
Halo Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World  - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/02/bungie-destiny/
======
ChuckMcM
This is an interesting tease. I'm not sure why they are teasing it (presumably
to get developers) but conceptually from a game perspective it could be
interesting.

I played World of Warcraft from 1.0 (actually 0.9 but whatever) to 4.0 (a
bunch of years, I've got the pets to prove it :-) Felt it finally completely
jumped the shark with the Panda thing and the simplification of the world to
the point of banality. As I told the Blizzard guy who surveyed me about it, I
don't go into the library at the Middle School to play DND with the kids there
using rules they can understand, I _do_ play complex scenarios with other
adults. I think Eve Online gets this, Blizzard has yet to internalize it.

WoW was created to compete with EverQuest, which it did, way more successfully
than even Blizzard expected. But it ran into the problem that the storyline,
while interesting, and which character progression suitably nerfed, it got
boring. And adding new story lines helped, but they had to add better gear to
keep people grinding for it, and the basically I think they ran into the law
of diminishing returns. Making your character twice as powerful was cool, but
it made the previous game a bit silly, doubling that again and now you could
single-handedly waltz through the old end-game raids (which had been designed
for 40 simultaneous players in their best gear), and the dissonance gets to
you. It's kinda fun, like God mode, but it's also hard to imagine a world
where you could be this powerful and everyone else couldn't just fix the
worlds problems without you. When the story line is "we're under seige by the
forces of evil" and your character, through a series of quests, singlehandedly
overwhelms all that evil? Its like reading Nancy Drew mysteries instead of
Agatha Christie mysteries. To simplified to be enjoyable.

Then there is Eve Online, which is similarly durable to WoW and yet has a much
larger percentage of retained adult participants. I expect for the reasons
that Eve does _not_ constrain the behavior and doesn't make it "digestible" to
people who don't understand that money can buy power and power can be
manipulated. Compare getting into a high end Eve Corporation with a high end
WoW guild. Interesting difference.

And then there is the business model. Everquest, WoW, and Eve, all have pay-
per-month subscriptions. That is nice, but Zynga and others have shown it can
be just as, if not more, profitable for the company to run the internal
economy. Something Blizzard shied away from on WoW, embraced on Diablo 3, and
Eve has had I think a mixed relationship with (but I may be completely wrong
on that I'm not as familar with the online Eve currency market)

That suggests that there may be a market for a persistent world, with
'stories' for interest but not necessarily character gain, an environment
where you every bit of content is available to you (perhaps not as
successfully as you would like) from the moment you log in, and where you can
use economic means or game-play means to achieve goals. Combined with a system
for mixing up character strengths, items, and what not. With the game company
running the economy, and taking a tax on that economic growth to fund the
actual game. You have to be willing to bet that for everyone out there who
will diligently cut rocks or what ever for a .001% chance at a powerful gem,
there will be 10, 100, 1000 people who will just fork over fifty cents to a
couple of dollars to just buy one. And playing the average revenue per gamer
game rather than the monthly fee model.

Bootstrapping something like that will be extraordinarily hard, but if
successful consider how much Blizzard would have profited if they had been the
'gold farmers' which at one point was estimated at a several hundred million
dollar a year business in its own right.

Tending something like this, keeping it fun and profitable will also required
very deft execution since it is tempting to take too much money off the table
early on.

I hope the Bungie guys pull it off.

~~~
jcurbo
I think Eve did two things to embrace their online economy - hired a real-life
economist to oversee changes and study it, and brought buying and selling of
timecards with in-game currency into the game directly. Previously, you could
buy timecards outside of the game and offer them to people, but you had to use
external means to do so - forums, IM, email etc, with no guarantee of
security. CCP went and made an in-game item for the timecards that you can buy
and sell directly. By embracing that process they made things more secure for
the players, and knocked down an barrier to their in-game economy.

I think you have a point about Eve seeming much more 'grown-up' - the
sociology of the game was extremely interesting to me when I played. How
alliances formed, mustering up hundreds to thousands of players at the same
time for attack and defense, grand strategy, economic effects on alliances and
wars, etc. I was in Goonfleet at the time and a lot of what was happening in
game and in corp for command and control was evolving into something
resembling how the real-life military does things - I was in the USAF at the
time and could see the similarities. Stuff like chat rooms for operations, how
fleet command was handled, position updates, alerting procedures (Goonfleet
had a Jabber server that was used to send out messages telling people to log
on for battles).

------
nswanberg
It's amazing to see the path Bungie has traveled. They made a couple of
Macintosh games in the early 90s, then had a breakout hit Marathon in 1995 on
the Mac, back when serious gamers played Doom on the PC and laughed at the Mac
(maybe they still do?).

When I was a kid with a Mac, wanting to learn to program games, I read this
interview over and over:
<http://marathon.bungie.org/story/jasonjonesTofTMPG.html>

I had to read this again to remember that the original Marathon game had taken
three developers a little less than a year.

And on re-reading it, it's great to see how much solid, long lasting advice
there was in that interview.

