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On April 4th an article was published at Eurogamer.net that reported on an interview with Joseph Staten and Chris Barrett, our panelists of interest at GDC. Here is the full article. There are plenty of brand new juicy tidbits but I'm not going to single out any in particular, you'll have to find them for yourselves. Here is the Q&A section for your viewing pleasure. I've got a funny feeling fans will bug you about Tiger Man for a long time, and you may have shot yourselves in the foot by even mentioning him. Joe Staten: Then Tiger Man has served his purpose. He has become the bullet shield. That's his role. He is brave and noble and strong and wise. Chris Barrett: I guess Blizzard did it with the panda, right? That turned out to be a whole expansion. Oh dear... Joe Staten: No! I've already seen #TeamTigerMan on the internet. So, well done! Joe Staten: Thanks. Whoops. You mention mythic sci-fi and idealised reality as guides for what Destiny is, and you've created some stunning concept art. But building an actual video game that lives up to the promise of that concept art must be a particularly difficult challenge. Chris Barrett: Switching gears for the whole team and coming up with this new world was certainly tough. We had a lot of people who were used to making Halo games for a long time, so trying to communicate that new vision and get them on board, we had to do a lot of concept art to show people what we were thinking about and what mixtures of sci-fi versus fantasy worked and what we were going for. The other thing though, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When you start making characters who fit into that world, or stories players are playing, or bring some of it into the gameplay, it all starts to form that feel. Joe Staten: I remember playing a build maybe a month ago, and for some reason the build just wasn't rendering cloth. I play as a hunter character with the big cape and cloak and hood. That part fell away, and all of a sudden there was something missing from that mythic sci-fi, because nobody had cloth on, and it looked much more like a straight up sci-fi game. It's that texture that the art is bringing to the world, and the colour palette and the screen effects. It is this combination of things that make it happen. I'd also say - and I never thought this would happen - but it's crazy that so many of the pieces of concept art we made long ago are actually present in the game. You can look at that postcard and go into the game and as you're playing you'll say, 'Oh my god, that's The Buried City.' The challenge is communicating the vision and the theme clearly enough to the people who need to make it, answering their questions, being open to their push back, but all having a very clear vision of what you're going for. And if you define that well and you define it right, you can achieve a lot of these things we thought early on would be really hard if not impossible to do. And that's been really great to see. You talk a lot about players creating their own legend and their own stories in Destiny, but from a writing perspective, you also want to create a story. It must present an interesting design challenge to combine a story Bungie wants to tell with players who are creating their own stories - at the same time. Joe Staten: Without getting into too much detail, if you think of Halo, you had two sort of experiences in general. I'm going to play the story, or I'm going to play competitive multiplayer. In the story I'm playing the story. And in competitive multiplayer I'm just fighting against people, and there's not really a story there except that awesome story of the moment to moment combat experience I'm having and the post-game, 'Oh, wasn't that awesome when you drove the Warthog that way?!' That story was really important to PvP. But there was this cinematic story that lived in a sort of silo over here. The simple answer is, we still believe in a great narrative cinematic story. We want your character, whatever character you are, a female robot warlock or a male human titan, whoever you are, you're going to be the star of that cinematic story. But there are many many other activities that cross the divide between story and multiplayer in this world of Destiny, and your character is going to go through all of them. So, whatever character you are in story is the same character you are in all these other activities, including competitive multiplayer. And so, our hope is that it will feel like a consistent experience. Your legend will take you through all these different activities. Some are more narrative driven. Some aren't. Some are just more emergent. But you're a consistent character across all of those. That's the key. That's where that consistent experience comes from. In your GDC session you talked about character creation. The impression I get is you want it to be an immediate experience, almost like you pick based on a gut reaction to the options. What is the overriding philosophy behind what you're trying to do there? Chris Barrett: When we were talking about how that process would work and the choices the players would have, we knew if we gave somebody a choice and then betrayed that choice later down the road, that would be bad. We wanted players to just go on gut. What do they like the look of? What sounds cool to them? And not betray that in any way. We don't want to make something where a character plays very differently, or isn't what they thought what they were getting. That tied in to that process. We want to give people whatever they want to play in that world and not have any negative side effects. Joe Staten: Making it up front and quick and largely emotional, and nothing that's going to, later down the line, make you feel like you made the wrong choice. You're going to make this gut emotional choice: 'I'm going to look at that robot and I'm going to look at that more exotic space elf and I'm going to look at that human and I like... robot.' It's like, bam. I'm going to be a robot. And there's nothing about being a robot that's going to play any different from the other two. We want to make it immediate and quick and gut, for sure when it comes to race, and then make sure we don't screw you down the line. Chris Barrett: We didn't want to give a plus eight bonus or whatever it is, that people are going to be like, 'Oh, I made the wrong choice! I've got to start over.' That always sucks. With Halo you were locked in to working on a single main character with Master Chief. Now you're working on multiple main character types. That must have been quite the change, being able to say, actually, I can create whatever I want now. Chris Barrett: Absolutely. Some of the early brainstorms on the enemies for example were just lining up, what are awesome things we want to do? Like, 'Oh, let's make ancient robots! We need those!' Or, 'Let's make dimensional beings!' Whatever it is we thought could fit in the world we could do because we had all those more options. We wanted space zombies and robots and we could do that in this world, which was super cool. So it was liberating. It was a lot of fun doing all that stuff instead of trying to cram it all into one character design. It was freeing. With Master Chief you had to consider just one central character's backstory. Now you have to deal with multiple stories for multiple characters. Joe Staten: As long as you as a writer remain flexible and don't try to put too many rules on the process up front, your really fun job is to make everything possible. So if Chris comes to me with an image of the Traveller, or if he comes to me with an image of a guy with a soul ripping out of his head, or space zombies or robots, it's been a real pleasure just to assimilate all of those ideas loosely and try to create a world where it's less about the constraints and the rules and more about, what's possible? Like, give me the big brackets. Give me fantasy and sci-fi. There's a lot that can fit in between those two big brackets. And then it's just a matter of, well, where do space zombies go? Do they go on the moon? Do they go on Mars? What's cool? Artistically, what looks better? What's a richer combination of palettes? So much of our fiction conversation is just about creating this pleasing world, this inviting world, this world that looks good, that's beautiful, that draws you deeper. It's less about writing about a bunch of backstory. We certainly do some of that, but it's more about sort of colour blocking. Like, big, thematic blocking we do. Let's talk about Mars. Okay, let's look at it thematically. Who belongs in Mars? Is it big Kabal? Is it space zombies? Really, much of the work has been just moving around these different elements until we get a pleasing whole big picture. Then we have to tighten the screws. If I were writing a Halo game, what I would do is, typically, I would sit down and write a linear script that looked a lot like a film. I would just bang it out. Here's what the story is going to be. Here's what the characters are. We'd make a story. We'd talk about backstory. In this world, we spent a lot more time just doing what I think people would do in a television show, which is, we've got this plot card, and that is, like, space zombies invade the moon, or whatever it is, and that's an awesome idea. Let's just put that there. And then let's come up with other ones. And then let's start moving them around and stay flexible and then f***ing play the game so we know it's going to be fun, and then, let's finally tighten the screws and shoot it. That's been a really rewarding, different process than we've gone through before. Some of the art shows Earth reclaimed by nature or in some abandoned sci-fi style. Will we be able to visit these places on Earth in the game as well as go out into the solar system? Chris Barrett: We're doing both. It's exciting to explore what was humanity. What happened to humanity? And be able to explore those spaces on Earth. Those are real places we want to explore. And then also what's also cool is seeing how humanity spread into the stars and what happened on those other planets. Both are super exciting in the same way. Joe Staten: We sometimes toss around loosely terms like galaxies and universes and solar systems, but we're really excited about telling, at least during the beginning of the story, the story of a human civilisation in our solar system. So we're talking about the moon and Mars and Venus and the moons of Saturn. You can Google Enceladus or the Moon. But we want to take that familiar understanding of what these places are and tweak them into this world of strangeness and mystery. And that's true for Earth as well. You can type in Chicago but you're not going to get a picture of flooded streets.

