Destiny E3 Gameplay Walkthrough

Bursting through the walls known as Battlefield and Call of Duty during the biggest video game tradeshows and conventions of the year, the shooters that caught the media's attention throughout 2013 and won awards for doing so, are thankfully new and different. We're of course, referring to Destiny and Titanfall, new IPs from familiar developers.

Destiny is a new franchise in the works from Bungie, the creators of Halo. It aims to offer a persistent online world where players can work with friends or strangers on their journey to complete missions and win battles. There will of course, be a competitive multiplayer element to Destiny as well, as we learned last week, but most of the main game will have players working cooperatively. The end-game content might even require it.

Game Informer spoke with  Bungie co-founder and design director Jason Jones about Destiny, asking about the more co-operative nature of the game an the appeal of the title for players looking for a solo experience.

"You absolutely are going to be able to play Destiny by yourself and have the same kind of fun shooter-experience that you could have in a single-player campaign, which is a word that we've weeded out of our vocabulary, but we’re going to give you this great player-progression on top of that, and we’re going to give you as many opportunities as we possibly can to expose you to other people, so that hopefully you’re drawn into some social experiences, because those are incredibly powerful and interesting, but we’re not going to force those on you. We describe it in a lot of ways as sloping the floor towards socialization, without putting a requirement on it. I would say that there’s some sort of — if you wanted to talk about it in MMO terms, you’d say “end-game activities”, but some of the most intense non-competitive activities in the game do require cooperation. They require a group of players to tackle at once. I guess at some variable, distant endpoint we are going to say, “Yeah, if you show up at this door, and you don’t have five friends, you’re not going to be able to succeed,” but the core experience that solo players have enjoyed in shooters, they’re going to be able to get that, and we’re going to pull many of them into social experiences as well."

The most apt comparison is to MMOs, as Jones, suggests since looking back to World of Warcraft some of the most epic "events" and questions involved 25-person raids against waves of bosses. If there's end-game content of that nature in Destiny, that may redefine what players expect from MMOs.

"I think the MMOs have different fantasies. There are some action-y, shooter-y games in that space. But I think after 30 seconds or a minute playing them, the gamer came to have an action experience, they’re going to be disappointed. We want to be the opposite."

Although there's no hint yet of how many players we could see battling a specific boss at any given moment, we did see a group of 7-8 players team up against a group of enemies in a demo shown to us at E3. The idea of end-game raids or epic co-op missions also gives players something to do once they finish the game. Even though there are plenty of similarities to MMOs, Destiny's main story compaign does indeed have a conclusion, but Bungie is hoping that players will find enough to do to stick around once they complete it. Adding frequent updates and DLC for max-level characters or players who beat the main story is just one way to keep the online universe alive until the first sequel arrives.

"The answer we come to is yes, it’s absolutely important to set you off on some mission that you feel as if you've accomplished at the end. We have to have that. I think the spin or the difference is that it is our job that by the time you get to that climax it will feel good. I won’t say our job, it’s our hope and it’s our mission that by the time you get to that conflict, that climax, which hopefully will be very satisfying, that instead of thinking you’re done playing, 'Now I'm going to finish,' that you already have a head so full of other things that you can do in the world that it almost feels like, how can you get that thing out of the way so you get on with the rest of the game? We think that’s like walking this line down what action gamers expect and hope for and want. It’s just our desire to tell a story that has some closure and things happen, and our desire to build a world that’s fun to be in for week after week."

Excited for Destiny and are you the type of player who demands that co-op play be an option in shooters?

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Destiny releases September 9, 2014 for the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.

Follow Rob on Twitter @rob_keyes.

Source: Game Informer