~~~
Tycho
Also interesting that this new game is called Destiny, and the word 'Destiny'
is the last thing you see in the Marathon series (ie. when you complete
Marathon Infinity).

~~~
nswanberg
What I remember about Marathon isn't only that it was a fun, playable game,
but also the story arc and it's level titles' semi-serious references to
military history, such as "Waterloo Waterpark" and "My Own Private
Thermopylae".

It's nice to hear they're continuing that story arc.

~~~
Tycho
I think the story is one of the best works of sci-fi ever... the terminals
play with storytelling/narrative in all sorts of ways.

------
binarycrusader

      Bungie says it has a whopping 350 in-house developers working on Destiny
    

Holy burn rate Batman! Maybe it's just me, but if that number is accurate,
this looks like an "all-in" bet by Activision and Bungie both. If this project
fails, Bungie will likely not survive and Activision would at least take a
major hit.

If you think that's wild, pessimistic speculation, consider this statement:

    
    
       One thing that was made quite clear is that the game will not be subscription-based. Every presenter was clear in stating that players will not pay a monthly fee to participate in this persistent world.

~~~
rorrr
Game developes are what, $80-150K/year on average (of all levels). Add
benefits and tax overhead, makes it $110-180K/year. Times 350:

$38,500,000 - $63,000,000 per year.

(I don't know if they include artists, managers, executives in that 350
number, so it could be more, much more).

It's really not a crazy budget, movies break that all the time. There are
multi-billion dollar game studios out there.

~~~
angrycoder
Your salary number is bit too high, in general, game developers make less than
your average software developer.

Also, there is no way they have 350 programmers working on that project. That
number has to include various types of designers, artists, and programmers.

~~~
ardacinar
Wait, what? Game development seemed like the most stressful/worst thing you
can do in software, i'd never expect game developers to make less than average
developer.

~~~
yannickt
Game Developer Magazine runs a salary survey every year. The average game
programmer salary in 2012 was a little north of $90,000. There are game
programmers who make much more than that, but it is not the norm.

[http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1108/game_developer_...](http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1108/game_developer_salary_survey_2012.php)

------
thefreeman
This has been rumored for years as Blizzard's (aka maker of World of Warcraft)
next big MMO. It's cool to see all of those leaks and conspiracy theories add
up, though they don't mention Blizzard in the article, just their parent
(partner?) company Activision.

Here's my favorite one:

 _In February 2007, an episode of 30 Rock entitled Hardball aired and in the
credits it said, “Promotional Consideration Furnished by Blizzard
Entertainment.” What makes this interesting is that no Blizzard products were
featured. No Warcraft. No Starcraft. No Diablo. No World of Warcraft. However,
Halo was featured in the show! So Blizzard was advertising for Halo in 2007?
This was right before word got out that Blizzard was working on a brand new
MMO and they started hiring “Science-Fiction Texture Artists.” Coincidence?
Maybe._

[http://obsoletegamer.com/could-blizzards-next-mmo-titan-
real...](http://obsoletegamer.com/could-blizzards-next-mmo-titan-really-be-a-
halo-mmo/)

~~~
zach
As someone who has been on that team at Blizzard, those Halo rumors were the
kind we laughed over. With the talent and experience in game design, lore and
art which the company (and that team in particular) has access to, it seems
silly to imagine Blizzard going out and borrowing a game universe from
elsewhere to base a game on.

~~~
tokipin
since you say it that way, i think it's true that Blizzard would create a
StarCraft MMO long before it would create a Halo MMO

------
kmfrk
"[Creator] Unveils Its Next Masterpiece" says a reviewer who has barely seen
the game.

