This is an interview with Tyson Green, overseer to everything from skill design to loot drops. [url]http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/12/13/designing-the-rpg-elements-of-destiny.aspx[/url] [url]http://www.totalxbox.com/68114/more-destiny-details-from-bungie-youre-going-to-fail/[/url] [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9YoJjdEBv8[/url] [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhNkK4h1oVk&feature=player_detailpage#t=59[/url] [quote]Tyson Green has mentioned a few games that the folks at Bungie have been taking inspiration from for their own RPG/FPS hybrid. Green mentions Borderlands as one of the more obvious ones, praising how that game offers "very, very many possibilities of items" but at the cost of not a lot things to use them on, particularly in the late game - [b]so Destiny will have "less randomly generated stuff" and aims to replace them with ones that are less frequent but "a little more interesting, a bit more meaningful to you."[/b] Tyson says that a [b]massive influence on the game is From Software's Dark Souls[/b], saying that the lack of hand-holding and direction in that game is something to be praised, with people talking to each other outside the game in order to figure out how to beat the toughest challenges. "It made the Dark Souls experience so much better, because you were essentially playing it in a virtual co-op mode." "The notion that the game is not just a completely open book that's spoon-fed to you in little nibbles like baby-food is something that we really appreciate, and we thought Destiny should have a little bit more of that actual depth." Green says [b]Bungie is creating encounters where it's not immediately obvious how you should proceed[/b], and that in fact, you might not even succeed. "Oh my god! You're actually going to play a triple-A videogame and fail a lot!"[/quote] [quote]Yeah, so Borderlands was really interesting; I played the first Borderlands an awful lot, and I think Borderlands spent a lot more effort on creating very many possibilities of items in their sandbox combat space. And as the kind of player who really likes the numbers and who likes the nuts and bolts, and likes thrashing wirh the mechanics, that was really entertaining. I really enjoyed that part of it. But I think that they spent too much effort on that, and not enough effort on, well: "what do you use those things for?" The combat wasn't really super engaging beyond a certain point, and there wasn't really a lot of stuff to do at the end, and there was no strong multiplayer component. [b]So, I think we're sort of looking at that and saying "hey, well what's important to us? Strong gameplay, strong activities; things to do. Well how do we support that with an investment game?" And I think that means less randomly generated stuff, less constant bombardment of items. I think our approach to the loot that you get in the game is much more: if something drops and you don't care about it, we should take that out of the game. We wanna have I think a lower frequency of drops that you'd see in sort of a typical ARPG, but the individual drops are a little bit more interesting, a little bit more meaningful to you.[/b] Our drops are per player, so there's no mad rush to be the first player to pick up everything, there's no ninja looting. [b]When you see an item that drops for you, there's systems that are hopefully working successfully to make sure that that item is actually worth looking at.[/b][/quote]