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On April 4th an article was published at Eurogamer.net that reported on an interview with Joseph Staten and Chris Barrett, our panelists of interest at GDC. Here is the full article. There are plenty of brand new juicy tidbits but I'm not going to single out any in particular, you'll have to find them for yourselves. Here is the Q&A section for your viewing pleasure. I've got a funny feeling fans will bug you about Tiger Man for a long time, and you may have shot yourselves in the foot by even mentioning him. Joe Staten: Then Tiger Man has served his purpose. He has become the bullet shield. That's his role. He is brave and noble and strong and wise. Chris Barrett: I guess Blizzard did it with the panda, right? That turned out to be a whole expansion. Oh dear... Joe Staten: No! I've already seen #TeamTigerMan on the internet. So, well done! Joe Staten: Thanks. Whoops. You mention mythic sci-fi and idealised reality as guides for what Destiny is, and you've created some stunning concept art. But building an actual video game that lives up to the promise of that concept art must be a particularly difficult challenge. Chris Barrett: Switching gears for the whole team and coming up with this new world was certainly tough. We had a lot of people who were used to making Halo games for a long time, so trying to communicate that new vision and get them on board, we had to do a lot of concept art to show people what we were thinking about and what mixtures of sci-fi versus fantasy worked and what we were going for. The other thing though, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When you start making characters who fit into that world, or stories players are playing, or bring some of it into the gameplay, it all starts to form that feel. Joe Staten: I remember playing a build maybe a month ago, and for some reason the build just wasn't rendering cloth. I play as a hunter character with the big cape and cloak and hood. That part fell away, and all of a sudden there was something missing from that mythic sci-fi, because nobody had cloth on, and it looked much more like a straight up sci-fi game. It's that texture that the art is bringing to the world, and the colour palette and the screen effects. It is this combination of things that make it happen. I'd also say - and I never thought this would happen - but it's crazy that so many of the pieces of concept art we made long ago are actually present in the game. You can look at that postcard and go into the game and as you're playing you'll say, 'Oh my god, that's The Buried City.' The challenge is communicating the vision and the theme clearly enough to the people who need to make it, answering their questions, being open to their push back, but all having a very clear vision of what you're going for. And if you define that well and you define it right, you can achieve a lot of these things we thought early on would be really hard if not impossible to do. And that's been really great to see. You talk a lot about players creating their own legend and their own stories in Destiny, but from a writing perspective, you also want to create a story. It must present an interesting design challenge to combine a story Bungie wants to tell with players who are creating their own stories - at the same time. Joe Staten: Without getting into too much detail, if you think of Halo, you had two sort of experiences in general. I'm going to play the story, or I'm going to play competitive multiplayer. In the story I'm playing the story. And in competitive multiplayer I'm just fighting against people, and there's not really a story there except that awesome story of the moment to moment combat experience I'm having and the post-game, 'Oh, wasn't that awesome when you drove the Warthog that way?!' That story was really important to PvP. But there was this cinematic story that lived in a sort of silo over here. The simple answer is, we still believe in a great narrative cinematic story. We want your character, whatever character you are, a female robot warlock or a male human titan, whoever you are, you're going to be the star of that cinematic story. But there are many many other activities that cross the divide between story and multiplayer in this world of Destiny, and your character is going to go through all of them. So, whatever character you are in story is the same character you are in all these other activities, including competitive multiplayer. And so, our hope is that it will feel like a consistent experience. Your legend will take you through all these different activities. Some are more narrative driven. Some aren't. Some are just more emergent. But you're a consistent character across all of those. That's the key. That's where that consistent experience comes from. In your GDC session you talked about character creation. The impression I get is you want it to be an immediate experience, almost like you pick based on a gut reaction to the options. What is the overriding philosophy behind what you're trying to do there? Chris Barrett: When we were talking about how that process would work and the choices the players would have, we knew if we gave somebody a choice and then betrayed that choice later down the road, that would be bad. We wanted players to just go on gut. What do they like the look of? What sounds cool to them? And not betray that in any way. We don't want to make something where a character plays very differently, or isn't what they thought what they were getting. That tied in to that process. We want to give people whatever they want to play in that world and not have any negative side effects. Joe Staten: Making it up front and quick and largely emotional, and nothing that's going to, later down the line, make you feel like you made the wrong choice. You're going to make this gut emotional choice: 'I'm going to look at that robot and I'm going to look at that more exotic space elf and I'm going to look at that human and I like... robot.' It's like, bam. I'm going to be a robot. And there's nothing about being a robot that's going to play any different from the other two. We want to make it immediate and quick and gut, for sure when it comes to race, and then make sure we don't screw you down the line. Chris Barrett: We didn't want to give a plus eight bonus or whatever it is, that people are going to be like, 'Oh, I made the wrong choice! I've got to start over.' That always sucks. With Halo you were locked in to working on a single main character with Master Chief. Now you're working on multiple main character types. That must have been quite the change, being able