This is some horrible journalism right out of the gate.

~~~
chobo
It's video game journalism, my friend. Everything is 10/10, buy it now!

~~~
sliverstorm
My personal theory is video game journalism is young enough to have largely
missed the old fashioned long-form investigative journalism phase, so there
isn't even a _history_ of strong journalistic integrity.

~~~
furyofantares
I think additionally there is a large audience that reads reviews and other
gaming news to be entertained more than to be informed.

It's fun to get hyped up and excited about some upcoming game, it's not that
fun to read a review about a mediocre game.

And if you are largely going to make your purchasing decisions based on what
your friends are doing anyway, or if a game isn't a super high-ticket item for
you, then it's not something you really need to chase down professional
reviews for.

~~~
philwelch
When done well, critical video game reviews are extremely entertaining. Zero
Punctuation, for instance.

------
huhtenberg
Looks spectacular, but why does it have to be a _shooter_?

I still hope that someone will eventually make a large scale world
_exploration_ game. Journey on steroids, basically.

~~~
potatolicious
The problem with exploration, especially at the AAA-level is that content
costs a lot of money.

For multiplayer-centric shooters, the cost of maps and levels can be spread
across a relatively long lifetime, millions of matches.

An exploration-based game by definition cannot recycle its content. Attempts
to proceduralize world generation have been mixed - Diablo did it, but the
world itself is not the focus there either, and other games have been torn to
shreds for their repeated, boring automatically generated content.

Even open-world games like GTA are focused on specific locations in the game
world, and you can see the amount of detail drop off precipitously outside of
these areas.

Content is really, really expensive - today moreso than ever. An exploration-
based, AAA-level game would have to solve a _lot_ of completely unprecedented
problems.

~~~
Negitivefrags
Procedural generation doesn't have to be the generation of random content
purely from algorithms alone. It can just be tools to automate artist work by
allowing them to specify what content should be at a higher level.

For example, the artist specifies that he wants a road going one way, a river
crossing it and a cliff that runs along one side and the terrain generator
creates the level.

I have a video of this process here. The input is a graph specified by the
artist as well as a bunch of other metadata that he specifies in text files:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PRsHyyFoaM>

I have done a talk on the terrain generator as well which you can see here if
you like: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0>

~~~
mark_l_watson
+1 yours is the best comment I have read so far.

Higher level tools really do speed up content creation. It was a long time
ago, but when I worked at Angel Studios, we put a huge effort into
infrastructure tools.

A high level scripting language driven generator with good fix-up editing
capabilities sounds good.

All that said, I would imagine that large entertainment companies have great
smart creation/editing tools, but they are probably kept under wraps.

------
mattbaker
Bungie's original plans (circa 1999) for Halo a.k.a. BLAM! were much closer to
a large world like this, also with minimal guidance. The ring-world of Halo
was supposed to be a large landscape, requiring you to engage in guerrilla
warfare and letting you improvise your way through the game with the storyline
unfolding dynamically.

I'm excited to see this project happen, I've been waiting 14 years for it!

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Me too. Reading about this project made me think back to the first time I ever
heard about Halo. I'm sure they won't be able to quite nail it, but here's
hoping they get a bit closer!

------
akurilin
I'm almost certain that every MMO since UO has claimed to be about having the
universe's story be written by the players themselves. It never turns out to
be true, with exception to maybe EVE.

~~~
Jach
That's more or less correct, and you can blame WoW for it.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64>

------
iharris
I'm intrigued by the concept, but... XBox 360 and PS3? For a game that is
going to span years? I hope to see an announcement of PC support at least.

~~~
runevault
GiantBomb also put up a video about this, and I agree with Gerstmann, I think
this is really for next gen console not PS3 and X360, since it isn't coming
out until 2014.

~~~
10098
The pre-order page lists xbox360 and ps3 as target platforms
<http://www.destinythegame.com/wheretobuy>

~~~
runevault
That's... surprising then. Because I don't see how you can have a 10 year game
on a console that is about to be obsoleted.

Technically you can just move an account up to the next version of the same
console, but that still seems... strange.

~~~
coldpie
I expect it'll depend on which comes out first, the game or the new consoles.
They seem optimistic that the game will come first, so they'll get loads of
sales on the old hardware. Then when the new hardware comes out, you'll have
to purchase it again to continue playing on your new hardware.

