I'm curious if I can play Destiny without encountering other "world" players?

I would prefer to tackle this game alone. I'm hoping it's possible to turn off encountering other players so I can go it alone.

There will certainly be public and private spaces; if you choose to go to a private space, nobody but your party will find you there.

I don't know for sure if it is feasible to finish the game with zero interaction, though.

I think of all the morons I've encountered in Reach Firefight and I would like to avoid them. Hopefully Bungie takes players like me into account that just want to kick back for a few hours and tackle the game solo without any social interaction.

I agree, I enjoy that play-style most of the time and I hope Destiny can still cater towards that style. But I'm also okay if it's a solo-experience in a shared world.

It's also going to be a very different game than any Halo. It might create a completely different tone of players. Playing alone and then seeing someone 'live' doing their own thing nearby might not be anything at all like a griefer or point-stealer in Firefight - it might be like stumbling upon another hiker when you've been in the wild for a couple of days. :)

looking at the Vidoc's little 3 player party setup, I would guess that the game will just swap out party members with nice silent meaty targets that made up the arbiters role and the rest of the fire team in the likes of Halo 3 and Reach. But I guess you'll be missing out a lot of immersion if you avoid the 'public' spaces. (however they are articulated)

Presumably the ‘public’ spaces are a hub area that you can party up in, which lets users drift off to a scenario / mission via spaceports and things. I’m sure they’ll let you party up or just go to these missions co-op or solo, but the point of the hub is to make the world feel more alive, let you buy gear and let you find / meet people that want to play a mission properly rather than just toss about (like a random party in firefight or whatever)

One would guess that for pure expedience or just for anti social players that you might be able to avoid the public spaces and just dive into a mission (or mission ‘lobby’ zone) straight from the menu.

I assume that the cross section of players you see in the public spaces will be comprised only of users the server has matched you with in terms of ability (and people in your friends list), so you'll not see many twerps that are going around trying to smack you with their rifle butt or dry hump the walls and stuff.

Firefight didn't have Skill-matching (AFAIK), but Destiny will, apparently.

I want other kind of matching, too. I hope the Reach preferences are expanded to include other things. ncsuDuncan and I were talking the other day about the possibility of gamer profiles that are more sophisticated that what we've seen, all optional of course.

In general I'm very curious about what they are going to do to prevent or punish griefing.

Kermit wouldn't be able to keep me and my Xbox off his front porch ;-)

Any more than he already does. :3