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Bungie: Destiny beta needs a 'million gamers crashing against it'
With Destiny, Bungie hopes its beta in early 2014 will help to ensure a smooth launch for its online-enabled features. In an interview with IGN, Senior Writer Eric Osborne spoke to the importance of slamming their servers with players, especially in light of GTA Online's launch issues. "From our perspective as a developer, it's hard to fault GTA Online for caving under something like 10 million players trying to hit servers at the same time," Osborne said. "We need people to play story, multiplayer and co-op. We need them to go and create characters so we can understand those systems and what they mean for us. We need lots of people to hit the servers at the same time, see how they use guns and play the early stuff, what the competitive multiplayer looks like with many different levels. Working on Destiny every day doesn't compare with a million gamers crashing against it." Osborne said that Bungie doesn't want to "rely on guesswork. We're going to push as many people against it as possible. We'll forge it in fire and hopefully that'll make it a better experience day one for everybody."
Destiny devs on Star Wars influences and the MMO stigma
How does Bungie plan to escape the shadow of its own Halo megaverse in the upcoming sci-fi shooter Destiny? By going the Star Wars route, according to a piece at IGN. The dev team even has a name for its genre-melding mashup, and the ingredients include Force-like abilities and gunpowder to go along with the new IP's spaceships and ray guns. "Internally we've started calling it Mythic Science Fiction; a world that's rooted in science fiction but with more fantastical elements than we've ever had before, at least with Halo," said Bungie senior writer Eric Osborne. "So you can have a guy with a cape and a gun that shoots gunpowder but then he can use the power of the Traveller, which is effectively light, to fire flames at his enemy and disintegrate them." So, is Destiny an MMO? Sort of, according to Osborne. "There are certain places where the tag is certainly applicable. We want to bring players together in a shared space while making everyone feel unique. That's certainly the realm of MMOs, as is that social aspect of getting people to meet one another and play with one another and form bonds and lasting relationships," he says. "So there are [MMO] aspects, it's just that out of the gate we wanted to explain that it's an action game from Bungie."
