Bungie’s Destiny: creating a believable new world

August 27th, 2013, 23:45 Posted By: wraggster

In the first in a series of in-depth interviews exploring the making of Destiny, we speak to Bungie’s art director Chris Barrett to find out how the studio is building a persistent, online world that its players can relate to.I’m curious about laying the foundations for Destiny, how it differed to past projects you’ve worked on and how you build a series you know has to last for ten years – how is this different from making Halo?Chris Barrett: With Halo the world was already established – back in 1997 or whenever it was, when they started working on it. So it was our first chance to reset and just come up with an entire new IP. So one of the things we did first was basically took the kind of game we were making, which was a social game and [identified] that the most important thing was the world. What was this world? This place that we wanted people to exist in rather than what story did we want to tell over the span of, say, seven hours.It was all about the world-building side for a long time, trying to figure out what the recipe was: which kinds of genres did we want to pull from, what kind of variety did we want, what feel did we want players to have, what kind of stories could we tell within that world.Was it in our solar system? Is it a different solar system? How ‘hard sci-fi’ it is versus how fantasy, all those kinds of things. I think we’ve tried to calibrate how can we get all of those [aspects] together in one place, starting with how to make this important to relate to players. That told us it had to be in our solar system, it had to be earth, so that people care about it. If it’s just some made up universe that we’re creating you have to work a lot harder to get people to care about it, so that formed our foundation and we just started pulling in stuff from there that fit. And [asking] how do we get fantastical elements into it, or how do we get fantastic things in from far off that are those fantastic places, bringing them to the solar system somehow.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...ble-new-world/

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here