If they really mean it about investment that is encouraging. Because I honestly see Destiny as a 1 time playthrough and then I'm done. If they can sway me after the game ships I may consider getting it possibly. I'm gunna let my friends tell me first probably. I'm weary of buying games when they first come out nowadays whereas I could just wait a few years and get it half off or even cheaper for the same experience. I'm also not really into the whole MMO scale type game so yeah ... I feel everyone is the same in the end so will be interesting how they plan to topple that.

[b]45)[/b] The other thing that Lars played was the Raid stuff (which is apparently Luke Smith's domain), he was very impressed about how secretive they had kept it and it adds something to the game that really compliments the activity for every mood mantra that Bungie has been pushing. Raids feel very different and it was fun to play and you're like "How the hell are we going to do this" and an hour later you're like "LIKE THAT" [b]46)[/b] Enough about other people, it's competitive multiplayer time. DeeJ begins by mentioning that there's a lot more to play with and things are different between higher lethality and a more diverse sandbox and more ways to fight and kill others, an investment game to wrap all around it, Tyson talked a lot about balance, what is different for you as a designer tackling the competitive multiplayer sandbox, building that arena, what should fans expect from Destiny? [b]47)[/b] The first thing they'll notice is that they're not making Halo again and that should be exciting. It's hard, but it's a different game and while the sandbox is different the way it feels and the way you move is reminiscent of Halo but the new things in Destiny like the vertical movement modes and all the different types of grenades and all the choices you're making on your focus and build makes the game feel really different when you run across guys and you go "wow I don't understand what he's doing exactly but that is really cool!" and you have your own set of tools that you use and the sort of player verbs that we have now are much deeper than what we had in Halo and the game is much more strategic in a way where you understand your own build and you go in and attack a situation in a different way depending on where you're at, what mood you're in, what gametype you're playing, all that jazz. [b]48)[/b] Looking at it on paper it might seem like it would be very complex, chaotic, and confusing, but it just feels so simple to slip into it and pick things up, you really quickly pick things up quickly, that guy is a Hunter, he's going to be on the peripheral and he is going to pounce, hit you from long range, land all of his shots, if you want to be successful you need to not be in the open and close with short range stuff and outsmart him, you learn these play patterns that people have and their abillities, like a Titan that always has short range stuff and he's going to run in and smash you or wait for you to run in and he's going to punish you for making the wrong move. It's more complex but it retains the simplicity and clarity of combat. Easy to learn, difficult to master. [b]48)[/b] I can play, I can be competent, if I'm skillful I'm going to win more than I lose, the longer I play the more nuance and the more shades of gameplay I'll see and the more abillities I'll unlock and the more movement modes I'm going to be able to understand, something like I'm going to blink instead of double jump because it's harder to use but it's more effective against someone in a offensive situation instead of in general, all that stuff is cool and fun to play with. [b]49)[/b] Skill is still very important, and it's not just thumb skill, it's understanding how you're outfitting yourself, what weapons you're taking what choices you're making in your build, and understanding how to use all that, like how you get around the map depends on what vertical movement mode you've chosen and there are moultiple ways into each of these more powerful positions that you want to hold on the map, there's one gametype where it makes map control really obvious, you can look left and right and if there's a door to my right a staircase to my left, and straight ahead there's this hole blown in the wall, I know there's three ways people can come in, the game is still predictable but the game has more depth, is the guy going to come up the stairs or through the door or is he going to glide through the wall, what's he going to do when he gets here? Should I plant my proximity grenade on the ground so he lands directly on it, do I want to hide in the corner and sprint and melee him in the