GDC 2013: Bungie reveals Destiny’s beginnings through its concept art

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http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2012/11/Destiny-traveller-610x343.jpg (http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2012/11/Destiny-traveller.jpg)Joseph Staten and Chris Barrett explained some of the challenges Bungie’s 400-strong team faced in building a new gameworld and maintaining a consistent vision at GDC 2013 today.Writer and designer Staten and artist Barrett explained that the title began as a fantasy-style game which took in myths, swords, artefacts, castles and monsters – but Bungie “couldn’t shake the lure of sci-fi,” said Barrett.“Ancient ruins are cool, but so are derelict spaceships. So then we asked ourselves – why can’t we have both? We started exploring this genre which we called mythic science fiction.”The game’s central motif, The Traveller (pictured above), was the result of “months of iteration”, with the name alone the subject of several days intense brainstorming.Westerns, films like Stalker, Solaris and Time Bandits, and artists including John Harris, Zdzislaw Beksinski and Peter Gric were also cited as influences for the team st Bungie.“The big challenge was to unify all of these influences,” said Barrett. “more than anything else we’ve worked on, it requires a lot of concepts – more than all of the Halo games combined.”Alot of work fell by the wayside as the project continued, too. The Bungie duo showed the crowd some concept art for ‘tiger man’ by way of example, a player race which didn’t make the cut as Bungie settled on Humans, The Awoken and Exos.“This was another another lesson for us,” said Staten. “Some things you have to leave on the cutting room floor. You have to have a strong sense of editorial in deciding what to leave behind.”

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