Gah, I'm tethered to my phone at the moment, but I can't wait to see this when I get home!

Yeah my work blocks it since it's related to video games :-p

However, they have an entire solar system to fill with content, it is going to feel awfully sparse for the first few years. I hope we don't end up like Mass Effect 1 where every planet off the main mission line had the same five crates stuck together to form the scenery.

Heh, felt like the whole trilogy had about five different crate types stacked across the galaxy. I always loved walking into a room devoid of life but full of crates:

"There's no WAY there's going to be an ambush in here is there????" says Levi Shepherd.

Such a stupid, stupid sounding name.

I find the biggest thing of note is that they purposefully did not go the Borderlands 2 route and dynamically generate content.

This is a plus, in that you don't have to grind for weapons until they drop with the specific barrel or elemental damage type like in BL2; Bungie should have more hand crafted items that make a bit more sense when compared to others.

However, they have an entire solar system to fill with content, it is going to feel awfully sparse for the first few years. I hope we don't end up like Mass Effect 1 where every planet off the main mission line had the same five crates stuck together to form the scenery.

I've been pondering this for a while with regards to Grognok, and really I think Mashup is a continuation of what they're doing with Grognok from a philosophical perspective. All of their tools seem to be designed to allow people to build worlds, gear, weapons, etc. at a very high rate of speed, which leads me to believe they are very conscious of the fact that their large game-world is going to need a metric fuckton of content to fill it up and make every part feel unique, to make every piece of gear feel rare and valuable.

If you recall, the contract with Activision calls for a title release followed by an expansion the following year, repeated 4 times. To generate a large amount of content that quickly, tools like mashup and Grognok will be invaluable.

The biggest challenge with using these bits to build gear is to make sure very piece looks unique because players will pick up very quickly if pieces of gear look too similar or share too many of the same bits. I'm sure Bungie is very aware of this, but it must be an interesting challenge for them nonetheless, both in terms of gear and worldspace.