The origins of Destiny can be found long ago in Bungie's past



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With Destiny 2"S Abandoned In full expansion, Bungie managed to make her addictive, addictive and skinner-box game a sequel to the division. By most accounts, their game seems to have paid off – largely thanks to Gambit, the new addictive mode at the heart of Abandoned. Bungie has been slow to fully exploit the underlying attraction of the game, but clearly destiny 2 persons is a company critical enough that the studio (and the publisher Activision) motivates them to use its fragile launch.

destiny 2 personsThe initial launch – he has well reviewed, but apparently failed to retain the players in the same numbers as his predecessor – has prompted many experts to write the franchise and the studio. But is Abandoned redemption tale really so surprising?

Bungie's story still catches up with her

Bungie has been shooting first-person shooter since the genre had a name, having released her first version of the FPS in 1993, when everyone called the style of play.Condemn clones. In spite of occasional false measures, the excellence of Bungie's FPS goes back to the time of the cult classic MacOS. Marathon and its aftermath. These are works to which destiny, in this case, owes a huge debt.

The demands of creating and marketing a modern tentol franchise have negated many of the oddest elements that defined Bungie's former shooters. You can always spot them if you know where to look. There is a common theme and idiosyncratic narration techniques that we will explore throughout this piece.

And that connection is true even though the 2018 Bungie barely has a direct connection to the studio that was operating under that name in 1993, when the studio released its first commercial release: a unique approach to the so-called FPS Pathways Into Darkness.

Pathways played a lot like a lovecraftian interpretation of System shock (but a year before Shock system launch). This made Bungie an instant favorite among a small but enthusiastic audience of players who, like Bungie, refused to give up Apple's dying Macintosh platform. The company's efforts to create a sequel to The paths transferred to Marathon, which turned out to be a more typical interpretation of SPF.

The Marathon trilogy retained the complex narrative element that had The paths so fascinating, but it has reduced items like inventory management and exploration to a blink of a superficial eye. Marathon focus on rapid fire, a multitude of LAN based Deathmatch modes and a large palette of versatile weapons to keep things alive.

Again, Marathon was created by a Bungie different from the one that exists today. Only the chief executive Jason Jones – chief designer and programmer on The paths, and one of the two original employees of the studio – remains since the early years a cult developer of MacOS.

In quarter of a century since The paths, Bungie grew up, moved, was acquired (no less than Mac's former enemy, Microsoft), and bought back his own freedom. Despite all this turbulence, society has never been too far from its roots. There was only flirting with real-time strategy in the form of the Myth trilogy, of course, but even that eventually brought back to the SPF. The big, opera-space RTS to follow Myth transferred to Halo, which immediately became one of the most important and influential FPS franchises in the history of gambling.

contrary to Marathon and Myth, Halo always turns strong … and if you think Destiny 2 It took time to win, just consider Halo's Master Chief Collection, who has finally updated to meet fans' expectations almost four years after the launch.

Of course, Bungie herself has no connection with Halo now; The company gave up the Halo series more than a decade ago, leaving it in the hands of Microsoft's 343 industries. However, you do not need to look to see Bungie's legacy in the current Halo games. The next chapter will be delivered under the name Halo: Infinite, which echoes the title of Marathon finale of the trilogy, Marathon: Infinity. This 1996 classic takes its name from the fact that it comes with a host of design tools designed to give fans the means to create endless content; one of these tools was called Forge, a recycled Bungie moniker for Halo 3Map Editor

Destiny 2 does not include such open links with Marathon games, but you do not have to work too hard to identify links between past and present Bungie projects. Marathon: Infinity reads like an early prototype for destiny in many ways, but a prototype limited by the realities of the 1996 technology. Infinite worked on a humble 2.5D engine rather than sending players across worlds built with real polygons. And while he supports the local multiplayer, the idea of ​​teaming up with a team of internet-connected friends from around the world to face enemy hordes would have been inconceivable 22 years ago.

Despite the constraints of the time, Infinite was the pinnacle of what could be achieved in a 2.5D shooter. Infinity The engine lacked true 3D support, but its level designers – a coalition of Bungie staff members and contributors from an ephemeral studio called Double Aught – have managed to turn it into intricate interlocking spaces. –Earthquake shooters.