Shortly after their hour long panel at the recent GDC, Joe Staten and Chris Barrett sat down with Eddie Makuch of Gamestop for a little more "in-depth" information regarding Bungie's upcoming game "Destiny". A very insightful look into a game that looks to have enough depth in both the Campaign storyline and Multiplayer to hold a player's interest for years. Be Brave. Read on. Content and image courtesy of GameSpot.com On inspirations for Destiny Barrett - Some of the things that I like, or our team really liked, from that kind of mixture of genres--you could go anywhere from Thundarr the Barbarian; that was something I loved as a kid and actually has some of those similar elements. Obviously the big ones like Star Wars or Dune or any of those things that we liked as kids. As far as the art, the art style definitely looked towards painters and images that had those big ideas in them…sort of timeless. Like I said in the talk, John Harris had that kind of feel. Seventies sci-fi art had this big world-building kind of feel and idea; stuff that would span galaxies and solar systems. And all that stuff really was inspiration for me, for sure. Staten - So in terms of other inspirations, I would just pile on there certainly we read a ton of genre fiction. Absolutely sci-fi and fantasy. We eat it up. But the thing we really looked at…I think typically, for the Halo games, we looked at movies. But really for this game, we looked at serial television; great dramas like Lost or The Wire; Battlestar Galactica. When you're building a world and you want to evolve it over time, it really helps to have an understanding of how you build this longer-form narrative. So for us, that was a really interesting new thing we did. I think we probably spent more time watching television these days than we do movies and that's definitely influenced the way we think about building our story. On the difficulties of creative collaboration with a 400-person team Staten - For me, I think [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien], having just read through the books with my ten-year-old son, is an incredible talent. I think [Lord of the Rings] is this creation of a single person, though, and we're in a totally different world. We're creating a game that's the creation of 400 people. And you have to be really careful in that world not to get too precious; to go too deep down your own rabbit hole. And then come out with a whole bunch of rules and strictures; 'this is possible in our world,' 'this is totally off-limits.' It's not good collaboration. And ultimately, I don't think results in creative ideas. On whether or not Destiny needs consistency Staten - We absolutely do. And we have pages of words that define things in great detail. But there's nothing worse than having words that go stale. Writing reams and reams of words and then nobody ever reads them or nobody updates them and they go out of date. So this has been really, really hard; we don't do it perfectly. But we spend a lot of time just trying to boil down things to a simple sentence like 'This is what this place is all about' and 'If you remember nothing else, remember these simple words.' And that's been hugely effective. And so we try really, really hard not to create a story bible; we'll create a style guide to talk to people about art, but we're trying really, really hard not to build a bible. Barrett - The other thing is, when we started talking about what this world could be, we always said to ourselves we want to make some place where almost anything is possible, so even now, as we're building the world, we have those defined, but we're always evolving. Over the next ten years we're going to be making up new stuff to put in there and we want to build as big a net as possible so those crazy ideas can fit. On whether or not games have a responsibility to show seedy sides of humans Staten - I think if you want to tell a credible story, yes, absolutely. In terms of the player choice, which is what we were talking about, we want players to be a hero. And if you're a hero, then that means you're largely on the side of good. And you might make a racial choice to be an Exo, which is artistically and thematically a little more sinister and dark. You might choose to be a Hunter class, who is just a little bit more in the bounty hunter, roguish vein. But at the end of the day, when you're a player in this world, you're a guardian of the last safe city on Earth. And it's really important that you are this heroic, hopeful figure in the world. That said, you're absolutely going to run into other humans and other Exos and other Awoken who, some are, bad people. They have bad plans. There aren't all good people in the world that you run into. So you will see that breadth across all the characters in our game, but if you're the player, you're the hero. On how the idea of hope factors into Destiny Staten - The kinds of experiences that I want to play, and that we as a studio I think want to put into the world--I think about my own kids or people who are going to play this game. How do we want them to interact with this world? What experience do I want them to have? Post-apocalyptic worlds are fun. Worlds with skulls and blood and hellfire are awesome, but if I want to spend time in a world, if I want to be an agent of change, I want to be an agent of good. I want it to be a hopeful outcome. We go back and forth about the name Destiny and we joked about it for a while about whether it was the right name, but I think we think about Destiny and what kind of Destiny do you want to have? Do you want to have one that ends in annihilation and reprehensible things? Or do you want to end in a hopeful, heroic place? For us, that's really important. That legacy that we want to build is a hopeful one. On the mystery of Destiny's world Staten - One of the choices we made early on, like [barrett] said, was where to set this game. And when. Do we want it to be a galaxy far, far away? Do we want it to be a planet-of-the-week like Star Trek? What really clicked in my mind when we started mixing sci-fi and fantasy is with fantasy you get this strong sense of history; you get myths and legends and ancient gods; different dream realms and stuff that's steeped in time and legend. And we wanted to create that same feeling in this mythic sci-fi world. Bungie hopes players will want to explore the red dunes of Mars. So one of the things we did early on was decide we wanted to center it on Earth, but we want to build a history. We want to build a block of time that occupies from the here to the now to the distant future. But we want players to go back and explore this lost human history. And so for us, that was the source of a lot of the mystery in our world was this [period] of time where something happened, but you don't know what. And we're hundreds of years in the future now exploring back through these ruins of human civilization. Barrett - We talked about a lot in our concept art; if you look at a painting and you don't want to know more, if there isn't a mystery there, you're going to get bored looking at it. So every shot we try to create, especially the key images, we want somebody to ask a question about it. 'Why is that there?' 'What's behind that little door off in the distance?' or 'What's that character doing in the distance?' That's absolutely a key part of making evocative concept art. Staten - You show up on Mars, now in the game we're playing, and you see this city buried in sand and it's a mystery that draws you deeper; it's not one that's repellent or dark and grim. It's a beautiful place that is steeped in mystery and wonder so that's really what we want the world to do; just keep dragging you deeper and deeper and deeper. On whether or not science-fiction can avoid thematic repetition Staten - I hadn't really thought about it in that way, but I think it's the big reason why we wanted to inject fantasy into this world. With the world of mythic science fiction, anything is possible. And when you round a corner and see up high a combatant; for example something that looks much more like a wizard-space-zombie. That's not an experience you get when you're playing most straight-up action-shooters or sci-fi shooters. That was really a critical part to making that experience unique and fresh--was injecting these more fantastical and exotic elements. Barrett - I think it's always something you think about is creating this completely new idea that no one has ever seen before. And we definitely have some of those in the game, but also we do that like…players aren't bringing anything to it; it's not familiar; in some way, you want them to see things that they recognize in some way so they feel emotional when they see it again. So we try to strike that nice balance between those two elements. Destiny is currently in development for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4. The game is described as the very first "shared-world shooter." It is an online-focused title, though it is not a massively multiplayer online game and will not carry a subscription fee. Activision is not planning to ship Destiny until 2014.

Image and video courtesy of Bungie.net According to Dee J at Bungie.net... "This video was originally screened as part of our GDC 2013 presentation. It provides a rare glimpse into the character art, development and design of Destiny – from early sketches and concept art, to animation and in-engine 3D character models." http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xKOY8zJx2Q4 Another great video providing more images of the upcoming game by Bungie! Enjoy!!

Today Bungie was in the spot light at the game developers conference, they discussed some of their techniques and inspirations when building destiny but the main part of it all was the new concept art. As a large amount of concept art was shown I will try and provide the most interesting pieces I captured from the video First up we have an abandoned colony on Europa which is one of Jupiter's moons Here we have alien ruins on Venus it's unknown which alien race once inhabited this place These are some early concepts of space ships that did not make the cut Here is a space station and a space ship, bungie said they focused more on these so it's possible these made the cut. Here is a hanger where human ships are docked one of the bungie guys said this is a place where heroes show of their armor and personal space ships. This seems to suggest the player can customize their own personal ships. Here is a place that bungie describes as a frozen city occupied by machines where towers and skyscrapers become dungeons. Here is a place currently known as the buried city as you can see ruins buried in mountains of sand on Mars. This is one of the enemy races space zombies but officially named "Hive". The flooded streets of Old Chicago. And here are some different types of weapons, they didn't mention that these were early concepts or finalized concepts but no doubt we will be seeing some of these in the game. This post has been promoted to an article

An Interesting part from the destiny presentation at GDC was that the player will be able to choose from different races. Besides being a human there are 2 others that are selectable when customizing your character they are "Awoken and "Exo. Bungie describes the awoken as exotic, beautiful and mysterious beings and they said they look to ghosts, angels and vampires to capture the feel of this race. the Exo, which bungies describes as sinister, powerful, and tireless beings they said the looked to famous characters such as the terminator, the undead and their very own master chief to capure the feel of the Exo race. Here is a picture of these races. As the humans have different classes (hunter, titan and warlock) I'm pretty sure the awoken and exo will each feature their own classes to choose from. So from the pictures and the descriptions bungie gave which race do you like best at the moment? View full article

Today Bungie was in the spot light at the game developers conference, they discussed some of their techniques and inspirations when building destiny but the main part of it all was the new concept. As a large amount of concept art was shown I will try and provide the most interesting pieces I captured from the video First up we have an abandoned colony on Europa which is one of Jupiter's moons Here we have alien ruins on Venus it's unknown which alien race once inhabited this place These are some early concepts of of space ships that did not make the cut Here is a space station and a space ship which bungie said they focused more on these so it's possible these made the cut. Here is hanger where human ships are docked one of the bungie guys said this is a place where heroes show of their armor and personal space ships. This seems to suggest the player can customize their own personal ships Here is a place that bungies describes as a frozen city occupied by machines where towers and skyscrapers become dungeons. Here is a place currently known as the buried city as you can see ruins buried in mountains of sand on Mars. This is one of the enemy races, space zombies but officially named "Hive". The flooded streets of Old Chicago. And here are some different types of weapons, they didn't mention that these were early concepts or finalized concepts but no doubt we will be seeing some of these in the game. View full article

During Bungie's GDC panel earlier today, a massive dose of concept art was shown from individuals to locations and environments. "Some of it has been cut, some of it will look different when the game is actually released. But all of it looks absolutely fantastic." The following images come from the article here. Now to the images. A large amount are very similar to the style of art used in the Halo Franchise, but are also very different at the same time. Flood like enemies, awesomely large environments and even the weapons have a touch of Halo to them. Courtesy to Kotaku.com and Choot 'em for supplying and finding amazing these images.

