Sixth Axis interview (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 12:52 (3753 days ago) @ DaDerga

From the article linked to on The Front Page via The Sixth Axis via Xenos. It's an informative read.

Have I not been paying attention, or is this Xenos's first post to the front page? Either way, congratulations.

TSA: So it’s not been a case that he’s been called back into the studio to re-record, but you’ve been going through existing samples?

Jonty: Well, to be transparent, we already had a studio session planned for Peter after the alpha. It would be disingenuous also to say that, with all the attention that it got, we didn’t put extra scrutiny on it, because we did. It certainly added to our microscope of trying to make it as successful as possible, but we had lots of planned work post-alpha that was always going to happen.

I love this. I love transparency. I want to have beautiful clear babies with transparency. It's even enlightening and kind of interesting to find this out.

TSA: But there won’t the kind of custom modes which you had in Halo games?

Jonty: Um, I think we’ve been asked quite a bit about whether or not we’re going to do private games and things like that. It’s certainly an active discussion, but it’s really about how we wanted to make sure for launch that we had the best gameplay that we could offer for the core competitive multiplayer activity.

I think what you’ll find is that over time we’re going to see some things arrive, and I think players are going to inform our prioritisation of what features we update. We’re going to build on Destiny. 9/9 isn’t just launch and forget. We did a bunch of this with Hoppers [temporary playlists], I guess, in previous Halo games, but we’re on a much greater scale of potential change, if we choose to do it.

I do not love this. Given how much of my time is going to be taken up with multiple games and life stuff it might be better to not have to deal with custom games in a new game, but I would up for the challenge of trying, and I'm getting the game anyway. I really can't put into words how important custom games are to me; maybe my actions can speak there. Really though, it's more about just fun and community for me, so if they can deliver that... well I'll still really miss custom games for the other things they provide, but it won't hurt as much.