face, (while dodging his arc blade), it's really cool how there's a surprising amount of depth to each encounter and again it takes a lot of skill, the guys who play for a while can outstrip people who haven't. [b]50)[/b] That's not to say that they're winning because they have better characters, it's just about understanding the map and the mechanics better, knowledge matters. DeeJ has found with games like Halo that he's somewhat streaky and inconsistant, he's not sure why, but he finds that he's more consistant at Destiny because he has reasons to live and he's not just thinking about "I need to run fast through the map and put shots on a guy", he's thinking about "Well if I do that I'm probably giong to die and feeding them supers" so I have to be smart about how I approach this situation and play to my preffered playstyle and skirt the edges a little bit, lure people into traps, be chaotic, and that's all because of the systems that encourage him to come up with a plan and stick to it because he wants to stay alive because that's how he'll get these supers and if he dies all that's going to do is accelerate the loss. You've got to look at map position and builds and stuff like "I have a hand cannon, now I need to work from the edges, now I have an auto, now I've got to close the gap or flank them". [b]51)[/b] What Lars is talking about goes deeper than thumb skills, but when you start talking about jumping through a window and deciding what abillity to use you get into a discussion about tactics, what would you say to a player who likes games that blend skills and tactics? Lars thinks that Destiny has a lot going for it in that realm, and going back to the builds it's your outfitted character minus your weapons and whatever armor you have set up so you have a bunch of abillities you're choosing and when you choose those abillities you migh tnot be thinking about what tactics you're going to employ those abillities in, but when you decide to take something like the Arc Prox (which is currently his favorite weapon in the game) it's a proximity mine that attaches to any surface and perpendicularly juts out electrical damage in a line four seperate times, it's really fun to use a trap, you don't expect to get kills but you can use it to zone your opponents so you can either force them to go a different way or take advantage of the hesitation to flank. It feels really good. [b]52)[/b] Urk shares an anecdote about when he was playing as a Warlock and the Axion Bolt came on and people were like "HOW MANY NOVA BOMBS DOES URK HAVE?" and they're like "They're just Axion Bolts they're different!", and that's where map design comes in. One of the hardest things they encountered early on was how do you make map movement predictable with all these forms of vertical movement modes? Once you understand the maps and you understand the movement modes things are predictable and you can force people to do things and they can force you to do other things and it goes back to the skill conversation they had earlier. There's a lot more to it than anyone is expecting, and that's a ton of fun. It's just as much fun to land a super as it is to make someone else miss theirs, and it feels really good. [b]53)[/b] Lars shares an anecdote about how he was just playing as a Titan that had an abillity where he sprints and does a shoulder rush and kill dudes but they see you coming a mile away and they can counter you if they see you doi it but he's shoulder charging towards Josh Hamrick and he doesn't see him, he snaps on Golden Gun, he turns, sees him, at the last second he connects right in the face and Josh screamed like a girl as Lars is like "YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAH" and things like that happen all the time and things come out of nowhere and surprises abound, people are in super mode and you can still shut them down. [b]54)[/b] There's all these hero moments that make for great narrative pieces where where you or someone on your team do these combine tactics where two people defend a space and someone comes in, you pepper them out, you throw an axion bolt and when people get driven out of the back corner you use Fists of Havoc and it's so perfect and feels so good and exciting. [b]55)[/b] Many anecdotes about different combos happening are shared by several people, these layering events that build off each other. It's an experience not limited to the competitive mode, they've been playing cooperative and they're slaughering Fallen and clearing them out and they're like "Wait, we're supposed to be doing a misssion right?" [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361453&path=1]Link to next post[/url]