Image courtesy of Bungie.net According to Dee J at Bungie.net... "We’ve been relatively quiet since the reveal of Destiny. Today, we’ll be unusually talkative. Right this very minute, Joe Staten and Christopher Barrett are getting ready to take the stage at the GDC. Their presentation, “Brave New World: Bungie’s New IP,” will be an exploration of the development process at Bungie, focusing on how art and design have worked together to create a brand new universe from Bungie’s primordial soup. If you want to retrace those steps with us, you’re invited to join the virtual audience for their presentation. The talk will be streamed live via Gamespot. You can find the embedded video below if you’re already cozy. Once the curtain closes, we’ll make a handful of assets available for you to view in high resolution." Video courtesy of .

Want to know the answers to the community's questions straight from the creators themselves?? Hand-picked questions that are answered by Bungie. Be brave...read on! Image and content courtesy of www.Bungie.net. "The March of the Mail Sack" Bungie's Mailsack - March 1, 2013 Duardo - What's the scariest part about creating a new universe? The best sci-fi/fantasy blows people’s minds, while still resonating with them on a deeper, universally relatable level. The entire team at Bungie has spent years figuring out how to best marry these two ideals into one wholly compelling experience. It’s been daunting, to say the least. But releasing it to the wild – that is the terrifying part. Dave Mongan, Senior Writer tyalka93 - How much backstory and lore can we expect in Destiny? Prior to joining the writing team on Destiny, Eric Raab painstakingly helped guide the Halo fiction as part of an external team at Tor Books. He has a wealth of experience curating deep volumes of fiction for other franchises and a stable of supremely talented authors, as well. When we asked him your question, we expected a digital tome overflowing with careful Generations worth. Good luck uncovering it all. Eric Raab, Managing Editor Dark Delta 6 - What is your favorite alien in Destiny? There are many to choose from. Let’s learn about the preferred targets of our panel. My favorite alien is a dead alien. Mike Forrest, Senior Engineer The Cabal. I want to give them hugs. Special hugs. Frank Krause, SDET Everyone’s an alien, aren’t they? Concepts of nationality don’t really apply when there’s only one safe city left on Earth. Destiny is a melting pot. A tossed salad. Gumbo. What’s in gumbo? No one knows. Tom Slattery, Localization Content Manager The (yet to be named) “Space Zombies.” I love their mythos and how it’s communicated through the art direction of the characters and the environments. Joey Gibbs, Broducer I fell in love with the Fallen all the way back in 2009. Partly because there’s just something wonderful about the idea of a nomadic race of once noble houses now scattered to the solar winds. Partly because there’s something primordial and instantly terrifying about squaring off against an unpredictable Fallen Captain, his tattered crimson cape draped over a set of four splayed and angular arms that bristle with sleek firepower. That said, now that all of the enemy combatant races have been fleshed out more deeply, I’m harder pressed to call out a single enemy as a frontrunner. It’s become too difficult to play favorites. The amount of visual variety has become mind boggling, and our writers have been in overdrive to give each race rich and meaningful motivations that don’t just create distinctions between enemy races, but within them. Urk, Classified The Vex. They are unlike any enemies I’ve fought in other games. The fiction behind them is really fascinating, which, in turn, creates one of the coolest deaths in the game. David Candland, Senior Artist I’d answer but my arms are too tired to continue typing. Marty O’Donnell, Audio Director Spawn - How will you be addressing all player audiences within Destiny? You can’t make everyone happy all of the time, but with Destiny we’re reaching out to gamers who love heart-pounding action set in a world worthy of heroes. If that suit of armor fits you, here’s some speculative context from someone who is no stranger to player audiences. Sometimes shooting aliens is -blam-ing relaxing and sometimes shooting aliens is stressful and intense. We’re going to accommodate both sides of that coin. Destiny will have activities for every mood. Luke Smith, Senior Designer ll ManBean ll - What's Bungie's favorite thing to do in Destiny? With so many things to do, we’ll need our panelists to scratch the surface. I stare at gorgeous vistas instead of playing the game. Leland Dantzler, Tester Nothing’s better than playtesting with the entire studio. Francisco Cruz, Artist One night each week after work, food and beverages appear in the kitchen and we all get together to playtest the latest build. Josh Eash, Release Manager I like slow dramatic walks on the moon. Drew Smith, Producer I just go out to kill stuff for the shiny loot. Ben Thompson, Engineer Sit on the Shores of Time on Venus and watch other Guardians run through, leaving behind a body count. Nate Hawbaker, Associate Technical Artist Dramatic entrances. Josh Markham, Associate Artist Camp out in the social areas helping people get to their next destination. Kevin Hart, Associate Artist Madness - Is everything in Destiny made so "lone wolves" like me can enjoy the game as much as the guys who like to play cooperatively? You won’t be required to partner with strangers to achieve your goals in Destiny. You’ll have all the freedom you need to blaze your own trail. LLamuh - Will competitive gamers have a home in Destiny? Yes. The most competitive guys at our studio are having a damn good time playing Destiny. Josh Hamrick, Senior Designer burritohsenior - Will Destiny give us a chance to have cooperative Ride Along matches, where fans work side by side with Bungie to kick all the buttocks? Not all combatants have buttocks, but, just like anything that’s fun, Destiny is a game that’s more fun to play with your friends. We can’t say that enough. When we ship this game from our hands to yours, we’ll want nothing more than to play it with you. Father Franklin - Who is currently the best Destiny player in the studio? This is just the census we need to solicit volunteers to ride along with our community. What say you, Bungie? Our test automation is by far the best player; it can create a character and play through an entire level faster than any human. Austin Spafford is the best human player, in my opinion. Alan Stuart, Senior Engineer Mat Noguchi, Nate Hawbaker, Leland Dantzler, Mike Forrest. Elliott Gray, Graphic Designer I’m consistently thrashed by Monske or Hawbaker. Leland Dantzler, Tester Not me. Launching Bungie.next has put me a bit behind the curve. Tom Gioconda, Engineer John Harris. The man brings death with him wherever he goes. Joey Gibbs, Broducer Josh Hamrick. I try to avoid playing against him in anything. Francisco Cruz, Artist I haven’t played against everyone, but I was in a game the other day where Shaun Martin dominated my team. Rahsaan Green, Sandbox Test Engineer I thought I was good till I played our testers. Kevin Hart, Associate Artist I'm the unluckiest, statistically speaking. Mat Noguchi, Programmer* It’s unanimous. Flamestryker - Aside from the Mail Sack, when can we expect our next stream of Destiny related information? Will this be on a weekly or a monthly basis? The Mail Sack won’t be your only or most theatrical source of Destiny news, but it’s inevitable that our ongoing weekly chat will touch on our game from time to time. We have a lot to show you before it’s your turn to play, and you won’t miss a beat if you’re paying attention to Bungie.net, or any of our official channels. What we don’t want to do is commit that parade of details to a predictable cadence. Its a Mirage - Did anyone come close to accidentally announcing Destiny? Are you kidding? Before its “official” reveal, Destiny was the worst kept secret in the history of video games – or secrets, for that matter. While it stung to have our showmanship disrupted by sneak previews that we didn’t plan, it was hard for us to complain about the fact that the world was hungry enough for details about our mysterious project to pry them from our clenched fists. Professor24 - When Jason Jones (or whoever) pitched the idea of Destiny, how was the companies reaction? Jason Jones doesn’t pitch anything to Bungie. He tells us that he has an idea, and we listen from the very edge of our seats. Mandroid - Will there be grinding? I hate having to grind for stuff. Destiny is an action game, so you’ll grind your enemies into dust. EpicWaffles - For the Environment artists and level designers: What is your process of designing then creating a level for Destiny? We have world designers now. We’ll tell you more about what that means later. frdeswaq - I am guessing that most of you have played some form of Destiny by now. What was your first reaction when you stepped into this brave new world? We play this game every day. Here’s what some of us said when we stepped into Destiny for the first time: “I want to know more and see more.” Rahsaan Green, Sandbox Test Engineer “Ermahgeeeeerrrrd.” Dawn Vu, Graphics Tester “I made the right decision coming to Bungie.” Tom Slattery, Localization Content Manager “Hey, this is pretty damn fun… wait, what time is it now? Uh, I’ve been playing for how long? Wow… Eh, a few more minutes won’t hurt.” Tom Gioconda, Engineer “OMG, it’s so pretty! When can I take this home again?” David Johnson, Engineer “I’ve never experienced a User Interface like this.” Kevin McGinnis, Art Lead (User Interface) “Oh god, how are we going to test this thing in the usability lab?” John Hopson, User Research Lead “Hey, that’s finally working!” Tyson Green, Staff Designer “We’ve got our work cut out for us.” David Candland, Senior Artist As you can probably tell, some of these first impressions were made earlier in the process than others, but Mr. Candland is right. There is still a lot of work to be done in building this brave new world. Fortunately, that work will be done by the most talented team that we have ever assembled. We’ll be sharing more soon. I can hear the whispers as I type these words. Until then, we’ll be seeing you in all the familiar places. - Dee J More from the Mailsack to come!

