After appetizer and starter courses of beta, preorder numbers show Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners are hungry for a full play through of Destiny and the game's developers seem to be cooking up a recipe that will set a new trend in social gaming.
Destiny will have a general, overarching narrative to drive the game forward, but developers Bungie want to tell the stories of Mars and old Earth to parties of gamers online. It's been promoted in the upcoming Star Citizen game and its been arguably realized, to a degree, in fetch-filled content drops in MMOs, but Destiny seems poised to deliver on its promise of a connected universe that responds to the stories players create.
Destiny's end game doesn't exist yet, because the developers are still awaiting more feedback from players. Jonty Barnes, Bungie's director of production, said Destiny's game world will change with time.
The Dark Below, the release of the game's first planned expansion, won't necessarily have any bearing over which direction Destiny heads, despite the downloadable content bringing new story elements, according to Barnes.
"Already from the beta we learned about how to tune the players' experiences to be better experiences," said Barnes. " We're going to continuously update the game from now until the end of time. That's always going to be part of the philosophy of Destiny. We always wanted to build a new universe but keep building upon it, rather than to do a complete and utter restart periodically."
Destiny will have its player vs. player matches, as witnessed in the betas, but the sci-fi game will break down the walls and grounds of the perpetual arenas and invite gamers to engage in familiar game modes under different circumstances as the story unfolds. And the game modes aren't expected to remain stagnant, as they'll evolve along with player feedback and the progression of the game's broad narrative.
While Bungie said it has a 10-year plan for Destiny, writer Luke Smith said players will begin to understand the endgame somewhere around level 20.
"[The endgame begins] as soon as you see the way we wrap up the sort of first piece of the adventure that we're going to tell because we want to set you back out into the world to keep going," Smith said. "We want to try to align your motivations as the player with the motivations of the character who you've been pushing around this world. So for us I think a bunch of the endgame starts right at level 20."
Some gamers have been wary of a game that wants to tell its story entirely online, but the preorder numbers prove there's a large group of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners who have faith that Bungie is up to the task.
