Bungie vows to make sure Destiny works at launch

Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto Online, Final Fantasy XIV, SimCity, Half-Life 2, Diablo III – the list of online launch disasters is hardly a small one.

But Bungie has said that it is already working on measures to ensure that Destiny is not added to any such list this September.

For many months now, we’ve been actively had a build up, we pinged our data centre for the first time more than a year ago, Bungie COO Pete Parsons told Games Industry.

We take it super seriously and we’ve been planning for a long time, we’ve been investing into it to make sure that we have the best experience possible and I think we have to ultimately see what happens but we have every expectation of from moment one, having a great experience, and when things happen, whether it’s with us or the internet, we have things in place. There’s elegance in what we do so we have plenty of safeguards for this.

Parsons also commented on the supposed $500m budget publisher Activision has invested in the franchise.

For marketing you’d have to ask Activision people, but for development costs, not anything close to $500m,” he added. I think that speaks a lot more to the long-term investment that we’re making in the future of the product.

We sat back, long before we even came to our partnership with Activision, thinking about, ‘We wanted to tell a story over ten years.’ We wanted each one of these things to have its own beginning, middle, and an end, but we really wanted to step back and we can do it.

We’ve done it before; we did it with Halo but we didn’t plan it out. I say plan – I don’t know how the story goes, okay? But really, think about how do we future-proof our technology? What are the kinds of things we’re going to want to do? How do we build our team? How do we even build the building that our team is going to be in?

We have the time to start building that out and that’s incredibly powerful for us.”