to say, actually, I can create whatever I want now. Chris Barrett: Absolutely. Some of the early brainstorms on the enemies for example were just lining up, what are awesome things we want to do? Like, 'Oh, let's make ancient robots! We need those!' Or, 'Let's make dimensional beings!' Whatever it is we thought could fit in the world we could do because we had all those more options. We wanted space zombies and robots and we could do that in this world, which was super cool. So it was liberating. It was a lot of fun doing all that stuff instead of trying to cram it all into one character design. It was freeing. With Master Chief you had to consider just one central character's backstory. Now you have to deal with multiple stories for multiple characters. Joe Staten: As long as you as a writer remain flexible and don't try to put too many rules on the process up front, your really fun job is to make everything possible. So if Chris comes to me with an image of the Traveller, or if he comes to me with an image of a guy with a soul ripping out of his head, or space zombies or robots, it's been a real pleasure just to assimilate all of those ideas loosely and try to create a world where it's less about the constraints and the rules and more about, what's possible? Like, give me the big brackets. Give me fantasy and sci-fi. There's a lot that can fit in between those two big brackets. And then it's just a matter of, well, where do space zombies go? Do they go on the moon? Do they go on Mars? What's cool? Artistically, what looks better? What's a richer combination of palettes? So much of our fiction conversation is just about creating this pleasing world, this inviting world, this world that looks good, that's beautiful, that draws you deeper. It's less about writing about a bunch of backstory. We certainly do some of that, but it's more about sort of colour blocking. Like, big, thematic blocking we do. Let's talk about Mars. Okay, let's look at it thematically. Who belongs in Mars? Is it big Kabal? Is it space zombies? Really, much of the work has been just moving around these different elements until we get a pleasing whole big picture. Then we have to tighten the screws. If I were writing a Halo game, what I would do is, typically, I would sit down and write a linear script that looked a lot like a film. I would just bang it out. Here's what the story is going to be. Here's what the characters are. We'd make a story. We'd talk about backstory. In this world, we spent a lot more time just doing what I think people would do in a television show, which is, we've got this plot card, and that is, like, space zombies invade the moon, or whatever it is, and that's an awesome idea. Let's just put that there. And then let's come up with other ones. And then let's start moving them around and stay flexible and then f***ing play the game so we know it's going to be fun, and then, let's finally tighten the screws and shoot it. That's been a really rewarding, different process than we've gone through before. Some of the art shows Earth reclaimed by nature or in some abandoned sci-fi style. Will we be able to visit these places on Earth in the game as well as go out into the solar system? Chris Barrett: We're doing both. It's exciting to explore what was humanity. What happened to humanity? And be able to explore those spaces on Earth. Those are real places we want to explore. And then also what's also cool is seeing how humanity spread into the stars and what happened on those other planets. Both are super exciting in the same way. Joe Staten: We sometimes toss around loosely terms like galaxies and universes and solar systems, but we're really excited about telling, at least during the beginning of the story, the story of a human civilisation in our solar system. So we're talking about the moon and Mars and Venus and the moons of Saturn. You can Google Enceladus or the Moon. But we want to take that familiar understanding of what these places are and tweak them into this world of strangeness and mystery. And that's true for Earth as well. You can type in Chicago but you're not going to get a picture of flooded streets.

Shortly after their hour long panel at the recent GDC, Joe Staten and Chris Barrett sat down with Eddie Makuch of Gamestop for a little more "in-depth" information regarding Bungie's upcoming game "Destiny". A very insightful look into a game that looks to have enough depth in both the Campaign storyline and Multiplayer to hold a player's interest for years. Be Brave. Read on. Content and image courtesy of GameSpot.com On inspirations for Destiny Barrett - Some of the things that I like, or our team really liked, from that kind of mixture of genres--you could go anywhere from Thundarr the Barbarian; that was something I loved as a kid and actually has some of those similar elements. Obviously the big ones like Star Wars or Dune or any of those things that we liked as kids. As far as the art, the art style definitely looked towards painters and images that had those big ideas in them…sort of timeless. Like I said in the talk, John Harris had that kind of feel. Seventies sci-fi art had this big world-building kind of feel and idea; stuff that would span galaxies and solar systems. And all that stuff really was inspiration for me, for sure. Staten - So in terms of other inspirations, I would just pile on there certainly we read a ton of genre fiction. Absolutely sci-fi and fantasy. We eat it up. But the thing we really looked at…I think typically, for the Halo games, we looked at movies. But really for this game, we looked at serial television; great dramas like Lost or The Wire; Battlestar Galactica. When you're building a world and you want to evolve it over time, it really helps to have an understanding of how you build this longer-form narrative. So for us, that was a really interesting new thing we did. I think we probably spent more time watching television these days than we do movies and that's definitely influenced the way we think about building our story. On the difficulties of creative collaboration with a 400-person team Staten - For me, I think [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien], having just read through the books with my ten-year-old son, is an incredible talent. I think [Lord of the Rings] is this creation of a single person, though, and we're in a totally different world. We're creating a game that's the creation of 400 people. And you have to be really careful in that world not to get too precious; to go too deep down your own rabbit hole. And then come out with a whole bunch of rules and strictures; 'this is possible in our world,' 