Destiny's team size is now around 500 people

Hopefully among that lot there are at least 100 of them taking care of us gamers who have next to no interest in playing with other people.

Why dont you want to play with other people? Borderlands 2 was way more fun when you play co op and destiny looks like it'll be the same

Day 0 for me.

Hoping for a collectors edition as well.

Same, I also preordered to take part in the beta
 
I thought this meant playercount at first and that it was just a response to the Titanfall hullabaloo.

I have really high hopes for this game. I can't wait for it.

Edit: as far as speculation that the game is a lot bigger than Bungie has let on, that's kind of their MO. They love to keep secrets.
 
Guessing GI generalized the total count of everyone working on the game as developers, whether they are Bungie, Activision Central Services or marketing or PR, or DemonWare. Highly doubt this is just Bungie.
 
So, rumblings about things nobody can talk about yet?

Hard to put a finger on it but minimal game footage, locations, goals, story and a delay in release date with years and years of development plus a huge workforce....hmmm either Bungie are in Halo 2 levels of development hell or they're making sure everything they want in is there at launch.

I'm guessing it was the first bit last year and this year/delay is the latter. I'm also wondering about cross platform play...
 
And yet it looks worse than No Mans Sky. :)

Probably expecting 15 million sale, good luck to them.
 
That is impressive.

Keeping the one unified vision with such a large team working on the same project must be incredibly hard.
 
i kinda disagree with the business decision.

Yes its the same guys that made Halo, but this is a new IP and the mainstream have shown that they buy sequels.

Plus it must be awfully hard trying to coordinate a group of that size especially when its a new IP and you have to make sure the game doesn't lose its focus...

Also I don't understand how western devs always have such large teams... demons and dark souls shows you don't need such a large team (probably around 50-100 people) and you can still get a massive game.
 
Hard to put a finger on it but minimal game footage, locations, goals, story and a delay in release date with years and years of development plus a huge workforce....hmmm either Bungie are in Halo 2 levels of development hell or they're making sure everything they want in is there at launch.

I'm guessing it was the first bit last year and this year/delay is the latter. I'm also wondering about cross platform play...
And considering the length of time they expect to support this game I'd imagine that a good amount of work is going towards content we won't even see at release. World-building stuff, progression systems, laying the groundwork for the sequels and expansions to come.

I know the entire solar system is supposed to be playable but I have no idea what that means in practical terms. Will each planet have a Borderlands sized zone? Bigger? Smaller?

Is the true meat in terms of legs to be found in competitive? Is the game linear or designed for replayability? New game+? MMO-like endgame concepts?

Should we consider this game to be comparable in scope to something like Skyrim? or GTA? Or more like an Assassin's Creed game maybe?

Bungie is about to realize the promise of Resistance 2 coop and take it to another level.

In Bungie I trust.
I do like the sound of this, but part of that co-op allure was the dynamic objectives. Would love to see something along these lines.
 
There is no way No Mans Sky will reach the same scope as Destiny.

Very different looking games to be fair, just a light jab with a smile. Still, with procedurally generated content I wouldn't say scope is holding No Mans Sky back. More likely polish, game mechanics etc..
 
Very different looking games to be fair, just a light jab with a smile. Still, with procedurally generated content I wouldn't say scope is holding No Mans Sky back. More likely polish, game mechanics etc..
Games in a similar manner tend to be scope and not much more. I'm not sure a game like that is able to hold any real interest outside of the initial novelty -- but it would be great if they are able to nail it.
 
Very different looking games to be fair, just a light jab with a smile. Still, with procedurally generated content I wouldn't say scope is holding No Mans Sky back. More likely polish, game mechanics etc..
Very true. They are different and I'm looking forward to both. I guess I'm still a little salty after the VGX No Mans Sky thread in which people were claiming that No Mans Sky was somehow larger than Destiny which automatically made it better. They are both big in their own ways and each has different special qualities.
 
And considering the length of time they expect to support this game I'd imagine that a good amount of work is going towards content we won't even see at release. World-building stuff, progression systems, laying the groundwork for the sequels and expansions to come.

I know the entire solar system is supposed to be playable but I have no idea what that means in practical terms. Will each planet have a Borderlands sized zone? Bigger? Smaller?

Is the true meat in terms of legs to be found in competitive? Is the game linear or designed for replayability? New game+? MMO-like endgame concepts?

Should we consider this game to be comparable in scope to something like Skyrim? or GTA? Or more like an Assassin's Creed game maybe?


I do like the sound of this, but part of that co-op allure was the dynamic objectives. Would love to see something along these lines.

