Bungie reassures fans disappointed that Destiny only has one playable area per planet
"It's the biggest game we've ever made, by far."
Destiny developer Bungie has acted to reassure fans concerned about the amount of content in the game, after it emerged that each planetary location would only feature one location to explore.
The Earth has Old Russia, a sizeable map that was open during Destiny's beta, but some fans had expected other areas too.
Bungie confirmed that this would be the limit of your Earth-based exploration during a recent Twitch stream (1:49:30 mark).
"Yeah, we're calling them destinations," community manager David "DeeJ" Dague explained. "You go to Mars, you go to the Moon, you've got Venus, and you've got Earth."
We've seen concept art for those locations before - but what about outside the solar system?
"Not so far," he said. "We've revealed everything that you'll explore in the first version of the game."
Reaction to the news was mixed - while Old Russia is a large area, some fans expressed disappointment at it being potentially just a quarter of the game's open space.
Fellow Bungie community manager Eric "Urk" Osborne then responded to a 60-page NeoGAF thread on the subject.
"Destiny's pretty big," he countered. "It's the biggest game we've ever made, by far, and we're sort of known for making games you can play for months, years, and even decades if you're a little bit... dedicated.
"With Destiny, we're looking to exceed what we've done before, not just in terms of scale - the Moon is our smallest destination - but in terms of scope and breadth of activities. That's true for day one, as you expect, but it also means we want Destiny to have super long legs."
The developer has plans to keep players interested "months" after launch, he continued, with "cool activities" that it has yet to show off. Better yet, Bungie is making a concerted effort to keep fans of co-operative play happy, rather than just planning to release competitive maps as it did with Halo.
"We think we did a decent job supporting Halo, post launch, but we were only ever able to cater to the competitive set," he concluded. "That left a lot of players out in the cold. That made a lot of the team grumpy. We wanted to do better. So, Destiny is philosophically built support every type of player, and all modes with ongoing activities and events."