I for one was very disappointed by the lack of large maps in halo 4, true we have a lot of BTB maps but they are all fairly small and incapable of supporting heavy vehicle combat. What i would like to see in halo 5 is the introduction of a 16 v 16 heavy combat playlist which would pit teams against each other on very large maps loaded with air and ground vehicles. I would like to see the following vehicles in halo 5: -Warthog -Guass hog -Rocket hog -mortar hog -mongoose -Scorpion -Mantis -Falcon -Hornet -Wraith -Spectre -Banshee -Chopper -Ghost -Possibly even pelicans and spirits With this massive pallet of vehicles we should also get some new anti vehicle weapons here are some ideas: -Rocket launcher -Anti armor/air rockets (tracks ground and air targets, low splash damage) -Anti personnel rockets (no tracking, high splash damage) -Spartan Laser (how could anyone forget:) -Heavy Railgun (The most powerful weapon in the game, hold 2 rounds, has 2x and 10x scope, one hit kill on literally anything, pelicans included) -Plasma Launcher (practically the same as the one from reach but with better tracking and more damage) -Anti armor incendiary rounds (can be placed on map and are weapon specific, deal 2x the damage to vehicles) -Gauss turret (like the one on the warthog except in "shade turret" format -Rocket turret (like the ones on the mammoth in halo 4) -Oh and possibly mines as well (they could fit into a grenade slot on your HUD) These are just some cool ideas i had, feel free to critic them or add some ideas of your own

Want to know the answers to the community's questions straight from the creators themselves?? Hand-picked questions that are answered by Bungie. Be brave...read on! Image and content courtesy of www.Bungie.net. "A Most Quotable Mail Sack" Bungie's Mailsack - March 22, 2013 Let us begin this weekly sacrament of sharing and caring between Developers and Community by getting a piece of quick housekeeping out of the way. ODST VII - Will the community have any access to Bungie's GDC 2013 panel? For the less-informed, this shock trooper is talking about the Game Developers Conference. We’ve already announced Joe and Barry’s lecture, “Building a Brave New World.” You can grab the full session synopsis on the GDC website. If you want to be a fly on that wall, you’re in luck. Gamespot will be streaming GDC events on their website. You may want to pay special attention to the “Intended Audience,” however. The talk is not being built as a marketing asset, but rather an examination of world building pillars and challenges we’ve faced building a new universe from scratch. If you’re expecting a trailer, do yourself a favor and don’t tune in. If you love the sound of Joe Staten’s seductive voice, and can’t help but get lost in Barry’s chestnut eyes as he unfurls his beloved art pillars, stay tuned to Bungie.net and our social channels for more specific tune-in details next week. With that out of the way, let’s open the Sack. Forcewielder - For the members of the writing team: What were your majors, degrees and early experiences in your field of writing? And what things learned from that time in your life most influenced the early writing process for Destiny? I double-majored in Cinema/TV and English Creative Writing, then graduated and wrote my *** off (unpaid) while working my way up in the Industry. I read as many scripts as I could, even the horrible ones, and tried to steal learn as much as possible along the way. As for how that experience influences my work on Destiny, I’ll just say this: Early on, I learned that writing is 99% rewriting, and you can never get too precious about an idea. Game development is no different. It’s all about iteration. Sometimes painful, but part of the process. Dave Mongan, Senior Writer Trentonimor - What's the best experience you've ever had while working at Bungie? Working 17 hours straight, walking home at 3am, and wishing I could have stayed just a bit longer. Leland Dantzler, Tester Any day that they treat us with breakfast sandwiches ranks amongst the top days. Nothing beats a sausage patty on an English muffin to start the day. Kurt Nellis, Technical Cinematic Lead The after-work LAN parties are pretty spectacular. Never had a job where I finish working and voluntarily decide to hang around for several hours after! Jake Lauer, Web Development Engineer Crossbow. DeeJ’s Monitor. John Stvan, Graphic Designer The Pentathlon! Seriously, I really cannot wait for next year already. David Johnson, Engineer Signing someone's shoe at the Halo 2 launch party at the EMP. Mat Noguchi, Programmer* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9gBFmcg230&feature=player_embedded CJ Cowan, Story Design Lead During the run-up to Halo 3, Jonty Barnes and I went to the Tokyo Game Show. The gaming magazine Famitsu challenged MS Japan to a live Capture the Flag match. They asked one of us to participate with three members of the MS Japan team. Jonty immediately threw me under the bus and made me go play in this very public match. I was very nervous, not aided by the fact that it was 100 degrees in Tokyo and I was in a suit coat. The controller threatened to slip right out of my hand. Famitsu was so confident they would win, they agreed ahead of time they would shave their heads if they lost. We played on High Ground, which I knew quite well. As no one knew about the hatch, I quickly scored two flag captures and we won easily. Poor Famitsu. Jay Weinland, Senior Audio Lead Meeting fans of the studio is always one of the rewarding aspects of working at Bungie. James Tsai, Senior Designer Seeing my FX in the . Reed Shingledecker, Artist. yo momy hafu - Will Destiny be an easy pick up for new gamers? Well, yeah. The average game disc weighs about a half an ounce, so no one should have too hard a time picking it up. Was this a loaded question? Like “Is Destiny for noobs?” Or were you curious if our vision for this shared adventure would be too complex for a casual gamer to embrace? One thing that we’ve always strived to do at Bungie is to take rich and elaborate (and sometimes complex) experiences that we love and help bring them to a wider audience without losing what makes them great in the first place. We think we’ve done a good job of that in the past, but we’re looking forward to doing an even better job in the future. yo momy hafu - How do you exercise after spending most of your time on Destiny? I try to go to the gym (lifting, some cardio) in the mornings. I’m usually too exhausted to do it at the end of the day. Kurt Nellis, Technical Cinematic Lead I’m one of those goobers who still plays In the Groove and Pump It Up. For you non-rhythm-dance-game aficionados out there, these are essentially “hipster” variants of Dance Dance Revolution. Still lots of fun, and a great way to exercise. I have a couple awesome friends who own their own arcade cabinets, so I don't have to keep fishing for quarters. Daniel Hanson, Engineer Developer League Soccer. Pat Jandro, Senior Cinematic Designer Occasionally helping my wife with her horses is what passes for exercise for me usually. Tom Gioconda, Engineer I’m pretty rigorous about running 3 times a week. I go early in the morning before work, so I don’t have an excuse for later in the day. Some days are harder than others, but I’m always happy I’ve done it. Lars Bakken, Design Lead Every day at 1pm. 5 day lifting schedule. What’s up? Nate Hawbaker, Technical Artist I have a Doberman that needs a lot of exercise, so I take him out before work every morning. Unless it’s raining. Then he runs on the treadmill in the garage, and I sit next to it and play games or surf the web. Tom Slattery, Localization Content Manager Muay Thai, Cross Fit, Soccer, Math. Drew Smith, Producer EMJAYEL - Are the forums going to be incorporated into the Bungie Mobile App? That'd be nice. That would be very nice, eh? Aj6627 - Why is there still no news on bacon appearing in Destiny? I can neither confirm nor deny if swine survived the collapse of the Golden Age. Humanity’s luxury for consuming pork is a mystery that you will have to unlock as a player of the game. Another mystery is whether or not Urk, a confirmed vegetarian, [gentlemen, scholar, mentor, and curator of one of the best beards I have ever laid eyes upon,] will let this question stand. He doesn’t like it when I get cheeky with the fiction. Editor’s note: I will allow it. – Urk Macharius - How difficult was it to keep Destiny secret? Really difficulty, but we did it. We really pulled it off. Hard to believe. Yeah. SkilPhil - Fun facts are fun. Can you give us a fun fact about the development of Destiny? The entire case of Junior Mints that was added to the snack cabinets yesterday night was gone by 2pm today. Leland Dantzler, Tester Here in Cinematics Land, we often hold entire conversations with one another by only quoting lines from our scenes. We’re like an organic Destiny soundboard. Pat Jandro, Senior Cinematic Designer Current free space on my Dev Machine: 49.8GB / 698GB Code files I’ve checked in so far today: 48 Dice on my desk: 23 Food orders for last night’s playtest: 68 Beer orders: 32 Michael Williams, Senior Engineer I played our last build for 64 hours. Mat Noguchi, Programmer* ChorizoTapatio - This is for the multiplayer design team: What skills are required for your job? How did you learn what you needed to learn for your job? If I had to point to a specific skill, it’s the ability to rip apart anything and analyze how it works. How do the maps, gametypes, sandbox, vehicles, spawning system interact to create the experience? Critically, can you take a top-down view and understand why things are working and why they aren’t? Even more importantly, can you describe to another human being why you passionately think something sucks and propose a solution to fix it? I learned some of that skill set in college (critical thinking skills, writing, etc.). I honed them by working at my previous job, and now at Bungie. Before coming here, I played a virtual crap-ton of Multiplayer games - and still do - which prepared me to talk about games in context to the current landscape. Lars Bakken, Design Lead In general, being a multiplayer designer requires good critical-thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills on top of a love for games. I learned my trade first by playing, thinking about, and making games (…maps, mostly) as a devoted amateur, then making the jump to a professional game design gig when the opportunity arose. The best way to learn to make games is to make games. Derek Carroll, Senior Designer I came up on the level design side, making maps and mods in my spare time. That experience helped me learn the concepts of layout design and flow, which is critical in multiplayer shooters. Get involved in making something, then finish it and make something else. Beyond that, a lot still comes down to "just" playing games, but paying extra attention to game rules, balance, systems, etc. and learning how those interact to create the player vs. player experience. Think about your favorite memories of specific multiplayer games and what came together to create them. Crack open strategy guides to study map layouts and game rules/tactics. Read or watch interviews discussing the design of these games. Be a sponge, then start thinking of ways you might expand on those experiences or create new ones. Andrew Weldon, Designer Ser Jergen - "O Brave New World" and the Making of for limited editions of Halo 3 and 2 are some of my most cherished pieces of Bungie memorabilia, not to mention the countless ViDocs. That said has/is there an internal Bungie "Historian" who chronicles all the goings on behind the scenes at Bungie? In addition to the official Bungie multimedia you’ve seen, we’ve filmed around sixty hours of footage just for Destiny. Primarily, it’s used to populate our internal website, “Tiger University,” with content that chronicles our team meetings, show and tells, and internal Bungie Day presentations going all the way back to 2009ish. It’s a great resource to help new employees get up to speed quickly, and a great way to keep the entire team up to date on everything that’s happening on the project. It’s all put together by an in house crew, and yes, it’s the very same crew that helps make our ViDocs and in-engine trailers. They prefer to stay behind the camera, so we’re not going to out them individually. We will say, however, that they have a hand in just about every visual element you’ll lay eyes on, aside from the game itself. In fact, if you watch Act One of Bungie Community Theater, you’ll catch sight of one of their less metaphorical hands. Mr Reloadshot - Many of us are Halo fans, so what are some things being brought from Halo to Destiny? Many of us are Halo fans, too! Some of us even ran Halo clans. Some of us created Halo, and pretty much lived it for years. Pretty wild stuff, eh? If you fancy yourself a Halo aficionado, we hope you’ll recognize the Bungie signature, but it should go without saying that Destiny is a completely new universe. Joe will touch on this a little bit more at GDC, and of course, there’s also this from an earlier mail sack: “Destiny is an action game set in an amazing and mysterious new universe. If you love first person shooters – if you enjoy Bungie action games – then you’re going to love Destiny.” That’s right. We’re quoting ourselves now. But it felt relevant. The Mail Sack is now empty. With each week, the cycle repeats itself. You fill it. We spill it out all over the floor and decide which of you we want to quote with quotes all our own. See you again on Monday, and (if you’re extra studious) on Thursday. You can quote us on that. - Dee J More to come from Bungie's Mailsack when released with more answers to the community's questions.

