My discussions with various members of the dev team showed that they feel that trying to explain too much about too many facets of Destiny at once might dilute any individual message - so the reveals are going to be structured this way for a while.

That's interesting, because to me to most powerful, undiluted message you can send is one of "This is X type of game, and here's how it works" kind.

I think we've established pretty firmly that your idea of 'best' and Bungie's idea of 'best' do not line up all the time. :)

My discussions with various members of the dev team showed that they feel that trying to explain too much about too many facets of Destiny at once might dilute any individual message - so the reveals are going to be structured this way for a while.

That's interesting, because to me to most powerful, undiluted message you can send is one of "This is X type of game, and here's how it works" kind.

Never thought of them as firsts.

Guess I need to improve my gaming history.

Many are not firsts, but many are significant in their advancement of their genres.

Guess I need to improve my gaming history.

Care to elaborate?

Why was Citizen Kane important? It was technologically innovative, with its amazing blocking, matte photography, deep focus photography and lighting, expanding what the medium could do (also it was good).

Which games offer huge advances in technical technique that can be used to expand what types of games you play, while also being very good?

My discussions with various members of the dev team showed that they feel that trying to explain too much about too many facets of Destiny at once might dilute any individual message - so the reveals are going to be structured this way for a while.

You might hate that - but don't take it as "they're afraid of the comparisons that will be made", it's just that the social aspects of the game were NOT the focus of the E3 reveal.

Well what's interesting is they only sort of will all inhabit the same world. Someone could literally be exploring the exact spot of the world that you are and you wouldn't see them. I think this is one of the reasons they are differentiating. It's shared in a very limited way, only with who you want to when you are playing in private spaces, and matchmade people when you are in a public space. In an MMO there is never any matchmaking in the overall world, and usually there is only matchmaking for PvP.

That used to be true, but since the Cataclysm expansion, Blizzard has implemented a whole bunch of new ways to ‘phase’ content, either to funnel a user down a single player experience in an area, or to share that area amongst many players (for example, bringing in players from other servers to keep a zone from being too sparsely-populated).

I've not seen any clear, unequivocal statements from Bungie on how they plan to delineate public from private playspace (saying you've entered a public event leads to some conclusions, but they have previously also mentioned ‘incidental multiplayer’ too). One thing they've not talked about yet is whether the game world will be ‘sharded’; will all players conceivably be able to match with all other players? If you create a character in Destiny on PS4 will you be able to play as that same character in Destiny for Xbox 360 (even if cross-platform matchmaking won't exist, this sort of thing is still of value)?

Oh look! More questions :-)

I guess Contra and SMB just have a pure form about them. They are perfect games, distilled to the player mastering the mechanics.

[W]hat makes a game massively multiplayer to me is (as I wrote elsewhere) the shared persistent world inhabited by thousands of other players. It sounds as though Destiny will have that, but... Hey, this is exactly why I posted this! We need answers!

Well what's interesting is they only sort of will all inhabit the same world. Someone could literally be exploring the exact spot of the world that you are and you wouldn't see them. I think this is one of the reasons they are differentiating. It's shared in a very limited way, only with who you want to when you are playing in private spaces, and matchmade people when you are in a public space. In an MMO there is never any matchmaking in the overall world, and usually there is only matchmaking for PvP.

It is a somewhat fine line, but I think there is definitely a line there.

I wouldn't consider the raids the "massively multiplayer" part of.

Heck, Battlefield can handle 64 simultaneous players and isn't considered "massively multiplayer", why would 10 be?

Neither would I, really; I only mention it as you brought up the context for interacting with a number of players at a time, so comparing it to a raid seemed natural. No, what makes a game massively multiplayer to me is (as I wrote elsewhere) the shared persistent world inhabited by thousands of other players. It sounds as though Destiny will have that, but... Hey, this is exactly why I posted this! We need answers!

Heck, Battlefield can handle 64 simultaneous players and isn't considered "massively multiplayer", why would 10 be?

I'd say that if Bungie isn't being more descriptive about their game by the spring, then you can worry. For now, just chill for a bit and come back to Destiny closer to release…

Physician heal thyself!

I'm asking why they'd be the "Citizen Kane of Video Games"

I think their relative unease with the word 'MMO' is simply because the amount of players you will be able to interact with at any given time will be way too few to be called 'massive multiplayer' and get away with it.

Their demo had 7 simultaneously involved players, and they gave no indication this was an upper limit. In WoW you can raid with as few as 10, so I'd say they're not very far (if at all) apart in that regard.

It could be that they don't want to scare people away by using "MMO," but it could be (and I believe it is the case) that they see MMO as an inaccurate descriptor. That's a pretty good reason not to use it, too.

I guess this depends heavily on how much you believe the term MMO has been subverted to mean ‘gameplay like World of Warcraft‘; it was probably inevitable after half a decade of companies throwing money at trying to defeat the 800lb gorilla in the room that people could get tunnel vision. But to me MMO is still a term grounded in scale; it has thousands of simultaneous players, of whom you could bump into dozens at a time, the world it takes place in is shared between you all, and the persistence of that world is orchestrated through online play.

These things sound very much like Destiny to me.

What if some of those details are still in flux, though? Perhaps they're simply _not ready_ to flesh out the scope of how those aspects will work because they're still trying to fine-tune them or figure out how achievable they are with the various levels of hardware and infrastructure that they're working with.

I have to imagine a lot of it still is in flux, but they did just show a demo of actual gameplay. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to explain (for example) how damage works if you're able to upgrade your weaponry. What made the Halo games challenging was being able to defeat tricky encounters with the tools at hand. If the tools themselves can be upgraded then it suggests one day a load of the content will be trivialised. Maybe that's necessary if you have a moving conveyor belt of content with progressively harder enemies, but I'd still like to know that skill is going to count. Well, I'm sure it will, but I'd like to know how.

SMB = Super Mario Brothers

Contra was amazing. Once, I had a no death run.