Speaking with Xbox: The Official Magazine, Bungie developers offered new details as to what players can expect in the always-connected Destiny, how exactly they plan to support what's sure to be a heavily played online game, and what else fans can expect now that Halo and Master Chief are behind them.
When asked about how post-launch time-off will go, Director of Production Jonty Barnes said that the studio is big enough to cover online infrastructure, matchmaking, and any other issues while still getting some rest after shipping Destiny.
"It's kind of lonely, though. We're walking around the world that is Destiny at the moment, but it's unpopulated and so you know it's sort of deserted," Barnes explained. "You run into a couple of members of the team, but not the 4.6 million players that it's very much designed for."
When asked about the contractual obligations of working on a project as large as the $500 million Destiny, Barnes said the team has focused on flexibility first.
What you can read in a contract isn't always as agile as what we need to do for players, and I think that that partnership between ourselves has always been good about making sure we're doing the right thing, and so… I wouldn't talk any more about the legal side of things, but form a game developer standpoint—we always prioritize what is the best experience for the players.
With Destiny's multiplayer focus, Barnes also stressed that they're not worried about competition this Fall and have instead focused all efforts on testing and getting the product ready for consumers:
We play a lot of games and we learn from them and we play all genres—obviously our team is rather large and we're very passionate about games, and we only hire those who are very passionate about games. When it came to the implementation of the online infrastructure, it's very complex with Destiny.
When we looked at doing that architecture we had a lot of expertise in-house. But we are partnering with Activision's DemonWare organisation in terms of making that a really robust environment.
Barnes said that the development staff at Bungie have worn "many hats" during each of their projects and that "you need specialisation and skills" though everyone needs to care about the whole game "and culturally, that's really important to us."
When asked about Microsoft's upcoming Master Chief collection, Barnes offered his thoughts:
Well, for me personally—I didn't work on the first Halo, I came in as an executive producer on Halo 3 and for me Halo 1 was one of the reasons why I was very keen to come and work with Bungie, so it's very meaningful for me to see that brought up to modern graphics fidelity.
As a community of people in the North-West of America—I'm great friends with Josh Holmes and Chris Lee, for example, they're people I have a lot of respect for—and I think once we moved our studio firmly into Destiny we're just keen to make sure that the things we valued in Halo continue and [343] has worked really hard too, in both taking their own direction, but also to put their own identity on it. And it's been… as a player of games, it's been great to see, and I'm very interested in what they're doing next, but I'm sure they don't worry about what we're doing, and we don't worry about what they're doing—we're just consumers of the games.
For more, click the link below to read the full interview. Read all of our Destiny coverage on our game page.
