While PC gamers may have been able to ignore all the Halo 4 hubbub this week (and, judging from what I played of its campaign last night, not missing all that much either), it's highly unlikely you'll be able to avoid Destiny. Bungie's next MMO-ish-sounding game, which a recent leak describes as "still quite like Halo", is to be published by Activision after the developer's split with Microsoft, and it's a fair bet that it'll be a multi-platform mega-blockbuster. With a release date of next winter, it's also very likely that every news-bearing surface will soon be slick with the oily word-slurry of triple-A marketing.
Internet sleuth Superannuation is ahead of the curve, however: he's unearthed new tantalising details of Destiny, which were reportedly found on a blog post by a senior employee of Demonware, a networking middleware company owned by Activision-Blizzard. This publicly-accessible copy of Demonware's internal blog has since been removed, and the names have been redacted in the version published by Superannuation, but it details a trip to Bungie's headquarters and hands-on time with Destiny.
"This is not a dedicated server game," reads the post, "but there is some simulation and coordination running in their server infrastructure. The game was up and down a lot, playing in a team of 3 we did manage to experience entering a zone to find other players already taking on the bad guys, it's cooperative so we helped out (mostly [name removed], I just died) before both groups went their separate ways. Which is a pretty cool experience, making you feel you are part of a much larger populated world.
[...]
"At the end of the day I was excited about the game, I like the feel of being in a large world with different destinations and the interactions along the way. It actually brought back a sense of exploration I recall from playing [Elite] many years ago, although there was no opportunity to shoot aliens in the face in Elite. I'm not fully sold on the appeal of being able to change the colour of a weapon, but I guess it works in China, and customization and individual identity is a big theme for the game."
So: some sort of MMO-ish instance-combining? Microtransactable weapon painting? Interesting stuff - but are you willing to welcome Bungie back to PC?
