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• 36 Minutes in Josh Hamrick takes the hot seat. • Josh is a Gameplay Designer, he has a focus on the weapons. • There are people that make them pretty, physical, he makes them work dammit. • He has his fingers on the dials that control their balance and power and all that jazz, blame him. • Halo had the two weapon system, now we have a new world order where you form a relationship with your weapon in a way you couldn’t with Halo. • In Halo there were like 7 weapons that were on a map, they were always different weapons but they were the same weapon. They’re going a different way so that everyone might find a AR and have completely different ones. • They want a balance in the turnover rate of weapons, they want you to explore the breadth of the sandbox but they also want you to spend quality “DeeJ time” with the weapons. • You’re giving people control over what weapons they have when they step onto the battlefield. • Destiny has a three weapon system (and everything is still in flux / development), but you can carry more than three weapons onto the battlefield, it’s just that only three of them are going to be easily accessible at a given time during combat. They definitely don’t want you walking into an encounter with every gun in the game on hand. • You can definitely change between encounters, they just want to discourage you from changing out what type of AR you are using in mid combat. • There’s Primary, Special, and Heavy Weapons. It sounds like with some of the weapon types you don’t start off with ammo, so you have to go out and find ammo for it first, the conversation is sorta going all over the place and keeps getting interrupted >_> • Josh likes to play as a Hunter, but Danny (the lead sandbox designer) keeps giving him excuses to switch every once in a while. • Fusion Rifles are laser guns. • They’re talking a lot about their personal builds, but nothing specific, a lot of general stuff. • They “Jason Jonesed” the Hand Cannon before Jason Jones could. • DeeJ brings up the topic of Map Control and how in Halo you have to control specific territories to control the rockets and that was the big incentive to move around the map and not turtle up. How are you going to keep people moving around the map if everyone has their own weapons? • Instead of looking for a rocket launcher spawn, you look for ammo for your Rocket Launcher. • At the moment when you die you lose some of your Heavy ammo and you’ll give it away to the people who killed you, apparently killing with a heavy weapon gives you heavy weapon ammo and such. Apparently it is implied that ammo drops onto the map so there shouldn’t be any long term starvation problems from everyone eventually using up all the starting ammo. • Ammo is divided by weapon class, so you shouldn’t need to worry about picking up Rockets and not being able to use them with your sniper. • It’s no longer the Halo method of first guy to the Rocket Launcher probably wins, you have to be more careful about making sure that you can get away. • Destiny is still pre-alpha and they are still exploring what they want this to be and how they want this to work, so don’t be terribly outraged about work in progress things. They know what they are doing and they playtest and iterate every day. • The Bungie Day build was apparently really snowbally and didn’t have heavy weapons. • There’s some smack talk and small anecdotes about slaughtering the User Research team in matches and so on and so forth. • A lot of the feedback that comes in from the community is echoed in the studio, there’s a lot of different players with different views on how the game should be. • DeeJ comments about how they’ve seemed to have found the best of both worlds where you can develop a relationship with your gun, but you have to keep moving to find ammo. • There’s a level of predictability they can maintain, it’s not like Fiesta despite the breadth of the weapons sandbox. Silhouettes are maintained and audio is consistent amongst weapon classes. • Nobody has the Plasma Pistol against someone with a Rocket Launcher, everyone has their own weapons. • They’re excited to hear people ask “Where did you get that gun?” and then they go “Oh that was from my favorite mission on Mars, come with me I’ll show you!” • They’re hopefully going to pick up speed and try to release these Podcasts every couple of weeks or so whenever they have something to talk about.