Here’s a little overview of their talk. We’ve added a lot of additional Destiny’s concept art from the portfolios of Joseph Cross, Ryan DeMita and Isaac Hannaford, Jaime Jones, Kekai Kotaki, Darren Bacon, Daniel Chavez, Adrian Majkrzak, Dorje Bellbrook and Jesse van Dijk. Say what you want about Destiny, but these are probably the most impressive pieces of game concept art ever created.

History of Destiny

Bungie was really excited about building a new world that was different from the well known universe of Halo. They wanted to create a world, with which they can tell any great story. A place in which millions of people would want to visit again and again for the next decade plus. This world has to matter and last forever. It should also be flexible enough to accommodate any crazy idea the team would come up with.

They started by looking over their previous Halo games. Each Halo project was filled with energizing content and a story with great twists and turns. However, the whole experience was streamlined and narrow, though the Halo world was bigger. This is not really a problem of Halo alone, but rather a feature all modern first person shooters have in common. Players just charge through all the beautiful stuff the team has created and have no reason to return to those places.

Destiny needed to work differently. The game should encourage further exploration and give new reasons to come back to the virtual world. That’s how the team developed the Four Pillars of Destiny World.

1) Make a Hopeful and Inviting World

One of the first versions of Destiny was actually a fantasy world. This theme appealed to the team because of the history, the myth, and the change that fantasy brought. This brought a lot of opportunities to make some incredible lands with castles, beasts, artifacts, monsters and heroes. All these fantasy images created by talented artists at Bungie invited the player to explore and travel.