[quote]Designers spend thousands of hours creating details to immerse us, but some players never notice them. "What we do is create these incredible, atmospheric worlds, [then] bombard players with action. It felt like there were a whole lot of designers saying. 'What if we could just be in the world for a little while because that's really cool in itself?' What the last couple years have really shown is that there is a real audience out there and lots of people going 'Yeah, it's enough to be in a world and explore and that's a really rewarding experience'" -Dan Pinchbeck, Creative designer, The Chinese Room[/quote] This quote is from the [b]Destiny: The Taken king [/b]edition of Gameinformer this month. It's relevant and amusing in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it immediately follows the Destiny article in the magazine. Beyond that, to a great degree it offers up an ideal that I think many of us had in our heads in 2012 and 2013 of what our experience in Destiny would be like. "The First-Person Exploration Boom" That's the title of the article and it goes on to talk about the success of games like Gone Home, Dear Esther and Amnesia: the Dark Decent and how a subgenre has sprung up of just being in a world and exploring it. It credits games like System Shock 2 and Fallout 3 as having paved the way, but it goes back much further. My friends and I spent as much time exploring the original world of Halo as we did killing Covenant and Flood. Whether getting on top of the island or up on hills, flying the Banshee all through the snow levels... If it was possible to get somewhere, we found a way. It wasn't just limited to FPS games though. Rush: 2049 had all kinds of crazy places you could go off track and explore to find hidden coins. That game took up hundreds of hours of our time just driving around the world let alone racing. And while games like Fallout (and Morrowind and Oblivion before it) offered up worlds to just set off walking and see what adventure awaited hidden around the next bend, Bungie slowly worked away from that exploration and with Halo 3, started implementing hidden walls and death zones barricading all those places that beckoned to be explored. I don't think I'm alone in having had the belief (and the hope) that the worlds of Destiny would offer us that unknown to step out into, choose a direction and see where fate led us. I imagined that this would be a world where a real war raged and each of us could meet out in the solar system and positively impact each other’s battles to beat back the encroaching Darkness. It's funny with all the ups and downs that Destiny has had post launch, that one of the recurring themes is Bungie trying to find a way to gate our progression to prolong our playtime. Initially through ridiculous upgrade paths for weapons and gear, followed by Commendations and finally by Etheric Light. Now with TTK, they are letting us share Marks, but capping them at 200 account wide to ensure that we're endlessly grinding for more. On the one hand it's brilliant, we'll never build up a surplus and be able to say "I can play something else for a few days". But on the other hand, what does it say about the depth of the experience you are creating if you constantly feel the need to implement systems for gating to begin with? I think that is at the heart of Destiny's dilemma with the fans right now. We want the game world itself to make us want to keep playing and Bungie/Activision want slow dripped rewards to keep us involved. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have had any kind of long term world goals or gear progression plan in place when Destiny launched and seem to be making up rules for what can and can't be kept as they go along. It doesn't have to be this way. There don't have to be currency caps. There don't have to be endless weapon resets. There doesn't need to be a wheel spinning in place where numbers go up, but performance stays level. How? Living worlds to get lost in. Real secrets to unearth (no Golden Chests filled with green gear). Actual armies of enemies dropping out of the sky and not endless scouting parties of 3-5 enemies to quickly rout without any thought or question of success. How many hours do you think players would spend just wandering in-game if we could say, go over the Cosmodrome wall to explore around the rockets? What if we could climb one and sit high above the map sniping enemies roaming across the landscape? Here is something else that has bothered me for years with shooters. Why not bring PvP maps into the ACTUAL GAME WORLD. I don't know why no one does this; my favorite missions in GoldenEye were the maps that also served as PvP maps. It was kind of like playing PvP vs the regular game AI. How amazing would it be to explore the Cosmodrome and come across Rusted Lands, Twilight Gap and Sky Shock? I'm sorry, but it would be -blam!-ing incredible. Imagine fighting Fallen around Twilight Gap, Vex in the Pantheon, Cabal at Blind Watch... How it would bring those areas alive and give them a deeper meaning that made them truly special to the players that battle there in the Crucible. Not to mention that it would give players the opportunity to become familiar with these places before ever going to battle other Guardians there. They're areas designed for battle; why not let us fight minions of the darkness there? So in closing I would ask Bungie to really think about this world you are building and what it could become. I dream of a day when these planets aren't objectives, they're [i]destinations[/i]. Thank you all, see you amongst the stars.