Halo-creator Bungie, the next ten years started about five years ago when the Washington, US-based developer left a clue about its next franchise on an in-game poster in Halo 3:
ODST.
That clue marked the beginning of the developer's most ambitious commitment to date: to create a next-gen console game with a team of hundreds of developers that has a lifespan of a decade, which seamlessly blends always-on multiplayer gaming within a deep, lore-ridden universe.
The game is called Destiny, and Wired.co.uk catches up with Bungie to learn its past, its present and its future.
THE PAST
"We've been working on this game since well before Halo Reach shipped," Bungie's Chris Butcher tells Wired.co.uk. "We kicked off in 2009 and we'd already been working on it for more than a year," adds Bungie COO Pete Parsons, "and many of the ideas we have go back to 2002."
With more than 50 million copies of various Halo games sold, the studio has carved a deep benchmark for commercial success.
Destiny, set for release in 2014, will be the first title within a new series of games -- a series Bungie intends to have spawn releases for a decade with publisher Activision.
To live up to the high commercial and critical standards of
Halo, and set Destiny on a track that could successfully live for so long, Bungie had to cook an enviable feast of ideas, and invite an enormous group of developers to dinner.
How large a group? "It's around three times the size of the Halo Reach development team," Butcher, the game's lead engineer, tells Wired.co.uk. "If you count all of the test and development and support staff then we're over 400 people."
For perspective, the size of the team working on the next big-budget Call of Duty title, Ghosts, in-house at Infinity Ward is 125, in addition to about a few contractors and additional work done at partner studios.
The concept for Destiny arose "right around late-2007", Parsons says, which -- perhaps not coincidentally -- was around the time Microsoft announced Bungie was to spin out of Microsoft Studios "on a path to become an independent company". "But that was a lot of exploratory work until ultimately we stamped it officially as
'we're doing this' in 2009." "Most of the people who built the original Halo are still at Bungie. What's exciting about that is that we're getting the band back together to make something entirely new."
THE PRESENT
Destiny is foremost a science-fiction title -- a multiplayer first-person shooter set hundreds of years in the future, where humans populate the solar system in a post-apocalyptic era. Aliens have conquered former colonies on Earth and other planets, and as one of the guardians of "the last safe city on Earth" it's up to the player to uncover the cause of the recent apocalypse and save mankind from extinction. Sprawling vistas act as backdrops to colourful gunfire from a smorgasbord of high-tech weaponry, and a gameplay style that blends always-on multiplayer gaming with a deep storyline -- players will explore the worlds within Destiny alongside other online gamers, automatically paired up based on how far each player is through the main storyline as well as how evenly they're matched in terms of combat skill.
A critical eye might look at this and think, "isn't that just a different story within what could've been the Halo universe?" But Parsons would protest that view: "We actually couldn't make Destiny inside the Halo universe," he says, "so we had to create something entirely new."
Butcher also insists that the by starting fresh, and on emerging next-gen consoles, new doors are open to storytellers. "When we started off making Halo (back in 1997) our thinking behind making games was very different to what it is now," Butcher says. "We've had 15 years to improve our craft and we know that what we care about is building a world that's full of mystery and interest, something that has a lot of background and mythology that just sucks players in and gives them something to think about. "There are a lot of things we know that fans are speculating about that we won't be talking about for years."
Perhaps one of the big differences between Halo, which focussed on one protagonist called Master Chief, is that there is no single lead protagonist. "In the Destiny universe, one of the things that's really exciting to me is that there's not a single Master Chief character that's the focus of the story," says Butcher. "Every player is a guardian of this last safe city on Earth. All of these players...they're all major characters and there's a huge supporting cast."
The developers explain that there are many different activities that make up Destiny: "some are high intensity, low intensity, competitive and co-operative", explains Butcher. And to settle any alarm, there will of course be a competitive multiplayer mode ("It's one of the things we care about and love playing," says Parsons. "Bungie developers have always been smack talkers").
THE FUTURE
Looking forward, Destiny has grand ambition under its ten-year contract with Activision, and an enormous team within its studio to make that happen. As such, Parsons had to reflect on how
Halo evolved over its own ten-year lifespan within Bungie's control, and create a view for the future that could survive into the next next-gen console era, should one even arise. "We didn't understand the arc of where Halo went," he admits. "Now we have an opportunity post-Halo to sit back and figure out what we want to have happen. I'm not talking about knowing exactly where the story's going to go, but we understand what we want to do over time and how we think that [will] play out.
That informed our technology, our team, and everything else we were never able to do with Halo."
It also arguably informed Bungie's approach to multiplayer and community-focussed storytelling. The social elements that are baked around (and within) Destiny were present in plans from day one -- something that was not the case for Halo, which only introduced basic multiplayer modes in Halo 2. "The game of Destiny isn't just an experience -- it's a community of players who experience the game world as it evolves,"
Butcher says, "and so everything about the Bungie community has shaped our thoughts and feelings."
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Parsons elaborated further: "We wanted to move people playing together more to the centre. That's been our plan all along. For the next generation [of consoles] it's great because it helps align more of the things we want to do."
The stage has been set and Destiny will walk out onto it to high expectations from the existing Halo and Bungie fanbase, as well as newcomers eager to experience a next-gen take on science-fiction gaming. In previews at E3 2013,
Destiny landed on many "best of show" lists, with games journalists praising its graphical prowess, ambition and polish.
If there was any doubt surrounding Bungie's intentions with its new project, its 400-strong development team, its ten-year plan and its massive focus on world-building and storytelling, one need only give Pete Parsons five seconds to explain: "We spent a decade with
Halo. We built a world that people put on their shelves alongside Harry Potter. "We want to do that again."
Destiny will be released on next-gen consoles (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) and current-gen systems (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) in 2014.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
