[quote][url=http://www.x360magazine.com/features/destiny-bungie-opens-the-floodgates-on-its-shared-world-shooter/]Bungie Opens the Floodgates: Interview with Joseph Staten[/url][/quote] VERY good read! Full of little tidbits to keep your satiated during our down time inbetween now and E3. I will update with some info here and there, but hop on over and give it a read! Highlights: [quote][b]How far along is development on Destiny?[/b] Well, I’m playing it every day at my desk; we’re deep into it and the great thing about the game right now is that you only really learn how the game works when it’s up on its feet and playable. And Destiny is a pretty complicated game, it’s got an investment system and persistent characters, a big social shared world, so having it playable for real with all the systems running is a pretty big accomplishment and we’re learning a lot. This is exactly where you want to be as designers, playing it every day with our friends at our desks, seeing what’s broken and fixing it. We’re definitely there now, that’s for sure.[/quote] [quote][b]It seems like you’ve had trouble actually defining what Destiny is?[/b] It’s only been in the last six months that we’ve been able to play [Destiny] with everything running. For a while we could play parts of the game; we could play the action shooter, the same old sandbox shooter that Bungie’s made and loved and does well. We’ve been able to play that for a while. We could play, separate from that, our investment systems in a mock way, where we could just play through it in Excel tables with drops and loot and see how that part of the game played, but we hadn’t smashed them together yet. We could play parts of our big open world, broken up into sections that import into our engine, but as our engine became more robust we could import large swathes of our world. It’s been in the last six months that we’ve taken these things, that have been up and running separately, and got them all working in concert. During that time when [Destiny] was in bits and pieces, I think it was challenging for us to explain to Activision, even people on our team, what the game is going to be. We can talk about it, we could have you read words, and walk through it in animated storyboards and sequences and say ‘this is what it’s going to feel like’. But it was all a little bit on paper, it wasn’t in your hands and playable. So, it’s been a challenge to describe what exactly it is. The important thing to remember about [Destiny] is that first and foremost it’s a Bungie game and those are the games we make and love. You’re in a big world that’s populated by other players, a living world where things happen even if you’re not there. It feels real, it’s got time of day, big open environments, it has social places where you can gather and it’s got a persistent character, someone you grow over time. You’re going to choose who you are in this world and every decision you make influences how you look or how you fight. It definitely has properties of what you’d associate with MMOs, but it is at its heart an action game. A Bungie shooter, but it has all these other great, great things added to it, which we think really think makes it a revolutionary experience in the shooter space.[/quote] [quote][b]Is it true that players will get their hands on spaceships, will there be space combat?[/b] Well the only thing we’re sure of right now is that the spaceship is a thing that’s going to take you from place to place. Like other things that belong to you, you are going to be able to personalise it. You’ll certainly have some choice over which ship you have. It’s another thing like your weapons or your armour that makes you you in the world of Destiny.[/quote] * 6 months with all playable features enabled? We could very well play this game in 2013! ** A nice dodge, but I think Staten knows very well that space combat is a huge part of Destiny!