A bungie.net user BadgerDeluxe spotted some unnoticed art from Bungies next game Destiny at the Sony PS4 presentation. I assume these have gone unnoticed by the majority of the community as I have never seen these posted before or seen any one discuss them. Now the they aren't the best quality but they do open the window to Destiny's world a little more. Check them out below. First up is this one, what we can see here is some kind of pillar or watch tower, I'm getting the feeling of a human presence from this image as to me the structure seems to have a human architectural look to it. The tower seems to watch over a deserted and dead piece of landscape with what it looks like the sun is taking up the entire horizon. Maybe this was a human colony world that the human once inhabited I'm guessing this could be Mercury which it is the planet that is the closest to the Sun and as it appears the Sun is massive in this image. Here is the next image this looks to be one of the walls that surrounds the last city on Earth as it is very similar to structures that can be seen in earlier reveals and which was said to be a wall surrounding of the city. In this image we have a human warrior (a guardian) that is encountering creatures that are currently called "space zombies" the human appears to be carrying out an attack towards them and it appears that he or she possess some kind of power as a streak of light it shooting from their hand and seems to tell us that the player will have some kind of power to use as a defensive move. In this image we can see a night time stage and a human soldier approaches a building (assuming an enemy occupied area) from a wooded environment. This could be showing us that we will engage in stealth missions. There isn't much to tell with this image, it appears that another guardian is battling of an enemy alien that appears to be a part of the Fallen faction. And the final image again seems to feature the Fallen but the character that it mainly focuses on seems to be a high ranking figure or possibly a leader within the faction as it's dressing and it's bodily actions seems to show that it is giving orders and shows superiority. This post has been promoted to an article

The folks over at Firestream.net have created a few Destiny movie wallpapers with inspiration from the 1977 Star Wars movie posters as well as other wallpapers for pc use, Twitter header images and for Android users. Content courtesy of www.Firestream.net. Check them out below... Guardian Wallpapers... Twitter headers... Android users... Enough wallpaper options to suit your Destiny needs!

