Rumor: There's only one area per planet in Destiny

One of the big unknowns about the game is how big it'll be at launch, how many areas etc. While that's still largely an unknown, "DeeJ" (a community manager for Bungie) had this to say on a Twitch stream yesterday:

During a "2old2play" live-stream on Twitch, Deej was asked how many "explorable areas" there are per planet. He went on to say that there are in fact one destination per planet.

Source (Reddit)

Another Bungie community manager responded to this on NeoGAF:

Oh, hello.

Destiny's pretty big. 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.

If we're fortunate enough to have you playing months after launch, you still find lots of compelling stuff to do. That will manifest itself in a myriad of ways, from straight up content to cool activities we've yet to show off.

We think we did a decent job supporting Halo, post launch, but we were only ever able to cater to the competitive set. 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. We look at it quite a bit like television programming, as opposed to a singular film, as we had in the past. We think it's gonna be pretty great, but we wanted to test out a bunch of our new stuff with Beta, to make sure we could flip knobs and levers live, reacting and responding with lots (and, ho boy, did we see LOTS) of players online and playing.

Beta was water wings. Level 8 is nothing. You barely scratched the surface, and it seems like some folks had fun with what was there.

If you did, good news. More soon.

Source

So since he didn't deny it, that goes a long way to confirm that there's only one explorable area per planet (Old Russia on Earth is one example). There's also gonna be a shit ton of DLC, but that's not new information.

I put it as a "rumor" in the thread title, but with this I guess it's pretty much confirmed.

PS: I didn't find anything about this on the forum. If I overlooked something, feel free to lock.

This is part of the reason why I plan on waiting until AFTER launch to buy this game. I don't feel great about the amount/quality of content presented thus far. I know it's just a beta, but the way it's presented makes it seem pretty close to final.

Also, I feel like I've read this thread already, but maybe it was on Gamefaqs and not here.

On the plus side, saying level 8 is just scratching the surface implies the level cap might not be 20.

I share Jeff's concerns over the amount of content being in the game. If their idea of content is running the same strike missions and raids over and over again, I don't see this holding my attention as long as it should. The loot side of the game doesn't look particularly deep, like Diablo, so without the loot grind going for it, I don't see the point in doing raids over and over again. Perhaps they mean that PvP will be the reason to keep playing; hopefully not, because it didn't seem that great when I played.

Was this ever up for debate? The Beta may have 'scratched the surface', sure, but unless they really are still working on it I'm pretty sure what we saw there was representative of the final product. The real problem they're going to have to tackle is how to make each planet interesting enough to keep sending people back to the same place.

This is something that has been bothering me since the Beta started. There's a part of me that that worries Bungie will focus more on making this 'Halo 5 matchmaking with co-op' than this big open world MMO they've been trying to sell it as. There are what, 4(?) announced planets in the game? Unless one of them is dedicated to endgame content, or if they expect people to redo missions on hard mode, I really don't see any means of significant progression other than PVP. Then again, we haven't seen the final product, so I might just be paranoid.

I dunno. But for me, the Crucible PvP stuff is the real draw, so I'm more interested in the number of maps for that mode. I played a TON of the Beta, but I'd still like there to be a bunch of maps.

The level cap IS 20, that is not a rumor. But there is a definite end game and different "tiers" of gear to get at 20 just like an mmo.

As far as each planet is one area.... Okay... but Old Russia is fing huge. I spent over an hour and a half on the moon doing nothing but looking around and didn't see it all and that is the "smallest map in the game". There are going to be more missions, more strikes, probably more pvp maps, we will probably see mars/venus/and maybe mercury as additional planets.

Let's reserve the doom and gloom until there is something to actually be all depressed over.

I thought it was a given that Old Russia wasn't the only place you can visit on Earth. I also think that we'll be doing missions on every planet that has been featured in the multiplayer PVP, which would mean Mars and Venus levels.

If these quotes are correct, Old Russia is the only place on Earth. At least before DLC. That area might be huge, and the same will probably go for the area on other planets, but this implies that it's only one area per planet.

Also, I'm not posting this as some doom and gloom shit. It's just some information about the game that is pretty much confirmed.

Destiny? More like Des-tiny.

But really, I'm only going to care about the average play-length before the credits roll. Even four or five areas could end up being 30 hours of gameplay with each class type, and 90 hours plus PVP will be more than enough gameplay. 20 hours for a playthrough would still be acceptable. Less than that would seem pretty short for a loot focused game featuring RPG elements.

I was hoping for more than just old Russia on earth but it depends on how many other planets we get to visit, seems like they will let us visit other areas as dlc. I'm not really into pvp, i will play it a bit for the gear but honestly, im not really good enough to compete and i don't have the kind of free time required to even get to that stage. I hope the co-op stuff is the focus, that's what i had fun with and its the kind of thing i would like to see them develop further. If it becomes nothing but map packs for pvp im probably going to drift away.

