Just over a decade ago, a little-known studio called Bungie released a sci-fi shooter and, in doing so, changed the face of gaming forever. The weeks following Halo: Combat Evolved’s release in 2001 saw Bungie go from a niche outfit known for Myth and Marathon into a creative colossus within Microsoft’s development community, ready to take on all who wished to surpass them. The future looked incredibly bright.

And so it was. Bungie’s brilliant game design coupled with Microsoft’s marketing magic helped brand the original Xbox as the console of choice for the serious gamer. The years that followed saw the release of Halo 2, which remains the best-selling first generation Xbox game, and then Halo 3 some years later. The fruits of the partnership were plain to see, from the sales figures to the endless stream of awards that tumbled into Bungie’s lap. The studio was in an incredibly enviable position, widely respected and working on one of the hottest properties not just in gaming, but in entertainment. Which is why 2010’s decision to give it all up and try something new rocked the industry to its core.

Enter Destiny

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Case in point? The weapon system. All characters are outfitted with three weapon slots: the primary slot is where you stick the weapon you’ll be using most frequently, whether it’s an assault rifle or hand cannon. The secondary slot is for speciality weapons that are highly situational, such as a shotgun or fusion rifle; you’ll need to be in close in order to use them, but the devastation they cause is worth the risk. The final slot houses the heavy weapons, which is where you’ll find rocket launchers and heavy machine guns. You won’t be able to use them as often due to ammo restrictions and the like, but when you do, you’ll feel unstoppable.

“ I would suspect the majority of players would play it that way rather than it feeling like they have a second job. We don’t want that.

When it was first introduced to Destiny, though, transitioning between the categories felt clunky, so Bungie looked back at Halo for inspiration. “It felt confusing to move through three weapons on a single button press,” Osborne explains. “But now what we’ve got is like Halo, where you’ll move between the two weapons by pressing the button but holding it will bring out your heavy. It feels like a very deliberate action. Readying that weapon… it feels epic.”

At first glance, the similarities between Destiny and Halo seem to be myriad. From a thematic standpoint, both are science fiction. Digging a little deeper into Destiny, however, reveals a game that’s been softened slightly. Ironically enough, Halo’s impact was once compared to Star Wars’, but I’d argue that it’s Destiny that bears the closer resemblance to George Lucas’ masterpiece, at least from a lore standpoint.

While Halo is unquestionably hard sci-fi, with its spaceships, extra-terrestrial rings and A.I. companions, Destiny goes down the Star Wars route of embracing a more fantastical subgenre. The original concept art for the game focused on knights, a title any Lucas fan will be familiar with, while the awe-inspiring abilities conferred by The Traveler look set to crank Jedi force abilities up to 11. Internally at Bungie, the team has come up with a name for this amalgamation of influences they’ve created: Mythic Science Fiction.

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“Internally we’ve started calling it Mythic Science Fiction; a world that’s rooted in science fiction but with more fantastical elements than we’ve ever had before, at least with Halo,” Osborne explained. “So you can have a guy with a cape and a gun that shoots gunpowder but then he can use the power of the Traveller, which is effectively light, to fire flames at his enemy and disintegrate them.

“ “Internally we’ve started calling it Mythic Science Fiction; a world that’s rooted in science fiction but with more fantastical elements than we’ve ever had before, at least with Halo.

“Really, the artists were trying to push hard away from sci-fi because of the Halo legacy and history. They were just thinking, ‘What can we do that’s radically different after 10 years?’ So there’s actually some concept art that you can find online of a very fantasy-driven world of knights, swords and sorcery in a white city on a hill. That was very much pure fantasy, but the more they continued to work and the more their ideas formed over time, the more they realised that the lure of sci-fi was just something they loved and they were denying themselves that creative space. So they thought, ‘What if we just take these two things and smash them together?’”

And thus was Destiny, the persistent online shooter, born. After a couple of years incubating, Bungie finally offered a look at the game in action in February this year. While the response was overwhelmingly positive, some stalwart fans of the developer were left with a bitter taste in their mouths. It seemed to them that Bungie was making an MMO, and that was not what they were looking for.

It’s an understandable connection to make; the way Destiny’s been described, and several of its features certainly bear the hallmarks of an MMO. Yet Bungie has never embraced that term. Why? Is it down to the stigma that still surrounds the genre? Apparently, no - it’s because the label infers things about gameplay that simply aren’t true.