[b]30)[/b] Tyson doesn't mention the game franchise, but he played a lot of it recently and he also played the prequel and there's a difference between those games where in the first one they had a fairly punchy progression and you could have a functional character in a night's worth of play or a weekend of binging with your friends, you could try a lot of things in a short period of time, and when the sequel came out he and his friends all went out to get it only to discover that it took 50 to 60 hours to level up a character and it was a completely different experience just because of the time scale of the game from a something you felt you could do in a weekend to something you had to do in a week or two or three. On the other end of the spectrum you look at MOBAs like DOTA and League of Legends where you say "this is remarkable because you take an investment game and you compress it down to about 30 minutes", every single game of DOTA is an investment game where you say I want to roll a new character and I'll get him these items and he'll do this thing and that was great or oh that sucks I'm going to do him differently next time, and that's an intersting style of investment game there and people wouldn't neccessarily look at that and say "DOTA is an investment game" but it totally is. [b]31)[/b] How do you balance those two extremes between the short punchy cyclical rewarding investment game with the long term goals that is more in line with the Road to Recon or Mythic Tyrant stuff how do they collide? Tyson doesn't think they collide at all, they're just two different wavelengths in the same game, you can have a tight investment game where you find a new weapon and it's interesting and you ask "how can I upgrade this?" and you keep using it and you decide to go all the way with it and and that might only take an hour or two of play with a bunch of PvP matches, or you might have a long session where you're saving up for a new ground vehicle with freaking cool blue contrails, but the point is that you can have short cycles and long cycles and you want to introduce cycles of play, cycles of activity and their most famous design axiom at Bungie that gets the most press is 30 seconds at fun, and they think it's famous because it's true, it's a really useful design axiom, but that's not the only cycle, you have cycle of seconds where you get good feedback from firing a single bullet from your gun, to long cycles where you say "What am I doing this week? I'm going to get together with my friends for thursday night firefight and this weekend we're doing those challenges" you want to cover both ends. What the investment game brings to the table is "What if you had some even longer cycles?" The kind of cycles that make it worthwhile to form a clan and to have friends that your'e playing with in a commuinty and those sorts of things aren't in conflict at all, they're synergistic. [b]32)[/b] That's the intrinsic motivation again, when the community gets together and they do things to enhance each other's experiences that really don't have anything to do with what the developer intended but they take their own queue and they make their own action and what Tyson is doing doesn't get in the way of that, and if people want to speed run the game and if people want to go off and find ways to enjoy the universe they can, but you for the less inventive players lay out some bread crumbs between them and their future greatness. [b]33)[/b] Tyson notes that they might not neccessarily be less inventive players but they simply don't know that they hunger for these sorts of things until they taste it for the first time where they're going into an intresting space where Destiny is a shooter Destiny is an action game a lot of people out there are really familliar with and they love and they spend time playing it and they try to bring some additional elements to that where they're saying this is a game that is more fun playing with friends. You look at Halo 2 and it took Halo 1 and said "What if you could have that experience that you had during a lan party with friends and have that experience any time you wanted with a virtual sofa of friends?" The friends list came from Halo 2, they've always liked these games that you could play with your friends in a social fashion, and the best outcome is if the game introduces you to that even if you didn't know that you liked that and you find out you love it and all of a sudden your play experience has been enormously broadened. And there's a lot of people who know that they don't like certain things and such but that's pretty common and the game is great for those people to because there's a lot of content, but they think they're saying "Yeah, we want you to play this game with friends and if you don't have friends to play with then we got you covered we'll find you some we've got a ton of couches." [b]34)[/b] DeeJ knew that he liked social experiences going into Halo 2, but it made him love it to the point where he went "What am I doing? I'm starting a blog I'm starting a website I'm building teams to play this game, when my team gets full I'm building other teams to play this game" to the point where that's the reason he's working for Bungie. The systems Tyson's team has designed changes the way that gamers play games is the reason why you DeeJ is talking to Tyson in front of the internet. Hugs are shared. [b]35)[/b] Tyson started back in the Myth days where Bungie built this little community of a couple hundred people playing the game at any given time playing this obscure RTS game and the experience of playing that game and being part of that community is what eventually brought him in direct contact with people from Bungie and then he did an internship for a couple of months.. it's a process that brought many people to Bungie. [b]36)[/b] They joke about how many freaking exclusives Tyson revealed in this segment and how they'll have to go back and bleep that out, thankfully it sounds like most of it made it through the censor. Tyson's segment is coming to a close, DeeJ mentions that Bungie makes games that they like to play, and it's interesting to hear Tyson talk about the games that he likes to play and that Destiny is one of them. [quote][b]Part 2) Lars Bakken 38:36[/b][/quote] [b]37)[/b] Lars Bakken is the lead designer in charge of competitive multiplayer activities. Any time you go in and fight against other human beings he is in charge of that experience. Jokes are made about how he wasn't quite ready to talk about his job title quite yet but it would happen soon... [b]38)[/b] They encourage him to say whatever the hell he wants and not hold back because they'll just censor what they cant let through with bloops and such. Some jokes are made about what the noise should be. [b]39)[/b] They went at a really high level with regards to the Game Informer interview, they don't want to paint themselves into a corner but they're anxious to talk about the real stuff because there's a lot of cool things they're doing in Destiny. Game Informer really enjoyed the game, the first day and a half they were holding their cards close to their chest but at the end they somewhat lost it. [b]40)[/b] It's weird to be in a place where you can talk about concrete things after all of this time, not everything can be said but there's definitely a change in mode where they say "Well actually now we're going to let people play the thing... oh shit, hope they say good things" [b]41)[/b] What are you excited to see with the Winter Build? Lars wants to see how the story missions are coming together, they've made a lot of progress recently and some of the experiences are so freaking good with Marty's Music. Having those experiences coming together, the encounters are whipped into shape, the audio is coming in, the missions make sense, the fiction pieces flowing, it's really cool. Lars plays his stuff all the time so he knows what he's getting into with regards to the winter build. His voice is hoarse because he spent the past hour screaming during a multiplayer session from the sheer awesome, it's a good sign that things are coming together and he thinks the game is at a good point. [b]42)[/b] If the podcast gets delayed till January (it was), suck it, he was playing Destiny. [b]43)[/b] There's some amusing anecdotes about prepping the Bungie team before the Game Informer guys came and Urk is like "You've been playing for a while, please don't throw down and make it really obvious that you're not playing, but just be aware that they're getting their berrings for the first few minutes, and whoever gets first we're going to fire you." and then Luke Smith who was busy comes in last minute and they have this ongoing thing that goes all the way back to Halo 3 and he didn't get the message and the first five minutes he's taunting Urk and Urk is like -_-. Urk apparently took first place that match and they tap him on the shoulder and much amusement was had. [b]44)[/b] More amusing anecdotes are had about returning to old games like Halo 3 and they discover that "Oh shit there's people who have been here this entire time, they never left..." [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361451&path=1]Link to next post.[/url]