Want to know the answers to the community's questions straight from the creators themselves?? Hand-picked questions that are answered by Bungie. Be brave...read on! Image and content courtesy of www.Bungie.net. "The Ides of Mail Sack" Bungie's Mailsack - March 15, 2013 POKEY CLYDE - Can you tell the tale of an adventure you've had while playing Destiny? No. Lorraine McLees, Senior Graphic Designer I loaded a build, shot a gun, killed a dude. I suck at stories. John Stvan, Graphic Designer This one time it was like “brrrt”, and then I was like “whoa” and then the guys were all “oh yeah!” I was like “Yeah, take that!” and then I had to get back to work. Cameron Pinard, Artist I found myself working with three separate groups of people at different times. That was pretty rad. Jake Lauer, Engineer Gunny 186 - Is the team ready for the massive onslaught of players on Destiny's release day? This isn’t our first rodeo. Bungie is no stranger to anxious mobs of players who rush home after a midnight launch and put our best-laid plans to the test. Since a release date hasn’t even been announced yet, we’ll let our team focus on some less frightening but equally important challenges. ibex1001 - What are some of the more tedious things that the testers have had to do, either for Halo or Destiny? We had to test squad joining and host migration combinations mixed with various types of network disconnects. I don’t want to have to go back into matchmaking or reform my squad because the host rage quit. Rahsaan Green, Sandbox Test Engineer Halo 2, simulating 14.4 modem bandwidth with massive packet loss, playing 16 player rockets on Midship. The netcode held up remarkably well, considering. Michael Williams, Senior Engineer I still have nightmares about capturing 500 flags. John Harris, Tester All I am going to say is, “If They Came To Hear Me Beg.” Travis Pijut, Test Engineer I had to verify a bug that involved making 65 transitions from one area to another and back. It was… delightful. Leland Dantzler, Tester This rock has a bad texture, this rock has a bad texture, this rock has a bad texture, oh look a hole in the ground, this rock has a bad texture. Thomas Wiley, Tester GPK Ethan - What do you guys plan on showing at GDC? The GDC is really more of an industry affair than a marketing venue. If that’s what you’re after, we’ve got some thoughts about what we might share from the proceedings. When last we checked in with Joe and Barry, their presentation was a whopping 157 slides long, and bursting with Bungie secret sauce. Warman422 - On those few moments where you aren't coding/playing Destiny, what do you enjoy doing? Making fun of Urk. Drew Smith, Producer Creating pixel art and sprites, often for roguelike games, under the pseudonym Oryx. Christopher Barrett, Art Director Some gaming, lately including Tomb Raider and Starcraft II. Regular Magic: The Gathering over lunch at work is great fun too. Tom Gioconda, Engineer I like hanging out at home with my wife and kids. Joe Sifferman, Associate Test Engineer Maintaining tall-ships, playing Magic, creating puzzles, and reading books. Michael Williams, Senior Engineer I like to make beer and mead then consume the aforementioned product while playing my favorite video games. Alan Stuart, Senior Engineer Playing the violin and planning my wedding. Reed Shingledecker, Artist Writing, recording, and then never finishing songs in my home studio. Jake Lauer, Engineer Golfing, smoking premium cigars, and throwing tomahawks at people in black ops. David Henry, Senior Audio Designer Playing with my son. He thinks handing me a cup and then taking it back is the coolest thing ever. It never gets old. Justin Truman, Engineering Lead MastaSin - In Destiny, can we play as the aliens or are we locked to the human race? And if we are, why are we locked to the human race? What's the reason? Not all of the aliens in Destiny are evil, just like not all humans are good. We’ve barely scratched the surface on the character and customization options you’ll have access to in Destiny, but we’re not going to dig in any deeper today. Element ZER0 - How big are "levels" in Destiny compared to the levels from your past Halo games? The scope and scale really don’t tell half the story. At a high level, we now have what we call World teams. As the name implies, they’re less concerned about atomic “levels,” instead focused holistically on each world’s visual themes and the various destinations and activities you’ll find when you set foot in an LZ. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, of course – there are a number of teams that fall outside the umbrella of World teams whose contributions are equally instrumental – but ultimately our grand and overarching goal is to make Destiny feel like a world you visit, not just a disc in your drive. Don Shibz - Which planet do you guys most enjoy adventuring on and why? I personally love the Moon (yes, I realize this is not a planet). There is a spark of childhood wonder looking on the horizon and seeing the Earth in the distance. Just call me Neil Armstrong. Drew Smith, Producer Whichever is pretty this week. Lorraine McLees, Senior Graphic Designer Venus. It’s pretty and I like the Combatants you find there. Joe Sifferman, Associate Test Engineer There’s no place like home – there’s some great stuff set right here on Earth. It’s always neat seeing a modern-ish era presented as archaeological ruins/relics. Andrew Weldon, Designer Right now, I’m pretty partial to the red sands of Mars, but my favorite seems to change each time I land on a planet. Michael Williams, Senior Engineer Venus by far! No wait, Mars!!! Well, actually the Moon is pretty sweet when I think about it. But if I had to choose, I would say good ‘ole Earth! Reed Shingledecker, Artist yo momy hafu - Is Destiny going to have any kind of community creation tools in it? The entire game will be a community creation tool. As you encounter other brave heroes on your path, you’ll be very aware of the other people playing this game. On some occasions, they may save your life. Mental - What is your favorite new feature in Destiny that you can give us an extremely vague hint at? Crossing paths. Michael Williams, Senior Engineer Moving. Andrew Weldon, Designer We just got this sweet new import feature that speeds up workflow. Cameron Pinard, Artist Particle wrapping. Reed Shingledecker, Artist slunkling - So, you've given us sparing details about the game so far, understandably. We got guns like the Gravesend MkII and The Fate of All Fools, care to give us another one? For reveal, we showed off and named a good half-dozen guns for our friends in the press corps, including one of Staten’s favorites, Thorn. Here’s what he had to say about it: “The City wants us to recover a piece of Charlemagne, one of the great Warminds of the Golden Age—a vast machine intelligence built by the ancient Powers of Mars. The Cabal do everything they can to try and stop our descent, but we keep pushing, rifles cracking and Traveler energy boiling from our fists until the only thing left standing is us, and the only thing left of the Cabal is the loot they hid in Charlemagne’s vault. Jason finds a new shotgun – perfect for his close-quarters combat style. I find a rare hand cannon that looks like it was carved from the dark heart of one of the Cracked Moons of Saturn. It feels good in my hand, and glows like starlight when I prime its magazine. I am instantly and totally in love.” Barry also showed off Pocket Infinity and Super Good Advice, but those are toys we’ll save for another day. Xenos85 - What class of the announced classes is your favorite? The classiest one. Cameron Pinard, Artist Warlock, but I am a sucker for magic users. Drew Smith, Producer My favorite class switches weekly (or daily). Rahsaan Green, Sandbox Test Engineer Currently dueling between the Hunter and Warlock. The Titan may come crashing in and punch them in the face at any moment. Andrew Weldon, Designer Hunter. Fell in love the first time I met her. Jaime Jones painted the first hunter permutation as female and in my mind associated with that class more as a result. Combination of speed and strength. I also liked the shorter cape and rather sexier shape. Lorraine McLees, Senior Graphic Designer Two Words: Titan [Redacted]! Amos Yuen, Associate Engineer one eight four - What has been your biggest setback so far? Not enough time in the day! Lorraine McLees, Senior Graphic Designer Whenever we hit a new internal milestone, all our characters get deleted. Michael Williams, Senior Engineer My first day was the day the studio took the hands-at-sides-wearing-blazers picture. I knew it was going to be a weird time from then on. Jake Lauer, Engineer Real blocking bug by Timmins in January: 49361 – there is no ice cream in the freezer. Leland Dantzler, Tester I was backing up looking at some effects that I was working on and fell into the Hellmouth. Reed Shingledecker, Artist shmuel30 - How does it feel to have been working on Destiny for so long and being finally able to release more information about it to us? I no longer feel like a huge [redacted] making small talk with friends when the subject of how work is going comes up. Tom Gioconda, Engineer Now the kids can say “Destiny” instead of “the new game mommy’s working on…” I like how they say “Destiny” in hushed tones, though. It’s a relief to be sure. Lorraine McLees, Senior Graphic Designer Liberating. It’s also fun to read all of the comments and speculation out there. Joe Sifferman, Associate Test Engineer It’s nice to not have to do the whole “we haven’t announced anything” but now there is the totally new problem of me having no idea what we have and haven’t talked about. Cameron Pinard, Artist I still plead the fifth on everything. Rachel Swavely, Technical Artist It’s like playing with the best toy in the world and finally getting to show it to your friends but still not letting them play with it. John Stvan, Graphic Designer I’ve only been on the project for 5 months, and I was literally bursting at the seams. I can’t imagine what some coworkers who’ve been working on it for years had to endure. Leland Dantzler, Tester I’ve spent 3 years having to say “the game I’m working on,” and now I can shorten that to three syllables. Justin Truman, Engineering Lead. Be safe, everyone. Don’t make the same mistake as Caesar. Heed your own warnings. We wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fun we’re planning for you. - Dee J Be on the lookout for the latest Bungie Mailsack as they are released with more answers to the community's questions.

A bungie.net user BadgerDeluxe spotted some unnoticed art from Bungies next game Destiny at the Sony PS4 presentation. I assume these have gone unnoticed by the majority of the community as I have never seen these posted before or seen any one discuss them. Now the they aren't the best quality but they do open the window to Destiny's world a little more. Check them out below. First up is this one, what we can see here is some kind of pillar or watch tower, I'm getting the feeling of a human presence from this image as to me the structure seems to have a human architectural look to it. The tower seems to watch over a deserted and dead piece of landscape with what it looks like the sun is taking up the entire horizon. Maybe this was a human colony world that the human once inhabited I'm guessing this could be Mercury which it is the planet that is the closest to the Sun and as it appears the Sun is massive in this image. Here is the next image this looks to be one of the walls that surrounds the last city on Earth as it is very similar to structures that can be seen in earlier reveals and which was said to be a wall surrounding of the city. In this image we have a human warrior (a guardian) that is encountering creatures that are currently called "space zombies" the human appears to be carrying out an attack towards them and it appears that he or she possess some kind of power as a streak of light it shooting from their hand and seems to tell us that the player will have some kind of power to use as a defensive move. In this image we can see a night time stage and a human soldier approaches a building (assuming an enemy occupied area) from a wooded environment. This could be showing us that we will engage in stealth missions. There isn't much to tell with this image, it appears that another guardian is battling of an enemy alien that appears to be a part of the Fallen faction. And the final image again seems to feature the Fallen but the character that it mainly focuses on seems to be a high ranking figure or possibly a leader within the faction as it's dressing and it's bodily actions seems to show that it is giving orders and shows superiority. View full article

This will be thread dedicated to all know concept art work and various screen shots that show Destiny's lush environments. Destiny Concept Art Work Destiny Game Logo Concept Art Work "The Traveler's Rest" "The Vault" The "Captain" "Fireteam" "The Vex" "The Pike" "Dark Patrol" "Ghost Town" "Citadel" "The Black Garden" "Cassini Derelict" "Mars Exclusion Zone" "Hellmouth" "Ocean of Storms" "Fallen" "Guardians" We will add work to this thread as it becomes available.

Yesterday bungie tweeted that an ARG (alternate reality game) has begun for destiny and it begins at this site http://alphalupi.bungie.net/. ARG's have been used for bungies games since Halo 2 back in 2004 which was I Love Bees (ILB) and IRIS for Halo 3. So for Destiny another one begins and once clicking on the linked site provided above a series of dots is presented which are geomantic symbols and you are required to align them up in a correct order and it will reveal a picture. You will be required to do this for each one on each day of this week. For anyone who has missed yesterdays (like myself) you can still go back and do that one. So if you are into this kind of thing then get cracking and solves the puzzles. How this ARG works On alphalupi.bungie.net there are seven sections one for each day of this week and in order to access each section you need to align the dots to make the correct symbol. Once doing that it will show you two images, one on the left is a blurred image with text and the one on the right is a black sqaure with white dots (called an active baseline). Those white dots are nodes and the more people that are on viewing a particular section the more white nodes will appear. Once there are enough nodes appearing it reveals a code of some kind, a QR code, URL or something else that reveals the blurry text. Here is a picture of what these sections look like. Update 1 Monday 11th Feb - you had to align the dots to make this symbol The active baseline then revealed a URL which then revealed the first piece of text. http://alphalupi.bun...98862748014.jpg Update 2 Tuesday 12th Feb - you had to align the dots to make this symbol The active baseline revealed this QR code and when scanned it revealed the second piece of text. http://alphalupi.bun...09394972304.jpg Update 3 Wednesday 13th Feb - you had to align the dots make this symbol So far this code has been found in the active baseline but has not yet been fully revealed as there needs to be more activity on it, once it's fully revealed it should lead us to the third piece of text. Ok the code above was another URL which reveals the third peice of text http://alphalupi.bun...39283143985.jpg Update 4 Thursday 14th February - you had to align the dots make this symbol Once there was enough activity on the baseline it revealed this code which was another URL, the URL revealed the forth piece of text. http://alphalupi.bun...70595463907.jpg Update 5 Friday 15th February - you had to align the dots to make this symbol After enough activity on the baseline it allowed us to reveal the fifth piece of text http://alphalupi.bun...34939781476.jpg Update 6 Saturday 16th February - you had to align the dots to make this symbol After enough activity was on the baseline users retrieved the hidden code that brought us to the sixth piece of text. http://alphalupi.bun...31500044149.jpg Update 7 Sunday 17th February - you had to align the dots to make this symbol After enough activity on the baseline the hidden code within it brought us to the seventh and last piece of text. http://alphalupi.bun...99634869174.jpg For each of the text images there was some circular patterns in the background and all the images can be linked together to create one big image. http://alphalupi.bun...ceived_1920.jpg This webpage reveals all the text images that was hidden in each section throughout this week, along with a destiny themed wallpaper and transmission that is speculated to be a piece of a Destiny soundtrack. http://alphalupi.bun...cessResult.html This post has been promoted to an article