'this is totally off-limits.' It's not good collaboration. And ultimately, I don't think results in creative ideas. On whether or not Destiny needs consistency Staten - We absolutely do. And we have pages of words that define things in great detail. But there's nothing worse than having words that go stale. Writing reams and reams of words and then nobody ever reads them or nobody updates them and they go out of date. So this has been really, really hard; we don't do it perfectly. But we spend a lot of time just trying to boil down things to a simple sentence like 'This is what this place is all about' and 'If you remember nothing else, remember these simple words.' And that's been hugely effective. And so we try really, really hard not to create a story bible; we'll create a style guide to talk to people about art, but we're trying really, really hard not to build a bible. Barrett - The other thing is, when we started talking about what this world could be, we always said to ourselves we want to make some place where almost anything is possible, so even now, as we're building the world, we have those defined, but we're always evolving. Over the next ten years we're going to be making up new stuff to put in there and we want to build as big a net as possible so those crazy ideas can fit. On whether or not games have a responsibility to show seedy sides of humans Staten - I think if you want to tell a credible story, yes, absolutely. In terms of the player choice, which is what we were talking about, we want players to be a hero. And if you're a hero, then that means you're largely on the side of good. And you might make a racial choice to be an Exo, which is artistically and thematically a little more sinister and dark. You might choose to be a Hunter class, who is just a little bit more in the bounty hunter, roguish vein. But at the end of the day, when you're a player in this world, you're a guardian of the last safe city on Earth. And it's really important that you are this heroic, hopeful figure in the world. That said, you're absolutely going to run into other humans and other Exos and other Awoken who, some are, bad people. They have bad plans. There aren't all good people in the world that you run into. So you will see that breadth across all the characters in our game, but if you're the player, you're the hero. On how the idea of hope factors into Destiny Staten - The kinds of experiences that I want to play, and that we as a studio I think want to put into the world--I think about my own kids or people who are going to play this game. How do we want them to interact with this world? What experience do I want them to have? Post-apocalyptic worlds are fun. Worlds with skulls and blood and hellfire are awesome, but if I want to spend time in a world, if I want to be an agent of change, I want to be an agent of good. I want it to be a hopeful outcome. We go back and forth about the name Destiny and we joked about it for a while about whether it was the right name, but I think we think about Destiny and what kind of Destiny do you want to have? Do you want to have one that ends in annihilation and reprehensible things? Or do you want to end in a hopeful, heroic place? For us, that's really important. That legacy that we want to build is a hopeful one. On the mystery of Destiny's world Staten - One of the choices we made early on, like [barrett] said, was where to set this game. And when. Do we want it to be a galaxy far, far away? Do we want it to be a planet-of-the-week like Star Trek? What really clicked in my mind when we started mixing sci-fi and fantasy is with fantasy you get this strong sense of history; you get myths and legends and ancient gods; different dream realms and stuff that's steeped in time and legend. And we wanted to create that same feeling in this mythic sci-fi world. Bungie hopes players will want to explore the red dunes of Mars. So one of the things we did early on was decide we wanted to center it on Earth, but we want to build a history. We want to build a block of time that occupies from the here to the now to the distant future. But we want players to go back and explore this lost human history. And so for us, that was the source of a lot of the mystery in our world was this [period] of time where something happened, but you don't know what. And we're hundreds of years in the future now exploring back through these ruins of human civilization. Barrett - We talked about a lot in our concept art; if you look at a painting and you don't want to know more, if there isn't a mystery there, you're going to get bored looking at it. So every shot we try to create, especially the key images, we want somebody to ask a question about it. 'Why is that there?' 'What's behind that little door off in the distance?' or 'What's that character doing in the distance?' That's absolutely a key part of making evocative concept art. Staten - You show up on Mars, now in the game we're playing, and you see this city buried in sand and it's a mystery that draws you deeper; it's not one that's repellent or dark and grim. It's a beautiful place that is steeped in mystery and wonder so that's really what we want the world to do; just keep dragging you deeper and deeper and deeper. On whether or not science-fiction can avoid thematic repetition Staten - I hadn't really thought about it in that way, but I think it's the big reason why we wanted to inject fantasy into this world. With the world of mythic science fiction, anything is possible. And when you round a corner and see up high a combatant; for example something that looks much more like a wizard-space-zombie. That's not an experience you get when you're playing most straight-up action-shooters or sci-fi shooters. That was really a critical part to making that experience unique and fresh--was injecting these more fantastical and exotic elements. Barrett - I think it's always something you think about is creating this completely new idea that no one has ever seen before. And we definitely have some of those in the game, but also we do that like…players aren't bringing anything to it; it's not familiar; in some way, you want them to see things that they recognize in some way so they feel emotional when they see it again. So we try to strike that nice balance between those two elements. Destiny is currently in development for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4. The game is described as the very first "shared-world shooter." It is an online-focused title, though it is not a massively multiplayer online game and will not carry a subscription fee. Activision is not planning to ship Destiny until 2014.