Good points Null, they'd have to be planning fresh content 2-6 times a years, surely. They have stated the game was designed with a ending for the first game but to obviously open things up for continued games/progression post the initial game.

My personal guess is the meat is the story coop mode with opt-in clashes of PvP. To me the competitive mode seems quite separate to that but isn't the meat of the game. More like the toppings of your choice on the burger.

I think Destiny is going to be larger than Skyrim, I'm thinking it's designed more like Project Spark as a framework to expand as they see fit infinitely. I would guess elements that are static to the story and elements that are dynamic for revisiting purposes. I believe we know the fireteam sizes are quite small so I'm not expecting dynamic maps holistically but perhaps elements or pathways or loot etc are all dynamic from the cloud?

If they've really gone all out I'd love to see all the various fireteams "results" contributing back to a dynamic universe and next set of missions. Factions lends itself to this idea quite heavily but with no details it's hard to speculate.
 
Why dont you want to play with other people? Borderlands 2 was way more fun when you play co op and destiny looks like it'll be the same

I prefer playing solo. Playing with other people can be fun, and I'll probably do some of that, but goofing around with friends usually destroys the immersion, and I don't want that to happen while I'm playing these science fiction epics. Borderlands has a strong emphasis on humor, which lends itself well to those kinds of human-to-human interactions.
 
This is giving me a bad vibe though
Honestly, huge dev teams never resonated with me as teams that will produce a good game.

A BIG game yes, a good one?
Let's see how it goes
 
Well ill be gettng 2 copies. Both collectors(as soon as they anounce) versions for ps4 & ps3. Thats if there is cross gen play, which im eagerly awaiting news on.
 
500? Maybe that's including Activision liasons (or generous rounding) - last I heard, Bungie itself was around 350-400.

Regardless, that's a lot of people competing for bathroom time.

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500 people for 4 versions of the game plus the team already working on the expansion pack for 2015 sound about right.

Bungie better pray to god this works out. I remember reading about their contract with acti during the cod lawsuit and there are several clauses where activision can walk away.
 
Not sure why the game needs such a large staff. I would imagine it's a lot of contract employees, and they'll shrink back down to a 100ish after launch. I'm sure they're rushing to the finish. I just hope not at the cost of quality control.
 
No Man's Sky would make me go back to the drawing board if I was on the Destiny team, but the scope is very different (everything from manpower to multiplayer). In any case it wouldn't be surprising if they were running behind schedule considering the delay of the early access and the lack of hands-on impressions

Anyway the game looks like cross-gen blandness, but with that many people it should run relatively smoothly for a huge multiplayer title. It'll be interesting to see if it becomes the next HALO in terms of franchise success or will it become more like (edit) SWTOR
 
Is this just the normal ballooning up on staff to finish a project? For reference, there is an interview in GI with the producer on Pokemon X/Y, and he stated 500 people worked on the project. As many people worked on Pokemons as Destiny.
 
Not sure why the game needs such a large staff. I would imagine it's a lot of contract employees, and they'll shrink back down to a 100ish after launch. I'm sure they're rushing to the finish. I just hope not at the cost of quality control.

Nah Bungie is quite unique in that they try to avoid the swell/shrink cycle of contracting vs. game release cycles and I believe their "usual" staff is 250-300. It's most likely bigger these days as 300-350 and then the rest are contractors etc.
 
I wonder what the ratio of efficiency is. I've worked on mid sized teams and I simply can't even fathom how a development team in the hundreds could function with anything resembling efficiency. Ideally the project could be broken down into hundreds of independent compartmentalized little pieces that never quite works in reality. There's always interdependence, interface changes, bugs that result in bugs in other components, etc. Their bug tracker, cvs logs, etc have got to look like impenetrable novels.

If this wasn't the games industry I'd assume this was the work of some half wit in management who thought if one dev can complete a component in 2 weeks then it'd only take 2 devs working on the same component 1 week - taken to extremes. It'd be awesome to read a sort of project diary for a huge project like this.
 
How does one go about even organizing something like that? lol I'm not getting paid big bucks to design these games but I've worked with smaller teams of like 20 people and even then you run into confusion and miscommunication. So I'm struggling to comprehend 500 guys all working in sync.
 
I'll be getting it after things smooth over. Probably a week or two after launch. I've learned my lesson with online heavy titles. Prove to me it works and I'll buy it at retail. Not before.
 
Just 100 more people needed for this to be as good as Resident Evil 6.

I seriously can't believe RE6 had so many people working on it yet we ended up getting that... I mean even RE5 had so much more in terms of everything. Just makes me wonder how much stuff wasn't released as DLC or what the hell happened
 
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