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“There are things about [MMOs] that I think we don’t want to get into peoples’ heads,” Osborne reveals. “MMO tends to scream subscription game and that’s something we’re not doing. We’re building an action game at its core and I don’t think MMOs are traditionally heavily focused on action. We just want to make sure that we’re saying Destiny’s going to be a great action game, it’s a first person shooter from Bungie, and hopefully that tells people a lot about the experience.

“ When people hear MMO they tend to see the red light of time commitment. Destiny’s very accessible. So if you only have Friday night to play, we want you to be able to be a competent player, jump in with your friends and play when you want.

“But there are certain places where the tag is certainly applicable. We want to bring players together in a shared space while making everyone feel unique? That’s certainly the realm of MMOs, as is that social aspect of getting people to meet one another and play with one another and form bonds and lasting relationships. So there are [MMO] aspects, it’s just that out of the gate we wanted to explain that it’s an action game from Bungie.

“When people hear MMO they tend to see the red light of time commitment. Destiny’s very accessible. So if you only have Friday night to play, we want you to be able to be a competent player, jump in with your friends and play when you want. If you have the time to put into it, there certainly will be things like raids to really push you to achieve things that others may not, but otherwise if you only have one night a week to play competitive multiplayer, running around in the world experiencing the story, then that’s a totally viable option. I would suspect the majority of players would play it that way rather than it feeling like they have a second job. We don’t want that.”

That’s Destiny’s story so far. But when launch comes next year, all the years of work will mean little if the thing fails to actually work. Consequently, a beta is planned for February next year. Bungie has had experience cultivating Halo’s multiplayer servers for years, but Destiny is a more complex prospect. It’s for this reason that Destiny won’t launch straight after beta; it’s a separate event rather than a prelaunch warm-up. While a progress-wipe hasn’t been confirmed, Bungie is prepared to do it if necessary. Having witnessed the strong backlash and allegations of poor preparation during GTA Online’s launch period, the team is determined to avoid falling into a similar situation.

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“From our perspective as a developer, it’s hard to fault GTA Online for caving under something like 10 million players trying to hit servers at the same time,” Osborne explains. “With that said, we have a rich history of supporting big audiences online, hitting high concurrency levels. Even then, we’re not going to rest on our laurels and rely on our past history.

“ From our perspective as a developer, it’s hard to fault GTA Online for caving under something like 10 million players trying to hit servers at the same time.

“We need people to play story, multiplayer and co-op. We need them to go and create characters so we can understand those systems and what they mean for us. We need lots of people to hit the servers at the same time, see how they use guns and play the early stuff, what the competitive multiplayer looks like with many different levels. Working on Destiny every day doesn’t compare with a million gamers crashing against it.

“We’re going to do a beta, kick the tyres, get people in to play in 2014 and make sure we understand what those pushes are going to look like by trying to drive as much peak concurrency as possible before day one so we can understand what to do. We’re not going to rely on guesswork. We’re going to push as many people against it as possible. We’ll forge it in fire and hopefully that’ll make it a better experience day one for everybody.”

No matter how much preparation Bungie does, of course, post-launch there are always going to be issues. A rod that the studio has made for its own back is the sticky question of what happens to the current gen versions of the game as time marches on. While Microsoft and Sony have both said they’ll be supporting the Xbox 360 and PS3 respectively for at least two more years, Destiny has a 10 year plan, likely including ambitious goals that won’t be technically possible on the current consoles. Is anyone who opts to buy the game on them going to find themselves abandoned halfway through the game’s lifespan? Right now, the answer's a little uncertain.

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“As long as there’s a viable audience out there for us to deliver a game to I’m sure we’ll continue to deliver Destiny’s experience to them, but it’s hard for me to forecast what that looks like depending on the skew between playerbases two years out,” Osborne explains.

If you’re hoping to have people with you for the long haul though, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you’ve got big plans for them. So I ask Osborne and Dague one final question: regardless of when players jump ship, whether it’s after the first month, when support for their console of choice is withdrawn, or whether they’re there as the sun sets on the servers following the hypothetical release of Destiny 2, what do you want Destiny to mean to them?

“I think I want them to remember a world that they loved to visit,” Dague answers, smiling. “A world that captured their imagination and told them an amazing story, made richer by the people they play with.”

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor and longtime MMO player. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter