[b]Full interview:[/b] http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3434451
[b]Video interview: [/b]http://www.ausgamers.com/videos/watch/75129/ausgamers-destiny-developer-interview-video-with-david-dague
[quote]AusGamers: Let’s talk player numbers for a minute. A Fireteam has three members of any class, it can be the same class or all different classes -- all that stuff is great. Multiple Fireteams can meet up in a public space and take on a public event, as far as my knowledge goes. Can you talk to me about how many players, at any given time… is it capped at the moment? And also, I know the answer that is going to come from this, but I’m going to ask it anyway: have you guys worked on a persistent number of players in a given server at any one time?
DeeJ: Ok, there’s a lot of questions there. The first thing we’ll jump on is your Fireteam. The Fireteam is the essential combat unit in Destiny. In a strike, it is three guardians -- you and two of your friends, or just you and two people that we will match-make you with -- that is for a very specific cooperative activity. You can, if you want to, go into Destiny as a lone wolf. You can be the strong, silent type -- you can explore the frontier all by yourself. There are certain activities, like the Strike we played, where we will match you up, or let you select your teammates.
Those Fireteams will scale for certain other activities and become larger combat units, but it will always start with three, and then scale up from there. In terms of a public event, there’s no technical limitation as if to say ‘we can only have fifty players in a public event’, but what we are going for, is creating an experience where there are enough Guardians in that space where the event feels exciting, but not so many guardians that you don’t feel as though you’re making a vital contribution to that event.
I think a good example of this is the way that we concluded our E3 demo, with the capital ship that spawns in and overflies the space, and three Fireteams converge, and you’ve got seven players duking it out against a fallen tank, and they’re working together to bring that thing down. You’re aware of every single guardian in the mix, and every single one of them is contributing vital gunfire or guardian abilities, and at the end of it, they’re all doing the victory dance around the destroyed vehicle.
So there was no tourist, there was no wallflower on the outskirts going ‘what am I supposed to do? They’re the ones taking care of everything.’, they really do have to team up together to overcome those incredible odds. And I know there was one more question at the end of that, but I forgot. [/quote]
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Good stuff.