[url=http://downloads.bungie.net/podcasts/bungie_podcast_01162014.mp3]You need to freaking listen to this Podcast[/url], but if you can't I've got you covered. I spent about four hours typing up a very rough account of everything that was said over the hour long podcast. Please let me know if I get any of the details wrong, my sanity got a little strained near the end of the summary, and I'll probably go back through it slowly and edit it for readabillity. The summary is split into five posts that are loosely daisy-chained with hyperlinks, but if you lose your place, all the bullet points are numbered for your reading and discussion convenience. There's a ton of new delicious info, and a lot of exciting things to discuss, so let's begin. [quote][b]Introduction[/b][/quote] [b]1)[/b] DeeJ, Urk, and Halcylon are back for the first Podcast of the new year. [b]2)[/b] They recorded this just after the Game Informer Article came out, before the beginning of the new year. [b]3)[/b] The guests for this podcast are Tyson Green and Lars Bakken. This is going to be gory and delicious. [b]4)[/b] This was also recorded right before the Winter Build that they held right before they all left for break, where they stand up the current version of Destiny and they all play together for a day to see what is good and what sucks as they push towards the public beta. [b]5)[/b] Tyson specifically is very excited to talk about what he's working on because there's been a lot of question as to "What does it mean to have an investment game?", "How will that get incorporated into the gameplay we know from Bungie?" [b]6)[/b] We're going to hear about the nuts and bolts, the details, their goals, oh god I'm so excited to hear the rest of this podcast. [b]7)[/b] There's a nice bit of parrying between the two guests because Tyson wants to create this grand investment system that defines a player and Lars has to then take that and balance it for a multiplayer universe, and how they communicate that and fight back and forth over what is what. [b]8)[/b] They have a mindset where they try to anticipate what people want and feel over months and months to try to keep the experience organic and evolving and engage players. [b]9)[/b] For Tyson he's constantly making new characters and going through the system, how does he keep in the mindset of "I'm a new player!" when he's done it so much? [b]10)[/b] There is a bit of teasing about reading off the Destiny Script that is sitting a few feet from them in the Foley Sound Lab. Tyson is about to enter. [quote][b]Part 1) Tyson Green, 8:00[/b][/quote] [b]11)[/b] Tyson Green is the lead investment designer at Bungie, he tries to make people care about the game. [b]12)[/b] Once people get Destiny, how will they recognize the investment team's finishing touches? The stuff that they do is woven throughout the game, you want to care about the game because it's fun, you want to care about the game because it's got a good story, but the investment team wants you to care about the game because it gives you things to do, things to want, it gives you things to have a social group work together around, basically they try to pull all the parts together and make you want to stick with this game. [b]13)[/b] One of the things that has struck DeeJ as he's watched people look at investments is that people just assumed that they're tacking experience points on top of the experience, but Tyson cares about the moment to moment gameplay and what happens when people collide together, how do you make those experiences better, how do you reward people for doing the things you think they're going to want to do... [b]14)[/b] There's a really shallow understanding of investment, most people think of experience points and grinds, but what the investment game does is it tries to broaden the spectrum of ways for you to care about the game, the goal isn't to make you play the game for a thousand hours, the goal is to make a game that you want to come back to and your friends come back to and you all feel like you want to keep playing this game; you have a social game at that point, a communal experience as opposed to the "Done in One" experience you pay $60 for a single play through and then you never touch it again. There's lots of layers here , in some of Bungie's past games there was investment systems that were based on skill, skill is a form of investment, if you spend time to become amazingly good at team slayer on lockout that's totally valid and real, if you spend a ton of time to learn every detail of the lore of the Marathon series that's also a form of investment, it's just as valid to an investment designer as having a couple of items and characters that are leveled up to the max. When you talk about investment, there's surface level investment, which is experience points and item drops, but then there are deeper layers of investment like caring about lore or caring about an experience you shared with other people. [b]15)[/b] DeeJ says that when they're introducing people to this game who might not know it as well as the people on Bungie.net, they paint it in very broad strokes, the more you play the more dangerous you become the more rewards you earn the more you change the way you look and fight, are those the sorts of things you're creating with your systems? [b]16)[/b] Yeah absolutely, if you are a person who has really deeply played this game who has done the hard challenges or covering the breadth of the game, you should look different and stand out from other people, your new friends should say "Wow, that's really cool, I want one of those, how do you get one of those?" and instead of you just saying "oh just beat the campaign" you say "oh man me and three other guys got together and we really worked on this one thing for a while and we got good at it and then this led to that and it all came together and that's how I got it. It was totally cool, do you want to work on that?" [b]17)[/b] DeeJ says they talk about how the weapons tell stories and how many people take that to mean that there's fiction behind them and there is, but what they really mean is when you have that epic gun like the Fate of All Fools and when people go "Oh how did you get that?" you can tell them how to get it or you can help them get it and form a party and you create a story out of that moment for a player and those are super powerful and we see players do that intrinsically, guys like Mythic Tyrant for Halo would go out there and beat the game on the hardest mode and difficulty and what he would have to show for it was people knew his name, they saw his videos, if they wanted to beat the game in that same mode he could take them out and do that, part of Bungie's job with Destiny is to make sure that people know who he is IN the game, he doesn't neccessarily have to create a youtube channel, he can if he wants to, but in the game it will actually show that in his gear or some other stuff that they aren't ready to talk about or when you look at his profile on Bungie.net, those stories are really cool and potent. [b]18)[/b] Tyson says the Mythic players are a really good example of: Hey once you have a game people care about for whatever reason, that gives you as a Mythic player an audience to play to, and another example with another game is you've got all these players who play Dark Souls a lot and you've got this tiny slice of those players who play through Dark Souls on level 1 characters to beat it, why are they doing that? Because there's an audience of players who think that is awesome! They are always impressed when you can do that and you do it for them, when you have a game that people don't care about because it came and went, well, you don't get that kind of community it doesn't really build up around those games, investment isn't about experience points and item drops, it's about having an enduring attachment to a game and community so that community can exist and thrive. [b]19)[/b] How do you take this sort of old world order of a skill based first person shooter, 30 seconds of fun, I'm a player I'm powerful I have all these awesome weapons against enemies, be they AI or Human, and then fuse it with an investment game, does that require a whole lot of new thinking, does that require you to work a lot with a bunch of the activities guy sand the world designers to see wholistically how that should work or do you layer it in like icing on a cake? [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361420&path=1]Link to next post[/url].