Bungie has been around a long time, but they did not become the company they are today until their buyout by Microsoft, which led to Halo: Combat Evolved being used as a launch title for the original Xbox. Now Bungie is back on their own with the highly anticipated Destiny being published by Activision for both current-gen and next-gen systems. In an interview with Games Industry International, Bungie’s Pete Parsons made the bold statement that he feels that Destiny can surpass Halo, and the goal is to reach the levels of pop culture icons like Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings.
“We were extremely proud of what we achieved with Halo… I’m pretty convinced we are going to do it again with Destiny in a way that maybe even Halo never achieved before,” said Parsons. He went on to say that this does not mean that they will be creating a line of movies, comics, or novels based on the franchise, but he would not be opposed to it as long as it enriched the universe they are building.
With all of the talk in recent years about the next-gen consoles, Bungie aimed to try and protect themselves by future-proofing the Destiny brand since they have a 10 year plan for the game already. Bungie believes that the social aspect of the game will be the “killer app” of next-gen gaming as gamers are so tied to the networks on both Playstation and Xbox rather than the hardware itself.
That’s what’s really exciting about next-gen. I think the big advancements are how do we keep bringing people together? How do we make a game that’s not just about ‘here are a bunch of people in the same room together’, but it’s about what we want to do, which is to give you really finely crafted storytelling and competitive multiplayer and remove the barriers between those two. Think about all of our previous games in the LAN parties… Those were all attempts really to bring people together. At the end of the day we were shipping three separate games on the DVD – we were shipping campaign, cooperative and multiplayer, and they are arguably different games. Well, now we don’t have to do that; now we can actually have people crossing each other at different points. You can build your avatar for weeks, months or years while enjoying storytelling and then move into multiplayer in that same build.
A launch date for Destiny has yet to be announced, but the game will be coming to Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Xbox One, and Playstation 4
