Destiny “MMO-like” features explained

In an interview with Joystiq, Bungie‘s Lead engineer Chris Butcher explained some of the MMO-like features available in Destiny, the upcoming persistent online shooter published by Activision.

The way we think about the public spaces is that they’re areas within the world of Destiny where, as your fireteam goes into that area, you’ll be seamlessly match-made behind the scenes with other fireteams. There’s no UI, progress bars, loading screens or anything like that.

And that’s where we think shooter players are going to find the gameplay that’s most interesting and meaty for them, because it’s something we feel is kind of new, unexpected and exciting. What happens is, in these public areas – like I said – you’ll be match-made with other players in this large-scale cooperative experience.

There’s continuously these dynamic events that are kicking off in these public areas, and you can choose to engage with them if you want, or you can choose to go about your own personal mission that you came to do there. So it’s up to you; you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to, but if you do, you get to enjoy this cooperative experience and you get additional rewards as well.

This would seem to suggest an approach similar to Guild Wars 1 which however seamlessly brings together players for dynamic/public events, such as those featured in Guild Wars 2. Destiny looked very strong at E3 2013 and we can’t wait to know more about the game, currently slated for a 2014 release on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.