I don't really see anything wrong with this. I can't imagine it costs much to
port from 360 to Infinity (and PS3 to PS4). They get a wider user-base, which
is extremely important for an MMO, and many will buy the game twice when they
eventually upgrade their consoles.

~~~
runevault
Except I seem to recall them saying it would not be in this fiscal year, which
likely runs at least through this year (based on the giant bomb vid linked
elsewhere in the discussion of this post). If so, the PS4 at a minimum is all
but certainly coming out this year, and rumors are the neXtBox is as well.

We'll see though :)

------
patrickmclaren
I wonder how this will compare to the Eve Online / Dust514 universe?

Eve Online is a persistent mmo, and Dust514 is a console game which interacts
with Eve Online for one-off battles.

See <https://dust514.com/>, <http://www.eveonline.com/>.

~~~
Swannie
I expect it will compare favourably, except it's first person shoot-em-up
style.

I wonder how it will compare to Entropia Universe (fka Project Entropia).

They've also had a persistent, single instance, MMORPG universe for a long
time. They ended up introducing missions because people _didn't_ come up with
their own things to do. They also have an open ended skill system with no
levels. Higher skilled players tend to migrate to the more dangerous areas
which cannot be safely travelled by mid-level or beginner players.

Biggest difference I can tell is console vs pc.

(Played EvE for ~9 months, WoW for ~14months, Entropia probably ~2 years over
a 9yr period...).

------
DanBC
If you want persistent online worlds created by the users you should look at
Minecraft. Yes, it's blocks. Yes, it's mostly children. But the variety of
different gameplay is remarkable.

~~~
beering
> Yes, it's mostly children.

[Citation needed]

For anecdotal evidence, you can look at the number of "my [husband/wife] made
this in Minecraft" posts on Reddit and so on.

~~~
DanBC
For anecdotal evidence you can look at the age polls on Minecraft forums which
show 60% are under 21.

Don't forget that reddit isn't particularly child friendly, and yet even their
the MC subreddit is younger than most of the rest of reddit.

~~~
3pt14159
Wow, I just ventured in there for the first time to confirm or deny your
statement, and you are totally right. It is packed with kids. I guess
minecraft is the new lego.

------
zindlerb
Hearing the developers talk about 10 years of content worries me. I know this
is most likely a PR exaggeration, but creating a game that will occupy 10
years or anything close to that is a major responsibility. It would be almost
immoral to create something that provides no meaningful experience and is just
extended escapism. I obviously haven't played it and it looks exciting. I just
hope it isn't made to make players feel super powerful, but ultimately fail to
enrich a player's life.

~~~
contingencies
This is an admirably socially conscious perspective.

------
tomasien
Why do you have to refresh the page to change the header image? Wired can hit
me up any time, I can fix that for them.

~~~
damncabbage
If it's anything like Yahoo! when I was there, they're resisting that because
refreshing the page for every image displays another set of ads.

(It's 2005-era thinking, but the metrics for some ad networks are [or at least
were] skewed to invite abuse of that metric.)

~~~
tomasien
Oh thanks, that's a good point! Didn't think of that.

------
avimeir
Sounds like the world described in the book Ready Player One. Awesome read
BTW.

~~~
king_magic
My thoughts exactly. OASIS!

------
Taylorious
A bit premature to call it a masterpiece isn't it?

~~~
Yuioup
People are also assuming that Halo is a masterpiece. I don't consider it a
masterpiece. It's a good shooter but that's about it.

It got the 3d shooting game mechanics right but Bungie is definitely standing
on the shoulders of giant developers who created the masterpieces.

~~~
EA
But it is the technical 'masterpiece' of the XBOX. It was the killer app on
XBOX Live. And they changed the way other developers used the XBOX controller
to input commands.

And somehow along the way, it became a household name.

~~~
Yuioup
EA, is that you?

<http://i.imgur.com/2SrLf.jpg>

------
jacques_chester
So far as I can tell from the literature, nobody has licked the user-generated
stories thing.

(Well, Eve has, in the sense that they basically built a sandbox and charge
for time in it.)

There's lots of literature on building plots ahead of time. The only project
that's come close to doing anything in JIT plots was _Façade_ , and that still
relied on picking plot elements based on an overall dramatic arc in a very
limited scenario. It also required enormous manual work to reach a usable
state. (Look up the papers though, they're fascinating).

The basic problem is this: in an AOT plot generator, your system controls all
the elements. Every character is controllable, every plot twist is
controllable and so on.