But...

http://destiny.wikia.com/wiki/Old_Chicago

And

http://destiny.wikia.com/wiki/Mumbai_Push

Those don't seem to be confirmed or anything though (and might be DLC).

@amyggen: Perhaps, I wouldn't be surprised if Bungie were looking to surprise us though, they were notoriously secretive over Halo campaigns after all...

@spaceinsomniac: Oh snap! ;)

I think if people will finish all the content in say 3 days, those people will be seriously pissed! So I want to believe there's alot more to it then just those 5 area's. Also; the Earth area might be smaller since it's the start of the game?

That's true! We'll see I guess.

You think that's bad:

I could totally jump off this cliff right now and explore anything you can see, but I'm just not gonna.

I still think this is going to be a great game, though.

It's been fun watching the Internet go crazy about this. Granted, the shit did hit the fan on a Sunday, but you'd think they would've said something better than, well, what was said.

@spaceinsomniac: wow yeah that's just a massive lie, also I mistakingly flagged and unflagged your post because of the way the site works on my phone, sorry if anything bad happens because of that

I pretty sure there is more to even the areas we've been able to explore than is immediately apparent. I don't know about anyone else, but I was definitely getting more of a metroid type vibe during my exploration of Old Russia than a typical open world. There are all kinds of hidden paths and interconnections between the different regions. Also, I saw a ton of closed off paths that I would assume you'll be opening up later. Really though, speculating isn't really going to get us anywhere. Even if there is only one region per planet, if there are tons of, for lack of a better word, "dungeons" in each area I think that could be more than enough content.

No worries. Start to create a new topic, and then read the "How we control spam" section on the right side of the screen for a better understanding of the flagging system. We'll both be fine.

But speculation is fun!

Also, this is pretty hard info. But you're right, we of course don't know much about the size of those areas. I would bet that they're huge because Bungie is after all trying to create a MMO here.

How about this, we let the game come out and judge what that means for ourselves. Take the moon for example. I, like many, just played the mission and stopped playing thinking "meh." It was short and the mission wasn't that interesting. Lo and behold a bunch of other people strayed off the beaten path and found out the moon had a lot to offer in terms of scope and there were doors that looked like they will be open but were closed. Old Russia offered the same. There were a litany of caves to explore and areas that were sealed off plus 2-3 locations, (can't remember), that had unkillable enemies blocking the path. Obviously exploration is going to be a part of this game so maybe lets just see how much there is before we make judgement calls on a game that's not even out.

"support every type of player" - yeah, well, except couch co-op with my significant other.

Too bad, we would have loved a new Borderlands.

Let's not forget all that open space on the earth map that had no mission start points.
I think there will be more to the earth area than what we've seen.
Played the Beta a lot from Tuesday-Sunday exploring on the earth map (all but 2 hours on the moon).
I didn't make a second character till about Saturday/Sunday and never really got bored (but that's just me).
Liking what I see so far and believe there is much more to come.
This weather forcast sees no doom and gloom.

The E3 Destiny demo from 2 years ago completely blew me away.

I wish we got that game instead.

One map per planet seems okay to me. Old Russia seemed like a pretty big map with a assortment of areas that were locked out in the beta. Maybe it's just me but I wasn't expecting a 100 hour MMO when going into this

I had a blast with the beta, and I am pretty much guaranteed to be getting this game at launch.

That said, I think that the more pessimistic people are likely right, about there being 4 locations with one map each (Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus) playable.

Now, there could be a bunch more that has been added since they branched the Beta build we all played, but if so I would hope they would just come out and plainly say so. It would be an easy thing to do without going in to specific spoilers. Saying we just "scratched the surface" is not the same as saying "the beta was not all the Earth story content."

On the other hand, Earth might be a "tutorial planet" and Mars and Venus could be huge and really involved.

I think the real problem is that we have heard a lot of marketing buzz for this game but not a lot of concrete details, and that has allowed people to build up expectations that might be out of whack. If Bungie had been less vague, I think there would be no fuss right now.

People will finish the content in three days regardless of how much of it there is. And people will be pissed. They will play this game in order to complete it as fast as possible and then be upset that they succeeded.

I didn't get far enough that I was visiting other planets, but promise people 25 maps and they want 25 maps on 25 planets. Promise them 25 planets and they want 100 maps.

There are a lot of things you can judge about Destiny based on a beta. The amount of content it has is not one of them. I don't understand why people insist on trying.

People aren't judging the amount of content based on the Beta. They're judging it based on Bungie's confirmation that all areas of the game have been revealed, and that there is only area that can be explored per planet/moon.

Earth, Moon, Venus, Mars, and perhaps the Reef, depending on if it's a second social area or not.

Now people might be judging the size of those areas by Earth in the beta, but the amount of content itself is arguably much closer at this point to fact than speculation. There will be four or five areas that can be explored.

@spaceinsomniac: Knights of the Old Republic had 5 areas you could explore. That's not a very good way of describing the amount of content in that game.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple areas on Earth and only one area for other planets. That's how I would have arranged it if I had made the game, anyway.

