What Bungie's Destiny Does Better Than Halo

Bungie has big ambitions for its next- and current-gen multiplayer shooter Destiny, but it's the lessons from the past that inform some of its most important nuances.

"In the same way we're making your heroic story, your legend, that carries over into the cinematics. You're the star of the cinematics as much as you're the star of your own heroic tale," design director Joe Staten tells IGN. "So if you're playing in a co-op way, we're not going to do that crappy thing that happened in the old Halo games where, if you're playing co-op, you don't show up...you're not the primary role."

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We're not going to do that crappy thing that happened in the old Halo games where you don't show up in co-op cutscenes.

"Putting a history into the world was extremely important, something you felt you were fighting for, the civilization that was once yours that's fallen, that's trying to recover," Staten continues. "But it also goes to player choice, too, and not just choices you'd get in a Halo game, the moment to moment of how I'm going to take apart this encounter, what's my combat toolset?" This expands to characters, Staten emphasizes, in the tiniest and most significant ways. "What kind of character do I want to be in the world? Do I want to be a man or do I want to be a woman? That's a choice we never gave someone in the Halo games."

Beyond the moment-to-moment of interesting encounters, Bungie intends to change Destiny long-term. The world itself will evolve, as you might see in a PC MMO, but Bungie's still figuring out how to actually build this universe before tweaking it. "The goal with everything in Destiny is to continue to add to the world, but we still haven't figured out exactly what that means in terms of a cadence," says Staten, "but given our plan to build this big world and then evolve it over time, we're absolutely going to have some cadence for that.”

The what and how of your battles as that character is important to Bungie as well. With four enemy races, each with varying unit types, Destiny's numerous foes need to be individually interesting -- if not, you and your pals would essentially fight the same enemy AI in a different skin.

"Way more characters than we had in the Halo games, I think with all our systems, most of them are brand new from the ground up, and that includes our AI and the way we script character behavior," Staten explains. "Our goal is definitely to give people as diverse a combat experience as possible. Hopefully we’re able to pull that off."

For more on Destiny, check out everything we know, our first impressions, and everything we've got planned in the future at IGN.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He's also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.

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