Gamespot Destiny article

by mnemesis, Monday, March 04, 2013, 21:50 (4069 days ago) @ Stephen Laughlin

I'm both excited and worried about time-sensitive events. What will I miss if real life is in the way?

I'm excited and worried as well. I'm finding less time lately to get online, and it would suck to miss out on some of the fun times.

I was talking about this with a friend the other day. This is the problem MMO designers face in storytelling. It's difficult to have a coherent story that all players can follow along with simultaneously.

Either you go the direction of WoW where players are always out of sync with each other at different stages of playing through the same single-player storyline, or you go the EVE Online route where the universe changes with major story events, and everyone needs to man up or die in the new world.

I tend to prefer the EVE approach, but it by necessity means that players who aren't entirely caught up in the story or players who weren't around at launch, during major story events, etc. will miss and not be a part of what's going on in the world.

I played WoW for a while, and there were definitely some fun times when suddenly a world event hit the server. WoW cliches and tropes aside, there's something pretty neat about a bunch of players hanging out in a virtual space and suddenly, Zombies! (or, Dragon! or everybody's turned into rabbits or whatever)

I very much look forward to the Bungie/FPS implementation of this kind of thing, if that's really what's coming. Plus, capes.