No Subscription

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Sunday, February 17, 2013, 23:32 (4078 days ago) @ Cody Miller

The fact that Destiny is not subscription based actually worries me greatly. What is their business model going to be? How will they pay for this always connected world? Old style buy the $60 game and play the entire game forever? (although even that will not be a possibility since without the servers you can't play the game, and they won't be around forever) Or will we be treated to micro transactions for gear and stuff?

As Claude pointed out, no micro transactions. Good call, says I.

I think we may need more information on what Destiny's network model is, rather than its business model.

They've said it's not an MMO, so I don't think there is going to be a single, unified, persistent world that tracks everything, for everyone, everywhere, like Eve Online does. Probably not even shard servers that do the same for WoW on a smaller scale.

Perhaps the lobby will be replaced by an instanced areas that members of a faction have access to. Gameplay areas would be instanced and handled entirely on the console, but at certain predetermined intervals it might be possible for players part of the same faction, or party, or from your friends list, to share the same instance-- like drop-in drop-out coop the way Journey does it.

The shared universe persistence could come from saving some of the results of those instanced encounters to a meta world shared by everyone, sort of the way multiplayer results in Mass Effect 3 impact the "readiness level" in the single player campaign.

I'm not sure they're going to need big iron the way Eve does to track what is going on in your Destiny world; probably the competitive/cooperative multiplayer action will be handled by XBL matchmaking and the equivalent on PSN, and Bungie.net will handle the metaworld stuff. Certainly Bungie tracked lots of information and content about the Halo games that went way above and beyond simple matchmaking, and nearly all of that was free except for the extra space and features that were part of Bungie Pro.

Color me cautiously optimistic.

I notice nobody's said the word "episodic" yet although there were mobile notifications about Chapters. Perhaps Destiny will do what Valve sort of hinted at they'd do with Half-Life, and sort of what 343 is doing with H4's Spartan Ops-- chapters that will spread out the single player campaign over a certain period of time, with periodic big drops of new content-- the Comet DLC packs.