Helen Lewis 

Destiny: five things you need to know about history’s costliest console game

Big budget, big expectations – Helen Lewis offers the lowdown on Destiny, the alien fight-fest that’s taken the gaming world by storm
  
  

Destiny
‘Breaking the mould’: Destiny has been described as a ‘shared world shooter’ Photograph: PR

Size isn’t everything. But when it comes to Destiny, it’s all anyone wants to talk about. The shared-world shooter, which allows you to fight aliens as a warlock, titan or hunter, is rumoured to have a budget of £310m – for comparison, the film Avatar cost about £150m. With that kind of investment (recouped in first-day sales alone) no wonder expectations are so high. Here are five things you need to know about the most expensive game ever made, released last week, reviewed on page 35.

1 It owes a lot to a man called Master Chief (no, not Master Chef)

Destiny’s developers are a studio called Bungie, founded in 1991 by two friends called Jason Jones and Alex Seropian in a one-room flat in Chicago. Ten years later, Bungie released the first Halo game – starring a taciturn 6ft10in super-soldier called Master Chief. The franchise has since made billions. But in 2007, Jones and Seropian sold the Halo franchise to Microsoft in order to pursue other projects, including Destiny.

2 Tyrion Lannister is getting bad reviews as your robot friend

Peter Dinklage, better known to TV viewers as the endlessly sarcastic Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, provides the voice to your in-game AI companion, Ghost. It’s hard to design a non-playable character whose chirpy soundbites don’t grate after a while, and reviewers have not been kind. “The mission design … too often asks you to defend him from waves of incoming enemies,” writes Eurogamer’s Martin Robinson, “when most players surely couldn’t care less whether he was ripped to shreds or not.”

3 You can play Destiny on Xbox One or PS4, whatever the adverts may suggest

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are bitter rivals in the console market. For Destiny, Sony secured exclusive rights to all marketing, so every ad says: “Buy now on PS4!”. Microsoft struck back by launching a spoof site called DestinyFragrance.com. If you clicked the picture of a perfume bottle, the company admitted it was a ruse to get round the advertising ban, adding: “Thanks for smelling that something was up.” The site has been taken down.

4 It’s neither a multiplayer nor a single-player game

For years, there has been a divide between single-player and multiplayer games. Destiny hopes to break the mould as a “shared world shooter”: you can play on your own, but need to join an online team to explore all the content.

5 Every player gets a trip to Vegas! (Sadly, only virtually)

A beta version of the game, launched this summer, got 4.6m downloads, and Bungie expected double that number to play online this week. That is a challenge for any server, so the firm bought a huge data centre in Las Vegas. “You get a lot of natural disasters walking up and down the strip, but you don’t get a lot of true natural disasters affecting the landscape,” said Bungie COO Pete Parsons. “If there are no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no floods – it’s perfect.”. So far, so good.

 

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