Reporters caught up with Bungie's COO Pete Parson to talk about life after Halo and their next game destiny. This is no doubt the biggest challenge Bungie has come up against, Pete explains to us how the idea of destiny came about, how much of an impact their project will be on them, the technical side of destiny and more. Credits to Lil Dog for finding these. Articles and interviews conducted by VetureBeat and TechHive VentureBeat Interview Parsons left his job at Microsoft to become the COO at Bungie after Halo launched. In 2007, he left Microsoft to start Meteor Solutions, a viral-marketing startup, and worked double duty for a time. As Bungie prepared to leave the Microsoft fold and move on to a new franchise, Parsons came back. He returned to the studio in 2010. Parsons is now fully focused on getting Destiny out the door and managing the culture and talent inside Bungie’s 80,000-square-foot headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. After a few years of secrecy, Bungie finally revealed concept art from its new game universe while announcing that Destiny would debut on the PlayStation 4 (and likely other platforms). We visited Parsons at Bungie HQ last week, and here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. GamesBeat: You must feel good right now. Pete Parsons: [Laughs] Well, I think it feels good to be Bungie right now. We’re always about doing great things and ambitious things. That’s because we have such a great team, because we can do that. It’s a great time to be at Bungie. It’s an energy that many people haven’t felt since some of the earliest days of Halo. That’s exciting. We still have a lot of the old guard around, but we’ve been able to bring on a massive amount of new talent. GamesBeat: Did somebody in particular sell you on the idea of Destiny? I think you came in after it started, right? Parsons: No, we’ve all been working from the very beginning. Well, it depends on how you look at it. Destiny has been an idea bouncing around since even before the technology to make it existed. Destiny is very much a product of everybody at Bungie, but its inception comes from Jason [Jones, co-founder of Bungie]. This is very much a vision that Jason has. Then, he gathers a small group of really talented people who have been here a long time, and they begin hammering on it. It’s had multiple incarnations until it finally landed into what it is today. That’s fun to watch. Not just on technology, but art and story. GamesBeat: It sounds like you did have options, though. Was there a point where you bought into Destiny and said, “I want to do this too?” For 10 years or whatever it will be. Parsons: As naïve as this may sound, if Jason believes in something and he’s ready to go for it, I’m in. No joke, I still walk in the door every day and think, “Who gets to do this? This is awesome, to be a part of this thing.” Even when I’m having a ****ty day, I feel that way. There are so many other things I could do that, for me, wouldn’t be as satisfying or as interesting. They might be enriching. They might satisfy some level of my curiosity. They might be exciting. But there’s something about these people and this place. GamesBeat: Did you feel any tug when Halo went off in another direction, with Microsoft’s 343 Industries, and then Bungie went its separate way with Destiny? Parsons: Personally, I did not. I love the Halo universe. I think it’s great. It inspires me. It inspires my children. They’ve never played, but they know the universe. One, though, I’ve spent a lot of time with Halo. Two, the mythic science fiction of Destiny immediately attracted me. It was that first image … It’s a simple image, but it took weeks of back-and-forth to put together. There were a few images already, maybe three or four, but they didn’t speak to what it was. The moment that image was done, it was like, “That’s it.” That’s the game. That’s the idea. That’s a place that I want to be. GamesBeat: Is that published now? Which image is that? Parsons: I don’t know if it’s ever been published. It was just this very striking image that had that feeling of — this is not purely a science fiction universe. It’s not just about two big military-industrial complexes smashing into each other. It’s a place with myths and lore. There’s a guy with sci-fi armor on, and yet he’s got a rifle that looks like it’s from an ancient desert somewhere. It was super cool. That certainly spoke to me. I didn’t look back. At the time, we were working on both Halo: ODST and Halo:Reach. I still love the Halo universe. It’s an interesting place. But I think what we’ve been able to do is create an incredibly deep fiction and a place that you’re going to want to be in. GamesBeat: You had a leak. You had some interesting reactions. What was it like, looking at the reaction from the inside? Parsons: You’re never really excited when you first learn that a leak happens. Then you get to see the reaction. We had this really quick thing. We said, “There’s a leak happening. We can either say nothing, or we can say, ‘Yeah.’” Instead of looking at images that we didn’t want you to see, let’s give you one that we want you to see. So, we released the picture of the Fallen. When our community, who we love, reacts so positively to an image — “Oh my God. That’s so great. That’s a place I want to be in. I can’t wait to learn more about that” — we go from, “Oh, man” to “Sweet!” Within less than half an hour, we were like, “This is the course of action. Let’s go. TechHive Interview Game On: Where did the idea for Destiny come from? Parsons: After Halo, we asked ourselves some tough questions. What was worth doing? What comes next? How do we turn a genre on its head? We have a studio filled with incredibly talented and passionate people, and we could have pointed them at anything, but we wanted to do something ambitious. That ambition was Destiny—a universe filled with mystery and adventure set within our own solar system. What were your goals heading into this new project? We took all of our combined talent and experience and set out to make a game that would entirely redefine how people play action games. It’s a Bungie action game set in a bold new universe. Players create their own unique characters that grow and change over time. From the ground up, Destiny is built to be a social and cooperative game, but it’s also filled with a broad range of activities, from solo to group, casual to intense and cooperative to competitive. What was it like starting anew after being immersed in the same universe for so long? Creating this world is the most ambitious challenge we've ever taken on. It’s a new intellectual property with greater breadth of scope than anything we've done before. Huge worlds, larger than any we've ever built. And these are living, open worlds, with evolving stories, changing time of day, and plenty of players. That’s a bold vision, but it creates a lot of challenges, because Destiny is unlike any other action game. How did this impact the creativity of your team for Destiny? It’s an exciting time to be at Bungie and it started the moment we made the decision to commit the entire team to this single vision. That energy grows with each and every milestone. Every day I walk in the door I am inspired by the insane amount of talent that work and play within our walls. What are the challenges that exist today in launching a new IP like Destiny? We have a bold vision that requires a scary amount of art, design, technology, and creative focus to pull off. It’s a huge challenge. For example, our technology has to take this great action game, fuse it with a richly simulated world that we fill with unique player characters, each with their own history and unique abilities and characteristics. Our technology has to create a seamless social world where those players can meet up and experience their own shared stories, and it has to do it all invisibly. How do you hope Destiny pushes the shooter genre forward? We want players to tell their own stories. We’re going to give them the ability to customize their character, and their experience. Then they’re going to go on epic adventures with their friends. You can play Destiny solo, but we believe that everything fun to do in Destiny is more fun when you’re playing with friends. It’s that unpredictable human element that will create the most important moments in Destiny. Can you talk about the technology engine, Grognok, behind this game and what you feel it opened up for your development? We had to rebuild our engine and tools to support Destiny’s enormous size, scope and vision. Our graphics engine, world builder, lighting engine, and more were all custom-built to support the team’s vision. But all the tech doesn’t mean anything by itself. What matters is how it creates player stories. It’s been a huge challenge, but we’ve already begun to see huge rewards for all the hard work. How have you utilized performance capture or new technology to work with the actors in this story? Bungie has our own full-featured performance and motion capture studio on site, lovingly dubbed “Spandex Palace.” We’re not ready to crack the lid on the story, or our talented actors yet, but it’s something we’re looking forward to talking about in the future. What are you most excited about gamers being able to experience with Destiny? I hope gamers will put Destiny on the same shelf of great memories as they put amazing entertainment experiences like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Lord of the Rings. I believe the efforts and talent of our team is creating a universe that will ultimately have deep meaning for the people who come and visit our world. Halo has become a fixture in eSports. Have you thought of eSports (something Treyarch focused on with Call of Duty: Black Ops II) when designing the multiplayer of Destiny? We’re not talking specifics about any of Destiny’s core activities at this time. We’re too busy playing. View full article

Here we have 3 new pieces of Destiny concept are have just been discovered from the Game Informer magazine. Thanks to Drizzy_dan for showing me these images. This image is on one of Jupiter's, as you can see there are building ruins that's confined in an icy environment most likey one of the locations humanity once colonized and one of the locations we may visit and reclaim. This image appears to be in space as two space crafts fly through huge structures, it looks as if the structure is falling apart or is heavily damaged maybe a battle is taking place there. And the third picture, it looks very industrial factory facility. As you can see what appears to be some kind of tower buildings as there are people or aliens that are about to enter one and they supported by huge chains. To me the image above reminds me a little of the tower structures from bungies MAC game Marathon 2: Durandal (image below) with having somewhat similar shapes and the patterns of lights on them. View full article

