Destiny Avoids MMO Pitfalls, ‘Everyone Plays Together’ Says Bungie

Speaking to GameInformer, Bungie's technical director for Destiny, Chris Butcher, has discussed how the studio plans to cope with the demand on their servers as well as what has been learned from previous multiplayer and MMO titles. 

"You have all of these examples of people who are doing big server cluster things, like World of Warcraft or something like that. But we didn't really want to do that, because if you think about those kinds of games, you've got a centralized server that's simulating everything in the world, but that can only scale up to some number of players. Maybe it's 1,000. Maybe it's 5,000. Maybe it's 20,000. You compare that to the population of a console game and it's tiny.

"So what that means is that you have to have dozens or hundreds of these separate servers. So we started out by thinking, 'We want to have a single world that everybody can be in.'"

"We took this mesh-based networking that we've been developing for years and years with Halo and adapted that networking to work in a seamless interconnected world full of other players and AIs. What happens is everybody in the world can play together. There aren't these barriers that are in place. You're all playing in one connected online world.

He said the game's large install base will ensure that players will always have someone else to play with. Butcher also added that Bungie's technology means it seems like "you're the host" in a particular region of the game because there will be no lag or latency so it will feel like you're playing a single player game despite there being a great many other players in the game world.

Despite Bungie's assertion that Destiny players can avoid multiplayer entirely, the studio's Jason Jones hinted in December that the end-game story arc could require co-op play.

Destiny is set for release on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on September 9th.