Add humans and things get wildly out hand, because human players are
thoroughly unpredictable.

So either you "railroad" the player, which destroys agency and the suspension
of disbelief. Or you produce what is essentially random events, which destroys
agency but might preserve the suspension of disbelief. Neither alternative is
very satisfying.

What's wanted is a system that reacts to player actions, constantly replanning
current events to satisfy a general plot arc.

I looked at doing JIT, automatic, reactive plot generation as an honours
project but it's simply too big for a 1-year project.

Basically pen-and-paper RPGs with a smart, inscrutable GM are still going to
be the state of the art on this for some time yet.

(Email me if you want the crappy preliminary research I did on this topic)

~~~
elithrar
> So far as I can tell from the literature, nobody has licked the user-
> generated stories thing.

Cryptic's new "Neverwinter" MMO aims to do this. How effective it will be is
another thing entirely.

~~~
jacques_chester
Pretty much everyone aims to do it. The publicity for just about every CRPG
ever made, whether single player or MMO, talks about how amazingly immersive
and dynamic and reactive it's going to be. So forgive me if I propose to wait
and see :D

The thing is that you can go a long way with a sufficiently large, dense story
graph. That's the direction that single-player CRPGs have moved in. But it's
obviously a non-starter for MMOs.

------
knowaveragejoe
I really, really, REALLY hope this is not going to be console-only(which is
what it's looking like at this point). I've yet to see a decent, popular MMO
for consoles.

------
Illniyar
Apart from having a story that spans 10 years (which, btw, actually undermines
the goal of user generated content), what exactly is new about this? Almost
every new MMO tries to be user centric.

I'm not seeing the: “We’re not doing this just because we have the tech,” .

------
nicholassmith
On a slight tangent, interesting that it's going to be multi-platform after
being signed up as Microsoft exclusives for so long. I'd imagine it's mostly
to increase their possible audience, but part of me wonders if it's because
the split from Microsoft wasn't entirely without some burned bridges on both
sides.

Which begs the question, have they found a way to share the universe between
both platforms? That'd be pretty spectacular if they have.

------
jfb
I sort of wish they hadn't sold on the Myth IP, because a) I _loved_ those
games and b) I really enjoyed the world (albeit thanks, Glen Cook). An update
of Myth II to run on, say, iOS and Android, with good multi-player support --
well, my boss at Apple used to tell me that the company'd go broke building
software for me, but c'mon, wouldn't that be awesome?

------
abraxasz
Seems like a french retailer [1] guesstimated the release date as being
October 6th 2013. Note that I have no idea how reliable this information is,
and I'm taking it with a wagon of salt myself..

[1] [http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Bungie-Destiny-Release-
Date...](http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Bungie-Destiny-Release-Date-
October-52643.html)

~~~
cyphersanctus
Predicting the output and conclusion date of the work of 350 developers is not
an easy task. I bet not even their CEO has a clear date in mind. The french
retailer is probably just seeking PR attention.

------
crapshoot101
I hate shooters, partially because your average 4 year can kick my ass at it.
I'm still bitter at Mass Effect turning into more shooter than RPG, because
that's what sells. Why oh why isn't there a persistent, space-based RPG for
the single player that's awesome? Something like a KOTOR II, without the bugs.

------
Tycho
See also: _Huxley._ A game i really wanted to play but never got released
seemingly.

~~~
mvzink
I played the beta. It was Unreal with matchmaking, a little bit of PvE, and
character development.

------
husam212
Halo + Ingress = Destiny

~~~
Corrado
Yes, I was very intrigued by the way they represented off-line play. Its
almost like you can continue to "play" on your mobile device even when you are
not fully engaged in the universe proper. If they can pull this off it indeed
would be a game changer.

------
JosephHatfield
Wasn't Triton supposed to be a Blizzard property? Is Blizzard's role here to
contribute development and artistic resources to what will ultimately be a
Bungie game?

~~~
jat850
The Blizzard project is titled "Titan".

~~~
JosephHatfield
Thanks! Maybe I won't have to get a PS4 after all. :)

------
cpeterso
This game sound awfully similar to Richard Garriott's (short-lived) Tabula
Rasa MMORPG.

------
shocks
> Destiny, slated for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

This is fucking irritating.

------
morganb180
Dibs on the Parzival handle.