I made a post about bungie's new game "Destiny" and how it could possibly connect to an ancient belief called "The seven heavens" Which can be read here. Oakley HiDef from THFE contacted me to have a discussion about this theory as he was interested with it and wanted make a video about it. Bungie have a history of connecting their video game story's to biblical and mythological events, so for any of you who are interesting with the vast depths of bungie's story telling this may catch your interest. So here is the video about Oakley discussing mine and his theories about Destiny and the seven heavens. A big thank you to Oakley for taking an interest in my post and taking the time discussing it, making a video and sharing it View full article

Bungie has a history of connecting their story's or making references to biblical and Mythological event's. Fpr example in Halo the forerunners made an array of weapons which is made up of 8 installations, 7 of them being the actual weapons (the rings) and 1 of them being the place to activate the rings (the ark). The purpose of this array was to wipe out a parasitic threat called the flood and as I stated the ark is the place where is can happen. So this is a reference to the biblical event of Noah's ark, Noah's ark was to save life from the flooded earth, also the covenant seen these installations as sacred structures and they wanted to activate them believing they would be come gods and as you know the ark is the place to do this which is another biblical reference to story "The ark of the covenant. Another reference bungie used was Mjolnir was from Norse mythology and it was the hammer of Thor, Mjolnir were cyborgs the humans used in the game marathon and also the name of a type of spartan armor in Halo. They were many more of these kind of references but I just wanted to use a few as examples. So what has Bungie been doing this time for destiny? Well I think we might have some connections between destiny and an ancient religious story called the "The seven heavens" or "The seven layers of heaven" which are affiliated with some parts of Christianity and Islam. They can be read here. http://www.archangel...en_heavens.html http://www.faithfree...s/sina40712.htm It was believed that heaven was made up of seven layers, here is a quote from the article from the first link explaining this belief. "The ancients believed that there were Seven Heavens which related to the seven observable planets in our solar system. The Sun and Moon, where referred to as planets by the ancients due to lack astronomical understanding and with these they also included the five planets which were visible by the naked eye, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. According to this belief each planet occupied its own layer of Heaven or potion of the sky/space, each occupying an orbit further and further away from Earth, as Earth was the considered centre of the Universe. Today we realise that this apparent distance is in fact the planets orbit around the Sun, not distance from the Earth" These planets also represented each day of the week as stated in the second link provided above. Monday to Moon Tuesday to Mars Wednesday to Mercury Thursday to Jupiter Friday to Venus Saturday to Saturn Sunday to Sun Two weeks ago on the week of February 11th Bungie started an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for Destiny, this game was on a website called alphalupi.bungie.net and on that site there are seven sections that correspond to each day of the week. To access each section on the day it corresponds to we had to rearrange a series of dots, once these dots were arranged correctly they made up geomantic figures. Geomantic figures was an art that was practised in the Europe during the middle ages. There are 16 of these figures and they each represents the state or mind of the world and each figure is associated with the planets in the solar system. Out of the 16 figures here are the seven that Bungie used for the ARG. The first symbol to retrieve was this This symbol is called Populous which is Latin for "The people" and it is affiliated with the moon. Just like in the seven heavens story the moon represents Monday which was the day we had to retrieve this symbol in the ARG The Second symbol was this This symbol is called Puer which is Latin for "The Boy" and it is affiliated with the planet Mars, and in the seven heavens story Mars represents Tuesday which was the day this symbol was used in the ARG. The third symbol was this This symbol is called Albus which is Latin for "White" and it is affiliated with the planet Mercury which represents Wednesday and it was the day this symbol was used in the ARG. The fourth symbol was this This symbol is called Acquisito which is Latin for "Gain" and it is affiliated with the planet Jupiter which represents Thursday the same day this symbol was used for the ARG. The fifth symbol was this This symbol is called Puella which is Latin for "The girl" and it is affiliated with the planet Venus which represents Friday the same day this symbol was used for the ARG. The sixth symbol was this This symbol is called Tristitia which is Latin for "Sorrow" and it is affiliated with the planet Saturn which represents Saturday the same day this symbol was used for the ARG. The seventh and final symbol was this This symbol is called Fortuna Major which is Latin for "The Greater Fortune" and it is affiliated with the Sun which represents Sunday and you guessed it, it's the same day this symbol was used for the ARG. That was the first connection I believe destiny has to the seven heavens, the symbols representing the planets from the story and were used on the same days that the planets represented, In my opinion I think that may be a solid connection. The next thing that at noticed was this piece of the the story from the second link. "There are seven earths. The first is called Ramaka, beneath which is the Barren Wind, which can be bridled by no fewer than seventy thousand angels. With this wind God destroyed the people of Ad. The inhabitants of Ramaka are a nation called Muwashshim, upon whom is everlasting torment and divine retribution. The second earth is called Khalada, wherein are the implements of torture for the inhabitants of Hell. There dwells a nation called Tamis, whose food is their own flesh and whose drink is their own blood. The third earth is called Arqa, wherein dwell mulelike eagles with spearlike tails. On each tail are three hundred and sixty poisonous quills. Were even one quill placed on the face of the earth, the entire universe would pass away. The inhabitants thereof are a nation called Qays, who eat dirt and drink mothers' milk. The fourth earth is called Haraba, wherein dwell the snakes of Hell, which are as large as mountains. Each snake has fangs like tall palm trees, and if they were to strike the hugest mountain with their fangs it would be leveled to the ground. The inhabitants of this earth are a nation called Jilla, and they have no eyes, hands or feet but have wings like bats and die only of old age. The fifth earth is called Maltham, wherein stones of sulphur hang around the necks of infidels. When the fire is kindled the fuel is placed on their breasts, and the flames leap up onto their faces, as He hath said: The fire whose fuel is men and stones (2:24), and Fire shall cover their faces (14:50). The inhabitants are a nation called Hajla, who are numerous and who eat each other. The sixth earth is called Sijjin. Here are the registers of the people of Hell, and their works are vile, as He hath said: Verily the register of the actions of the wicked is surely Sijjin (83:7). Herein dwells a nation called Qatat, who are shaped like birds and worship God truly. The seventh earth is called Ajiba and is the habitation of Iblis. There dwells a nation called Khasum, who are BLACK and short, with claws like lions. It is they who will be given dominion over Gog and Magog, who will be destroyed by them…" Note that each of the heavens/worlds has only one nation, just like in destiny humanity is reduced to only one last city on the planet and the people in that city are probably known as the last and only nation left on the planet. We could later find out that there could be 6 other planets that are suffering the same situation at earth but at the minute this theory isn't certain yet. Going back to the first linked site I may have found 1 or 2 other connections to destiny, but again this theory isn't certain yet but I thought it was worth mentioning. "The First Heaven was also considered to be the place where Adam and Eve lived and here you would experience winds and the landscape contains water and clouds. The Second Heaven was the place that Moses visited and is considered to be the place where the Fallen Angels are imprisoned. Moses visted Raquia and met the angel Nuriel who hade governorship over 50 myriads of angels, who are composed water and fire. The Third Heaven has a small contradiction, Firstly it is considered the place of the Garden of Eden, juxtaposed to this, it is also thought to be the location of Hell to the North .It is also reputed to be the home of the Tree of Life. The Fourth Heaven contains the heavenly city of Jerusalem. Also the location of the Garden of Eden The Fifth Heaven, Samael the Ruling Archangel is served by two millions of angels. These are divided among the four quarters of the world, in each quarter three, who control the twelve months, and over these are twelve chief angels. The northern regions of this Heaven is the area where the Watchers, (Grigori) reside. To the South reside the angels (ministering) who endlessly chant the praises of God." The Sixth Heaven, Archangel Sachiel, with two millions of angels. The angel Zebul is placed over these during the day, and another angel, Sabath, during the night. They rule over kings, create fear, and give protection from enemies. This Heaven is covered in snow and frequently experiences many storms. The Seventh Heaven is reputed to be the Holiest of all the Heavens and contains the Throne of Glory which is attended by the Seven Archangels.The 7th Heaven is the home of God and his Throne. He is surrounded by the angels of the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Fanuel (Penuel) are introduced as "the four angels of the face of the Lord."In Enoch, lxxi. 7-13, these four stand near the crystal throne of God, which, encircled by fire, is surrounded by the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Ofanim. Click here to see Angelic Hierachy page Note the second heaven, which is Mars is the place of the Fallen Angels. Destiny features and Alien faction called "The Fallen" which control an exclusion zone on Mars. The third world is where the Garden of Eden is and it is thought to be the location of the hell of the north, in destiny there is a place called the black garden, why would it be called the "black" garden. Maybe it is place of evil or a fierce enemy? Also worth noting that there is a place in destiny called "hell mouth" And the fifth world has angel or being that control the twelve months, to me that sounds like time control or time travel and in destiny there is a faction of robots/ AI's called "Vex" and they have the ability to time travel. Thats all I have so far, this may seem crazy or over the top to some but I believe these may have connections and if you think about it, it would seem that it does. View full article