sci-fantasy. There are guns and tanks and spaceships and travel between other worlds, but there’s also dens of wicked creatures living under the Earth with awesome s--- you can go get, take from them, and bring out and make yourself more powerful – that’s more of a fantasy bit, and I think it was really appealing to bring that kind of mystery and adventure into the shooter.”
It’s a different approach from the heart of the military, which I think we have a lot of in console gaming right now. I’ve played all the shooters in the last two or three years. We thought we could bring something new to that, which is the idea: yes to the science and yes to the space ships, but there is also wonder and mystery and adventure.”
“We could out on the frontier and see good fortune and it meant something. In the way you would in a fantasy game. That is hugely appealing to me, and to us. And another one of the opportunities that we wanted to take advantage of that would have been difficult with a previous IP,” he told Game Informer.
Destiny, as mentioned earlier, is shaping up perfectly to become one of the benchmark games of the coming year, and one of its impressive features is the in-game class-based system where there are a host of different classes from player to choose from.
On asked as to why these classes form such an important part of the game and why the developer is trying to make distinctions between these different characters that people will opt for when playing the game, Jones stated: “I think everybody understands that doing things with your friends is often more enjoyable than doing it alone – that’s really an understatement – but even doing things with strangers is more fun than doing it alone, if you imagine the gym or the library in college, or wherever you go to do alone-but-in-a-social-environment things, like if you imagine the empty gym or the empty library or the empty sports arena, those experiences would be totally different in-character.”
“And so, the social element is incredibly important to this, we’re doing a bunch of things to encourage people to play together in proximity to one another. And classes are a great short-hand so that when I look at you, I can have some expectations about what your abilities are and how you’re likely to behave in the world, and what kinds of things I might depend on you to do, and a lot of games have done this very successfully,” he added.
Also, according to him, one of the origins of the in-game class system is because “it gives people some way to look at each other and talk about their abilities without actually talking.”
“We didn’t want a world that was totally undifferentiated in terms of playability – abilities – where everybody was a generalist. And then what we ended up with, when you look at the class spectrum, is the super-armored, heavy, big gun fantasy at one end, and at the other end the lightly-armored – or not armored at all – more agile, more tending-towards things that look like magic, like abilities to channel the power of the Traveler – and that’s the Titan on one side and the Warlock on the other.”
“And then in between, the Hunter, our character who does have a little bit of armor, but relies more on his wits than the Titan, somebody who’s going to fight, and fight with weapons like the Titan, but who’s going to rely on his wits and his knowledge of the world to survive, where the Titan has his armor. An adventurer, I think that’s the right word. So you have a soldier, an adventurer, and a sorcerer, in the Titan, Hunter, and Warlock. And so those are the archetypes that we were trying to hit,” he added.
Bungie’s Destiny is currently scheduled for releases on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on September 9. 2014.
