Gamespot Destiny article

by kapowaz, Tuesday, March 05, 2013, 06:03 (4041 days ago) @ mnemesis

I can't imagine that any world event-type thing would last for anything less than a day; more likely for a few days or a week. Time zones and real-life schedules alone would necessitate this, not to mention the desire on Bungie's part for players to actually experience the fruits of their labor.

Indeed, and if you look at Blizzard's example, they have gradually adapted their concept of ‘world events’ from the initial ‘blink and you missed it’ type (e.g. The Dark Portal opening, the Infernal Invasion at the end of the beta) to persistent things within a timeframe (the zombie event pre-WotLK) until they finally said that the Cataclysm expansion cinematic was the ‘world event’ (although they've done additional flavour pieces prior to this too).

If Bungie is going for a persistent world, then you have to choose between two possible approaches: player-persistence, or world-persistence. The former is something more akin to WoW's ‘phasing’ system (if you're not familiar: players share the same world, but world geometry, NPCs and zone-based triggers etc. are defined separately for each possible ‘phase’; players who are in different phases aren't visible to one another). There are implications with grouping in this setup, but I have to imagine Bungie would be addressing these — if indeed they are implementing some sort of phasing (which I suspect they will be).


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