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LOS ANGELES — Ever since it left behind the Halo series, the acclaimed Bungie development studio has been working on its upcoming online first-person shooting game. And this week, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the developer is finally showing off a playable version of the game.
In fact, the demo just happened on a giant screen at the Sony PlayStation pre-E3 press briefing. Jason Jones, one of the founders of Bungie, is on stage demonstrating a two-player cooperative gameplay session. We know it is live in part because the game’s frame rate slowed down a couple of times during the demo.
Destiny is a highlight of the Sony press conference today at the beginning of the trade show, which we expect to draw 45,000 to 50,000 industry professionals to Los Angeles.
“Clearly everybody wanted to see gameplay,” said Pete Parsons the chief operating officer at Bungie, in a recent press briefing. “We spent many sleepless nights to bring destiny live to the E3 floor.”
In the gameplay, the two shooters used powerful single-shot revolvers against the big and fearsome red-cloaked enemies, who look and sound like Elites from Halo. The players met up with another group o f players who had to dispatch the enemies in a “public event” that other players could join. They proceeded to fend off alien fire teams and a big boss.
Destiny is due out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2014. Activision Blizzard is the publisher, and it’s bills Destiny as “the next evolution in interactive entertainment.” Destiny’s sci-fi world is a first-person shooter in a shared, persistent online world.
Little by little, Bungie has been opening up. The company has had to keep a lot of secrets, especially since it split from Microsoft in 2009 and began working on a top-secret project. We learned earlier this year that the project codenamed Tiger is in fact Destiny
In Destiny’s story, you become one of the Guardians of the last city on Earth. The tale traverses the ancient ruins of the solar system, from the “red dunes of Mars to the lush jungles of Venus.” You’re trying to recover Earth’s lost glory and stave off a collapse of soci.ety.
In a trailer, we saw some beautiful environments of the future, including starfighter action in the skies. Andrew House, head of Sony’s games business, said that Sony has a long-term partnership with Activision over the Destiny property.
After a couple of leaks spilled the beans, Bungie acknowledged Destiny and said it would make a series of games over the next 10 years. For the first time since the Halo series started more than a decade ago, Bungie is working on a series that’s multiplatform, publishing on platforms such as the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 along with the next Xbox and perhaps the PC.
Check out our story on a guided tour of Bungie’s headquarters.