Game Preview Details Developer: Bungie

Publisher: Activision

Platform: Xbox 360, PS3 (confirmed)

Release Date: Some time after 2013

Price: No subscription fee.

Links: Bungie | Activision Bungie: Activision: Xbox 360, PS3 (confirmed)Some time after 2013: No subscription fee.

The most revealing moment at Acti-Bungie's (Bungivision's?) press event this week didn't come from a teaser video of the long-rumored game Destiny, nor from any of the carefully crafted speeches about the ambitious "ten-year project." It came from an impromptu discussion with an Activision Publishing general manager and executive vice president David Oxford.

Fit and well tanned with a mane of thick, jet-white hair, Oxford was in Bungie's Bellevue, WA offices for one of his once-every-few-weeks visits to check the studio's milestone status. He introduced himself during a lunch break and asked a small group of gathered press our thoughts on the day's Destiny presentations. “I don't get to talk to the press all that often,” he said with a smile, and his charisma was a good fit for the room. He even rapped about what he likes in an FPS, confiding that Battlefield 2 was an old favorite (blasphemy!).

I answered frankly: The little I'd seen seemed promising, but it's hard to get excited about a game that's still pure hype and concept. I was reserving judgment for a game I could play, or at least visualize playing.

Oxford nodded and empathized with my reluctance, before reiterating the silly company stance; that this event was meant to “drive excitement” about Destiny—whose now-official promises of first-person shooting and always-online play matched months of rumors.

Then, unprompted, he offered a thought about the industry from his high-up perch. "You know, where we are at the end of the current-gen lifecycle, today's seven is yesterday's eight."

It's the kind of Metacritic-obsessed comment from an Activision executive—one who's hooked his talons into the beloved Bungie, no less—that could set message boards aflame. But maybe it shouldn't. The money behind Call of Duty and the heart behind Halo couldn't join forces without aiming their rifle scopes toward the review score stars. "Merely great" won't meet the lofty expectations attached to such an alliance.

The game's admittedly thin reveal made the alliance's motives perfectly clear: to crack the review score matrix wide open. And they're not scared to set those expectations shamelessly high.

World of Halocraft

Get ready for the branding: "This is the world's first 'shared world shooter,'" says Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg. That means Destiny will combine first-person combat with an "open world sandbox" and a "persistent world experience."

More to the point, don't be shocked to see the phrase "World of Halocraft" pop up repeatedly in press descriptions of Destiny, at least based on the little info Bungie and Activision revealed this week. That description comes naturally with the early concepts we were shown for the game: customizable robo-soldiers that slightly resemble everybody's favorite Spartan; concept art of guns, rifles and shotguns seemingly ripped from a Halo spin-off; class and power-up choices that involve, at the very least, some sort of magic; solo and co-op content in which people drop into and out of story-driven campaign missions and optional, co-op only content; travel between different planets on mounts—er, spaceships—that grow bigger and cooler as you progress in the game; and plenty of loot.

The World of Warcraft comparison comes with one exception, at least: within the first minute of the event, Hirshberg "ripped the Band-Aid off" by insisting Activision "had no plans to charge a subscription fee for Destiny."

Yet he waited a few hours to confirm another contentious plan: Destiny will require an internet connection at all times, even if you don't plan to partner with anyone else. "That's the only way to realize the vision of the game, a shared-world shooter," he said. "That's the differentiation."

Bungie tried to put sugar in that syrup by having story lead Joseph Staten recount a colorful and enticing story of a Destiny play session: "My friend Jason is a Titan, and he's walking like he's got a line of asses to kick and is running way behind schedule. I am a Warlock. When I release one of my abilities, it's like hitting someone in the face with a piece of the sun."

But boiled to its basics, the story sounded like a pretty typical MMO experience. The party of two met in a city plaza, then traveled by spaceship to Mars to enter a heavily guarded compound. When combat began, another real-life player appeared—a Hunter, the third class announced thus far—on a motorcycle that looked like a cyber-hornet. She joined the battle and they tore through an instance, finding tasty loot at the end that played to their particular character strengths.

Of course, we only got to hear about this loot run second-hand, rather than actually see it happen. Not Staten nor anybody else came to the presentation with more than a few seconds of actual gameplay to show off, meaning most of the big promises—such as "every time you run into another player, it's amazing"—lacked some weight.

