Bungie, the creators of the Halo series and the upcoming Destiny, have had years of experience bringing to life vibrant and unique worlds that are memorable for players. Design director Joe Staten and art director Christopher Barrett recently sat down with Gamespot to reveal how they approach the worldbuilding aspect of science fiction games. Staten believes that it is important to show the ugly side of humanity, to balance out the heroics players undertake during Destiny and other games.
"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."
Barrett also points out that, even in grim, gritty games, it is important to add a sense of hope in a world, so that players will want to continue visiting the world the developers have created.
"...there's a lot of games that intentionally are making it a really grim or dire world and we think that we, intentionally, wanted to make a place--if we're expecting players to come back here every day over and over we wanted to build a world that's accessible to everyone and hopeful and fun to visit. And sure, you can have evil spaceships and zombies and stuff like that, but those are the things that give flavor, but at the core, we want to make a beautiful, hopeful place that's inspiring to people."
It appears that Bungie is very serious about the type of environment they produce for their first original game outside the Halo universe. Destiny is confirmed to come out on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Xbox 360.