The Halo franchise has finally flown from the nest and gone on to pastures that are fresh and new, but just what have Bungie been filling their time and what has decided to move in and occupy that now empty nest?
IGN recently received marketing details from an outside source about the new Bungie game ‘Destiny’ which is set to ‘create a universe as deep, tangible and relatable as that of the Star Wars franchise’. A very bold claim indeed. But Bungie have confirmed that these details are in fact real and were put together for them by an advertising company as a means of boosting interest.
Activision also has a ten year exclusive arrangement with Bungie and has been keeping incredibly quiet about anything over all things Bungie and Destiny related. They have previously stated that the game will be ‘genre-defining’ and will rank alongside Call of Duty as one of their two ‘largest growth opportunities’ for the coming years. As trends are currently going, the game will have to pull in half a Billion dollars if it wants to make the same stake in the ground as the most recent Call of Duty game, Black Ops 2.
Destiny is set 700 years in the far off future, mankind has tried and failed to colonise the Solar System and now is fighting to protect the last city on Earth from falling into the hands of aliens while being protected by a mysterious ship they call ‘The Traveller’. Granted it does sound like Halo but from the Covenents point of view, but it seems a fairly obvious plot.
“Our story begins seven hundred years from now in the Last City on Earth, in a Solar System littered with the ruins of man’s Golden Age. A massive, mysterious alien ship hangs overhead like a second Moon. No one knows where it came from or what it’s here for, but only that it’s our protector. Meanwhile, strange, alien monsters creep in from the edge of the universe, determined to take Earth and the Last City. We are young ‘knights’ tasked with defending the remains of humanity, discovering the source of these monsters and – eventually – overcoming it.”
Destiny will be ‘fun and accessible to all’ and Bungie co-founder Jason Jones described it as being ‘designed for your inner seven year old. We want to make it feel like a mythic adventure.’
Destiny was originally ousted as the new Bungie game in May when the details were made public as part of an Activision court case. The document stated that there are to be four games in the series set to come out ‘Fall 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019’. There will also be four expansions to the game, known as ‘Comet’, which will be released ‘Fall 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020.
The first game will be available on Xbox 360 as well as ‘the next successor console platform released by Microsoft’ which is referred to as Xbox 720. The game will then be available on PS3 in Fall 2014 after a ‘ joint technical feasibility analysis’ which basically means after they have worked out if it will work as well on PS3 as on 360. The ‘Comet’ expansions will be available to Xbox 360, Xbox 720 and PS4′. A release for the PC is also discussed. This is something that will surely bother the legions of fan boys who would fight until the last over the right to call bungie an exclusive developer, but then again, most fan boys didn’t know about Bungies previous title, “Oni”.
So, is the game, currently only code-named ‘Destiny’, going to have a less mature storyline than that of Halo? Is it the ‘joked about’ MMO? The MMO theory might not be far off, but it’s worth remembering that recently the team over at 343 who created Halo 4 and are now handling the Halo franchise recently put out a job listing looking for people who had experience in working with MMO’s. So it’s entirely possible that a Halo MMO will be coming in one form or another, although there are no official details mentioning such a thing, it has all been purely based on “leaks” and supposition on the part of the fans. And does it mean that the Xbox 720 will be here for Fall 2013? It would certainly be a wise advertising and business move to release before Sony yet again, but who knows? With Destiny being planned as having cross platform sequels perhaps an early system launch would step on too many toes.
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