Bungie's reveal: a disservice to Destiny

by Claude Errera @, Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 05:44 (4056 days ago) @ kapowaz

I would comprehensively disagree that they blew it out of the water; they said ‘It's not an MMO’, and yet almost every article written about it centred on the word. In fact if you read Eurogamer's preview you'd be forgiven for thinking they had said the game was an MMO. And this is from people who were at the press event!

Right near the top of Eurogamer's preview is a paragraph that contains these sentences:

Activision Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg says it's not an MMO. No, it most definitely is not an MMO.

But yes, you're right, the rest of the article spends a lot of time comparing what the writer saw to MMOs.

I guess what I have trouble with is the fact that you're blaming Bungie for the writers' inability to find a way to explain what he saw in terms that don't include 'MMO'.

The presentation started with a really simple sentence:

"We're building a shooter."

For me, that set the tone of the rest of the 90 minutes or whatever - apparently, for others, it was ignored as they tried to tie together what they were seeing (which they were told, over and over again, was different from existing genres) to what they know.

I look at it this way: Myth was a Real Time Strategy game. However, it had a twist that no other game had ever done, a twist that made Myth completely different from everything that came before it - it was an RTS without resource management.

This was big enough that many people, looking back, don't classify Myth as an RTS.

But in the beginning... that's what it was called.

I think Destiny is a shooter with deeply-integrated social aspects. This is a genre that doesn't have many examples - so for now, people are comparing it to other games with deeply-integrated social aspects... like MMOs. Doesn't make it an MMO, though.


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