I remember the first time I saw the E3 demo I thought the game was going to be absolutely humongous. The way they transitioned from a co-op level to a multiplayer level and promised after it was done you could go exploring the world was impressive.

Now I know it's just separate areas that have long loading times between them, and that there might only be a few of them.

Next generation has not impressed me so far. I am really hoping Witcher 3 will break this trend.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if this is the case and I think the opening cinematic backs this up, as well as showing roughly how large we can expect each "destination" to be; If you look at the system map shown in the opening cinematic, each location is represented by a pattern of white diamonds next to it. If you count the number of "pips" in the pattern, it matches the number of named areas shown on each individual planet's map.

For example, the Moon has four pips arranged vertically. If you look at the map for the Moon, there are four "zones"; (1) Archer's Line (2) Anchor of Light (3) Hellmouth and (4) Temple of Crota.

Similarly, the Earth map displays (1) Sky Watch, (2) Forgotten Shore, (3) Dry Sea, (4) Moth Yard, (5) Devil's Lair, (6) King's Watch, (7) Rocket Yard, (8) The Divide, (9) Blind Steppes, (10) Gateway. How many pips does Earth have on the system map? Ten.

If my theory holds, it looks like we can expect Destiny to launch with six major "planets"; Earth, the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and somewhere close to the Sun. Earth would be the largest with 10 "zones," followed by Mars with 7. Venus, Mercury and the Sun location would have 6 each. The Moon would have four, which would also square with Bungie's statement that the Moon is the "smallest" map.

@lawgamer Bungie have said there will be four planets (for the lack of a better word) at launch: Earth, the Moon, Mars and Venus.

I've already put more time into Destiny than some other PS4 full games I've bought...Infamous, Killzone, Murdered. I'll be happy with whatever's there at launch!

This is one of the most expensive games ever made with a proposed 10 year life cycle. I really hope the one area per planet is substantial.

I had a tooon of fun with the beta and alpha and Old Russia had a lot to explore but....it's pretty small if that's all of it. Honestly, I think there's more to it (Old Russia could be much more expansive than the beta) but the closer to release the more that seems like false hope.

A Mass Effect job eh? Bummer.

I thought this was known already! One area per planet makes good sense. I assume neither the Moon nor Earth planet maps in the beta were the "Full Versions" (and I can at least vouch for the fact that some places were too high level for me to proceed).

In the future I bet they add "Old America" and the like to Earth / Other planets.

Here's an idea, let's wait until the game is out, before jumping to conclusions about the amount of content in the game and the length. I know this is a new train of thought, but lets give it a go.

haha its kinda true.

@amyggen: some more info leaked out, word is itill have 32 story missions and 23 strike missions. http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/07/28/was-destinys-full-game-content-discovered

if its true, thats pretty substantial for a retail game. we'ill see soon.

@spraynardtatum: Maybe it's just that "small", and just plays a really, really small part of the game.

I'm wondering what people actually expected out of the story side of the Beta, considering it's just a Demo?

We'll see, I guess. What we do know is that the game will have a shit ton of DLC. I wouldn't be surprised if it has so much DLC that it'll almost be like a $10-15 "monthly fee" in practice. How much is that first DLC pass you can buy, and for how long does it last?

I was just thinking the same thing as I was reading this topic and the associated Reddit post. The way Destiny is set up with different planets and then areas on those planets seems perfect for supporting a long term DLC strategy.

That's not necessarily a bad thing as long as the base game has plenty of content to offer people for the $60 price of admission. If Bungie plans on supporting this game with post-release content as long as they're saying right now, they're going to need DLC (either paid or otherwise) to keep players interested. It's going to be interesting to see how often these "expansions" are going to be released, and what they're going to offer.

obviously those are both subsections of Old Russia.

i feel like if the ghost edition is coming with codes for those expansions, then they cant be that far off.

You don't call an area Old Russia when it's the only location on Earth. That is FACT!!!!

@mrfluke: Want to make some predictions? Here are mine:

• Destiny releases on consoles on Sep 9th (given)
• Expansion 1 drops just before Black Friday - Last week of November.
• Expansion 2 hits January or February 2015
• PC release announced just after Expansion 2 hits, somewhere around the end of March or early April 2015. This will give the consoles six months of exclusivity and the first two expansions before Activision discusses the PC version.

Even if 100% true I am fine with only 4 main locations at launch, if they are all as big as Old Russia and have as much little hidden stuff I will be happy. I am willing to bet the expansions will be pretty substantial as well given the price of the Season Pass. The structure of the game makes it extremely easy to add in more locations, you have a ton to be done in the ruins of Earth plus at least 3 other locations (Mars, Venus, Moon) and more could be worked in without hassle story wise.

Call me an optimist but I would say that if true this makes Bungie's claims of long term support more likely. Starting out not as big so that they can provide a steady stream of content to keep users playing.