This studied complexity resulted in a notoriously ruthless game. Consider the punch that opened Infinity second chapter. Called "Acme Station", the level forced players to enter narrow corridors, cluttered with a handful of powerful enemies. Hulking cyborgs blocked the winding and complex paths the players had to travel to reach the exit, and the whole affair took place in an environment that caused players to finish the race before their oxygen supply was exhausted.

Even reaching the exit did not offer any respite; you headed directly to the next stage, a huge hangar bay patrolled by enemy soldiers and autonomous combat helicopters. A shed that, like the station, lacked breathable air.

It is difficult to imagine many modern shooters with Infinity the most painful moments, especially at the beginning. Part of this is a sign of the evolution of the media towards a mass market. Infinity the layouts were a little too much on sneaky nooks and crannies that were not always obvious as part of the critical path. His steps were filled with the kind of weird roughness that modern gaming tests could do to make things more intuitive and minimize friction.

Yet, Bungie has never lost his taste for discerning players. The nature of his challenges has evolved into tasks that require team work. Even if, by beating a Abandoned raid requires just as much of a personal investment as, say, beat Infinity The penultimate brutal fight (titled with enthusiasm "You think you're a great moment? You'll die in time!") On the brutal difficulty "Total Carnage" game.

Infinite did not offer a game online but he sowed the seeds that eventually Destiny & # 39; s team-oriented design. Its story-based campaign mode, "Blood Tides of The Showon," could be played in cooperation. Although very little of the "Howon" campaign was designed to take advantage of this feature, it included a handful of additional steps that were only accessible through teamwork of two people.

It's in these bonus levels that you see Bungie's current approach to the FPS most clearly, as they contain tantalizing clues Infinity enigmatic scenario. Four years later Destiny & # 39; s debut, players again do not really know what the Traveler is, understand the nature of darkness or fully grasp the intrigues and ambitions that drive millions of players to run.

The story of the Halo series under Bungie tended to rely on similar riddles; a lot of the history of the franchise has appeared Halo 3and only through hidden and hidden computer terminals that forced fans to compare their notes and analyze the most convincing theories about their true nature. This particular gimmick came directly from the Marathon series, which preceded the use of scenes cut in real time in shooters to convey the narration.

Marathon come with ample history and knowledge in hand, but it has disseminated critical information through the use of computer terminals. Critical terminals communicated gameplay goals to players, while peripherals distributed tangential information that hinted at information (but never explicitly stated) that was feeding the main storyline.

This technique has reached its peak with Infinite. The central narrative of the game played in what initially seemed to be a chaotic mess. The players teleported to different places, serving the whims of different factions in what seemed like different moments.

Taken as a linear experiment, Infinite makes practically no sense. It was only when the players took the time to choose all the additional information on the terminal (and, yes, to track down these fragments of text only for the cooperatives) that the story began to emerge.

Infinite never made it clear that he was focused on time travel, forcing players to explore alternative scenarios and prevent a galactic disaster; they had to settle this for themselves. And not only does the player need to go back in history, he could even take a wrong path and get stuck in a recursive loop until he finds the proper terminal to go to the next surreal dream stage having served breaks in history.

Infinity Baroque history was as difficult to navigate as its complex stages. Unlike the games that surround it on each side – Marathon 2: Durandal and the Myth Games – Infinite was the latest version of Bungie to be delivered exclusively for MacOS.

That's a shame, because it really embodies the strengths and weaknesses of Bungie's approach to FPS design. The craft know-how invested in its two dozen stages of campaign and many multiplayer maps Infinite at the top of the 2.5D shooting format. Between the cooperative game, the innovative Deathmatch modes (and now standard) and a suite of separate multifunctional weapons, Infinity Marathon the future of its creators is much more direct than the games that most developers produced during the turbulent transition year of 1996.

Thanks to Bungie's decision to release the Marathon open-source community games, go back in time to rediscover Infinite (and his predecessors) is pleasantly painless. However, it is not strictly necessary to go up to this length. After all, Marathon Powers of DNA Destiny 2. Abandoned perhaps a nicer and more social version of the genre, certainly, but it is not so far from its 2.5D predecessors as you think.

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