In a three hours long presentation, Bungie revealed its latest and most ambitious project ever: Destiny.
Destiny is aims to be the first of a new genre of "Shared World Shooters."
The First Person Shooter (FPS) Space Opera takes place in an open sandbox world on a never-seen-before scale. The game is designed to accommodate players at all skill levels and it allows for different gameplay styles, but it is primarily designed for coop play.
Bungie stressed that calling Destiny an MMO would be "underselling it to players."
The game’s world is persistent and shared among all players, so the actions of one player might affect everybody else; just like he is affected by their actions. Destiny has its own grand story, but – according to the game’s lead writer Joseph Staten – its most important stories will be the ones told by the players through their actions.
Destiny takes place in the distant future, hundreds of years after humanity’s golden age. During the golden age, humanity colonized the space and built a galactic empire. But all of this came to an abrupt end when an enemy attacked and nearly eradicated the whole of mankind.
Nothing is known about the identity of the enemy that destroyed humanity’s galactic empire, but we know that its ultimate objective is to wipe off every single human in existence. And they nearly succeeded, hadn’t it been for "The Traveler," a giant spaceship hovering above the planet where humanity made its last stand.
Over a very long period of time, the survivors built a vast city under The Traveler. With time, humanity rebuilt its civilization in that city and – once again – started to take its first steps back into the galaxy, just to discover that their alien enemy was still looking for ways to penetrate their defenses and wipe humanity off for good.
And that’s when Destiny takes place.
In Destiny, the player takes the role of a Guardian. The Guardians are the city’s soldiers and they fall into different classes. Only three classes were revealed during the presentation: a brutish tank-like soldier called the "Titan," a Traveler tech-wielding "Warlock" and "Hunter."
In addition to customizing their avatars, equipment and weapons, players will also be able to customize their vehicles and ride them into battle. Unfortunately, Bungie refused to give any more details about the available classes, weapons, vehicles and gameplay mechanics. It did however confirm that the game accommodates coop, competitive and lone-wolf styles of play but measures have been taken to enforce cooperative gameplay in certain segments of the game.
Bungie has been working on Destiny for several years now, and it had to rebuild every part of their gaming technology to make it happen. This includes a new graphics engine, distributed computing clusters, a new AI and new game creation tools.
Destiny is set for release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and although Bungie committed to supporting the game for ten years, they refused to discuss the possibility of PC or next gen consoles release.