Instead, static concept art picked up the slack, often presented in pseudo-3D as an almost-gameplay illusion. If nothing else, Destiny will launch with quite the collectors' edition concept art book. Hero designs, while Spartan-esque, appear to enable enough customization to build the robo-soldier of your dreams, while the few enemy designs revealed thus far alternated between beefy, Warhammer 40K soldiers and Mad Max-inspired road warriors.

Even the most pedestrian, dystopian-future landscapes reached for enormity and variety, all while maintaining a consistent aesthetic. The only-two-colors rule for each scene proved lovely, because it allowed bold colors while avoiding the over-saturated look of Halo's purple outposts.

Where's the gameplay?

While most gameplay details are still clandestine, the engine tech behind that gameplay got the open-book treatment. Bungie engineers and designers rambled on about the engine's "polygon soup" system that lets artists, designers, engineers and testers bolt level design elements together. That inside-baseball stuff seemed less about impressing fans and more about addressing off-the-record complaints I've heard about Bungie's staff hierarchy; with this engine, artists and engineers can truly collaborate together, they insisted.

More relevant to the average player is how much Bungie revealed about Destiny's matchmaking—namely, that it's always happening behind players' backs. Senior engineering lead Chris Butcher compared it to a cell phone connecting to different towers as its user drives through a city, meaning that Destiny will never pause the action to load a matchmaking menu. Bungie confirmed that the game will make use of hub zones—trading posts, etc.—that will have a limited number of players.

When pressed, Bungie president Harold Ryan confirmed that Bungie will use a combination of a master server and client-run instances, but said he wasn't ready to further elaborate. I'd expect that the game will avoid the MMO distinction by putting the server burden on clients, like in Halo and CoD matchmaking. Players might not actively choose a home server, like in most MMOs, but the game's master servers will instead invisibly connect players who have reached the same in-game locations.

Other news from the event: player-versus-player content will be revealed in the near future, and it will also connect players in an "invisible," seamless way. The game's expansive story content has been likened to a series of connected novels, and Bungie used an image of ten hardcover books to drive that point home—though the studio didn't explain how that content will reach players over time (expansion packs? sequels? a $9,000 season pass?).

Destiny will also have its own iOS app, which so far looks like a glorified bungie.net interface, complete with stats, character creation menus and alerts for new missions. Bungie CEO Pete Parsons insists that the app will "not play it safe," enabling "meaningful events that can only happen on mobile," but he did not elaborate on what those might be.

Really, the event was short on elaboration altogether. What monetization can players expect from this no-subscription, always-online game? How will the game's three announced classes differ, and what other classes can we expect? What shape will Destiny's teased "sandbox" elements take, particularly from a studio famous for Halo's "Forge" options? What other RPG elements, if any, can we expect? Wait, spaceships? How will those work? All to come, Bungivision says (They even went so far as to joke that they're waiting on a room full of journalists to tell them about the next generation of consoles, as if they aren't sitting on a pile of secret dev kits).

Of all the collaboration's boasts, though, the one that may see the most scrutiny is a promise that the game will scale for all player types (so long as they're fluent in first-person games, anyway). Destiny will be the ultimate shooter for all player types, they insist, bridging the gap between novices and diehards, between Call of Duty and Halo fanboys, between Israelis and Palestinians. Well, they didn't say the last one, but considering the event's level of hype, they may as well have.

At least the designers took a moment to publicly tap their brakes, by insisting that a "shared world shooter" isn't an entirely new concept—or, at least, not the kind that will lead to over-promising and under-delivering. "The team is focused on a couple of key innovations," Hirshberg says. "First-person shooting is not a new mechanic, and it's one [Bungie is] incredibly versed in. The ways in which [Destiny] is new are focused. They're extremely meaningful and extremely difficult innovations."

The closest the day got to a legitimate gameplay reveal came from a blurry-cam capture of a playtest. Two players' faces were shown side-by-side, and we watched the moment they realized they'd run into each other in the game. They smiled wide, even laughed, and looked around the playtest room to find each other. That's the gameplay moment Bungie wanted the room to remember, more than any concept art, engine demo or class distinction. But the room's shared sentiment was clear: We're ready to see exactly what those playtesters saw. Instead, we're destined to wait a little longer.