Bungie's reveal: a disservice to Destiny

by kapowaz, Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 06:52 (4295 days ago) @ Claude Errera

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'.

If it were an isolated example, and there weren't other articles where the author felt that the lack of clarity on what Destiny is was worthy of remark, then maybe it would be unfair to put the onus on Bungie here. But that's not the case. And within this forum several others have remarked on feeling confused and uncertain over exactly what the nature of the game will be.

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.

Yeah, it'll be a shooter. That's not really mutually exclusive with it being an MMO though, as games like Planetside have demonstrated. Perhaps the problem is that what some (most?) people think an MMO is, is really just a highly-distilled codification of the mechanics of games like World of Warcraft, where you have features like levelling up, gear upgrades, quests, player stats and a large-scale co-operative endgame. Will Destiny have these things? Really, right now, it's anyone's guess (although I did notice that player stats were visible on the iPhone app you see in the ViDoc).

My interpretation of what Destiny will be is something akin to a cross between Firefight and Spartan Ops, but with the addition of an open world to explore, populated by players all over the world, all using matchmaking to bring people in from console-based online services. The label Massively-multiplayer online really doesn't seem like a bad description for this.