I am a consumer. I have an Xbox One. I talk to our clients via Skype on my Xbox One when I work from home. And yes, like the rest of civilisation, I have purchased Destiny. In Destiny, I am currently a level 4 Warlock.
Now, I’m only a lowly graphic designer with application development skills, nothing approaching the giddy heights of the World-building, 3D-manipulating mythological designers that constructed the interplanetary levels in Destiny. But for the purpose of our website, I’m going to have an opinion on the design that has been undertaken.
Destiny is an massively-multiplayer online game with a science fiction theme, and a boundless amount of growth and customisation possibilities. Bungie, the well-documented company responsible for its development and that of the genre-defining first person shooter, Halo, has stipulated that it will take some time living and evolving within the World of Destiny to fully realise it’s potential and thus pass judgement. To be clear, the growth potential in Destiny’s envisioning of our galaxy in the not so far flung future is beyond comprehension of the normal player, but it is this ability of human designers to envisage our World in the future and build it up that is key to the future of interface and immersive design itself.
Technology is catching and floating the ideas of sci-fi writers, and those writers continue to fuel the imaginations of the World builders – the virtual terraformers of our generation.
I am not passing judgement on Destiny, but I will comment on the futures envisioned by the designers, and quite frankly, they are awe-inspiring. Obviously the conflict plays it’s part, but this gamer purely wants to lose himself in the procedurally generated landscapes of Old Russia, Mars, Venus and the Moon, and hope it impacts his understanding of contemporary interface design.
I thought it apt to bring this post to a close with a tweet generated by the Planet View app built within the Destiny Universe using Google Tech:
I’m exploring the Moon, Mars, and Venus of #Destiny in #PlanetView https://www.destinyplanetview.com/en?utm_source=twitter
World Building Content Links