Thanks for breaking this down. I went through the entire thing myself beforehand, but I knew you'd be spreading the word once I got back into the forums. You are already a legend on these forums, regardless of how we become known in the game.

Lovely! Thanks Hylebos! I'm most excited about all these different skillsets, builds, and loadouts--the Focii. Mostly because it kind of reminds me of Pokemon... Just an FPS where skill and strategy both matter. I cannot wait to get my hands on the MM!

Thanks for this. It's nice to read this while listening to the podcast, just so I don't miss a single detail!

This was my favourite podcast out of all of them. Little tidbits of info to satisfy my Destiny cravings was nice to get indeed! Thanks for the write up, really appreciate the time it took! :)

#56 was where my mind really started to race. The way they were talking, it really sounds like it doesn't come down to just how good you are in moment-to-moment combat situations. You also have to think about how other people are playing and how best to counter them in terms of not only engagements but also in terms of how you build your abilities. Kind of like how in a MOBA, you can be really good at knowing when to engage, when to fall back, when to set up your teammates, but if your enemies are building magic resist and you build ability power, you're not going to do well. It's much more critical thinking. Nice work on the post by the way, can't imagine how long this took you.

So the teleportation movement is called "blink" ? That's sounds awesome! Amazing post BTW! :)

TL/TR

I will read through this at some point today, but I have to comment that I agree with you. This is a MUST READ/LISTEN. Even compared to the Game Informer bomb, this is the best group of information I've ever listened to about Destiny. There's nothing quite like listening to Bungie employees talk about them playing and loving their game.

I'm going to invest so hard in Destiny I'm going to find some unique ways to play this beast and then I'm going to write up some achievements and then share them and then declare myself king and duel anyone who challenges me. Come at me Bro I'm a Gunslinger/Titan hybrid. It's no secret that TF2 hats are a big business. I hope they talk about this on #42. Great shownotes as usual Hylebos. Super caring.

So grateful for this summary. Listened to the podcast but this will make it easier to review the facts. And there were so many new facts here. They only had to bleep out a few seconds too. Thanks for always taking the time to type these up - immediately no-less.

Nice write up Hylebos. I'll be sure to refer to this when I make my video on this. Cheers.

Dang, thanks man!

As someone who usually doesn't process the time required to actively sit and listen to the Podcast, I definitely wanted to send out my thanks to you. It was a great read!