Destiny already has DLC scheduled for release in December, though Bungie developers have promised that The Dark Below has plenty of world-extending gameplay to justify the addition.
Bungie Director of Production Jonty Barnes told reporters at gamescom 2014 that "The Dark Below is actually a really interesting expansion; it's got its own story." While much has been made about the title's budget, beta, and early preorder numbers, Bungie want fans to know they've been putting their best efforts in.
We call it an expansion because it has one of all the activity types from Destiny, so it's story, strike, and beyond—and competitive and cooperative experiences in there. As well as new gear, new armor, new weapons and everything else. Some of that attaches to existing places that you're familiar to, so you might find that as you're going through new areas, that you actually collide with players who are just playing the existing Destiny content. You'll have those collisions. We always want to create spaces where people can get together and cooperate, and we feel like that is a big innovation in Destiny.
The studio's beta test went exceedingly well across every platform Destiny will launch on later this fall, including Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4, though it'll like prove a small population of players compared against the millions flooding online services on launch day, September 9th. Still, it appears to have given the developer reason to prepare for trouble.
We're going to change the game after launch in a frequency that we think makes sense, and that isn't going to be dependent on The Dark Below. Already from the beta we learned about how to tune the players' experiences to be better experiences. We're going to continuously update the game from now until the end of time. That's always going to be part of the philosophy of Destiny. We always wanted to build a new universe but keep building upon it, rather than to do a complete and utter restart periodically.
For more on Destiny, check out our Destiny beta impressions.
[Joystiq]
