Which MMOs specifically are you thinking of?

I had not played an MMO prior to trying out the Old Republic earlier this year and it cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had about the genre. That game had virtually no grinding in the time I played. If I was too low level for the next story quest I would just pre-occupy myself with sidequests in the area I was in. I have no doubt Bungie will have it so that you can play the whole game free of grinding.

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No worries - I do it too! I just noticed it was cropping up a lot and I know a lot of the names around here. I'd hate to be discouraging people

As a long term Bungie fan maybe you could list their games and the networking/multiplayer aspects that they contained and contrast them with their contemporaries.

Bungie's definition of social is playing with other people and having fun.

But you can just ignore people who you encounter. And you never know, you may see some guardians getting their butts kicked and help them out for a bit then move on. Ships, passing in the night.

Which is my point I get scared hearing words like, MMO, and Social now because they seem to just be gimmicks and without solid details like I hoped we were getting on the fence I shall be!

Nothin' wrong with that. I can see pretty easily how they can do good drop in and out single player. Just use level and trueskill and whatever to not pull in someone way too good or bad. Playing with friends, yeah, that's where it gets interesting.

The only source I can think to look to is, again, Mass Effect 3. In its multiplayer you start out with a small handful of classes who themselves only have access to a fraction of their powers and passive abilities. You also don't have the inventory of guns, ammo powers, and healing items that you build up by playing. But even with all of that once you know how the game plays you can jump in to a mid or even high level match and fare well enough to help your team out. Sure, you aren't near as powerful as you will be. Yes you will likely score less points. But as long as you know what you're doing I'd rather have you at level 1 than be a man down.

Maybe Destiny will be like that. Maybe the core combat cycle will be such that someone without all the fancy powers and guns can still contribute as long as they have a handle on the game. How that works with a world that is, presumably, much bigger than ME3's 20 minuteish matches is beyond me though.

I also dread missing out stuff in RL because of a game or miss out stuff in a game because of RL. I hope whatever Destiny makes me miss out isn't really important/necessary for my enjoyment.

This is why the social aspect turns me off greatly, since it's anti-social in a way, > encouraging interaction through abstraction rather than actual exchanges. You're sitting at home on a couch alone.

Ugh.

Innate predispositions for sociability within the human species survived the agricultural and industrial revolutions, it'll survive the internet revolution too.

This is why the social aspect turns me off greatly, since it's anti-social in a way, encouraging interaction through abstraction rather than actual exchanges.

I can't help but nod along to this. One thing that the Halo series was especially good for was acting as a medium for social interaction but without any abstraction — you could gather your friends (in person or online) and have a blast together, be that in co-op, firefight or PvP multiplayer. In fact if you look at some of the more popular games with a multiplayer component over the past few years (WoW, Diablo III, Guild Wars, TF2 etc.) this is a big part of their appeal: they're a sandbox for having fun with your friends.

Maybe Destiny will still permit this more traditional, less-abstracted kind of social play. I'd hope that whatever they're cooking up isn't going to render it redundant, at least, because I suspect you're not alone in wanting something that's more pick up and play than invest, engage, socialise. We shall see.

As for the rest... loot drops, crafting, and mandatory timed events that you can miss out on or will change your game world while you're not playing (Cody mentioned those)... have any of those things actually been in any way confirmed? Or are we just making stuff up?

Well, by definition a persistent world exists and changes when you aren't in it. So that means yes, you will miss stuff unless you play 24/7.

I think that's one possible interpretation of what "persistent" means. Yes, it means it exists when you aren't in it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that things change with respect to your play when you aren't around.

Persistence could be something as simple as meaning that enemies don't respawn, and that items stay where you've left them-- the world doesn't reset itself when you leave. This is not an issue in a single-player campaign, because you just save the game world when you shut down, and nothing can change. In a multiplayer world, it's on even when no one is playing.

BUT... that does not mean the game must allow for things that will change your experience while you aren't around.

If the game has Guilds, and there's a Guild House where people meet up before going to play, and half the members are on one side of the world, and half are on the other, so that by going to sleep you're "missing" half of the play-- is this a problem for you? Or is this a feature?

If a player isn't around when his guild goes on an end-game raid, do you consider that he's "missed" it? Isn't that opportunity just going to come around again?

I tend to think these sort of essential experiences will be instanced-- when a new "chapter" drops people will be able to team up and go tackle it any time after it's ready. I don't think you should consider that you "missed" it just because somebody else played it before you while you were doing something else. I don't think it's going to go away because other people played it. And there will probably be other kinds of play to engage in that can be done anytime-- firefight-style coop, deathmatch-style competitive matches, that sort of thing.

This forum is online and persistent, but the new threads that are posted while I'm sleeping-- which is most of them-- are still around for me to read and respond to when I wake up.

Yeah I find it pretty unlikely that existing story/missions will just disappear. Sales-wise, it would be a colossally stupid way to do things - only the people who bought in near the beginning would be interested in your story - people would have no incentive to buy the game down the road. The only way this wouldn't prove true is if the story is so empty and inconsequential that no one cares to start with. Which isn't really the Bungie Way.

The UI elements we saw in the ViDoc, even if they are placeholder, suggested to me that story chapters would probably be like Spartan Ops episodes in Halo 4 - coming out on a schedule, but still available later.