Over the weekend, Bungie assistant community manager David "DeeJ" Dague confirmed Bungie has "revealed everything you're going to explore in the first version [of Destiny]," essentially confirming that each planet will have only one explorable area.
So for example, Earth, which was playable in the recent beta, will only have Old Russia. At launch, that is. Looking ahead, who knows what Bungie could add in the future. That's basically what community manager Eric "Urk" Osborne told fans to reassure them of the size of the game.
"Destiny’s pretty big. It’s the biggest game we’ve ever made, by far, and we’re sort of known for making games you can play for months, years, and even decades if you’re a little bit…dedicated," he began to say in a lengthy NeoGAF post meant to address fan disappointment.
"With Destiny, we’re looking to exceed what we’ve done before, not just in terms of scale – the Moon is our smallest destination – but in terms of scope and breadth of activities. That’s true for day one, as you expect, but it also means we want Destiny to have super long legs.
"If we’re fortunate enough to have you playing months after launch, you still find lots of compelling stuff to do. That will manifest itself in a myriad of ways, from straight up content to cool activities we’ve yet to show off," he continued.
"We think we did a decent job supporting Halo, post launch, but we were only ever able to cater to the competitive set. That left a lot of players out in the cold. That made a lot of the team grumpy. We wanted to do better. So, Destiny is philosophically built support every type of player, and all modes with ongoing activities and events. We look at it quite a bit like television programming, as opposed to a singular film, as we had in the past. We think it’s gonna be pretty great, but we wanted to test out a bunch of our new stuff with Beta, to make sure we could flip knobs and levers live, reacting and responding with lots (and, ho boy, did we see LOTS) of players online and playing."
Osborne went on to say that beta was "water wings," adding "level 8 is nothing."
"You've barely scratched the surface," he said," and it seems like some folks had fun with what was there."
"If you did, good news," he concluded. "More soon."
While I understand the complaints some may have with the size of explorable areas on planets, but I'm in the camp that appreciates smaller areas. I prefer experiencing new planets than grinding planets just for the sake of size.
