Speaking to MCV at Gamescom 2014, Destiny’s Director of Production, Jonty Barnes has said that “Players didn’t understand Destiny until the played the Beta.
It was no surprise that the announcement of an MMO FPS was met with confusion and automatically compared to Gearbox’s Borderlands. The confusion stemmed from the games wealth of playable content and the mixing of genres that previously went successfully unpaired, this made the game hard to talk about because of the unusual melding of gameplay mechanics.
Speaking about this, Barnes said “We didn’t realise, because we were living it, how difficult it was to talk about – how seamlessly you move between activities, how you collide and then disrupt,”…“We kept on talking about the core game, and people just didn’t grasp it until they got their hands on it. Since the beta it has been easier to explain what the game is.”
Given that Destiny is a hugely ambitious title, it’s refreshing to see members of the development staff actively taking player feedback from Beta builds of the game and using it to further refine the end product.
Jessie Van Dijk, the games lead artist further amended Barnes statement by saying, “Destiny is built on the foundation of things we have learnt over time.”
Destiny is currently slated to launch on September 9th 2014 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.