Announcements

(page still under construction - please pardon our dust!)

Although Bungie and others surrounding the Destiny project have generally been tight-lipped about details of the new game, there have been numerous announcements giving vague information that have served to build excitement. This page contains a timeline of all official public announcements by employees of Bungie, Activision, or other companies affiliated with Destiny. For information published or announced by other third parties (including "leaks"), see the Destiny Overview and other linked pages therein.

Timeline

 * December 15, 2011 - Umbra Software, creators of software designed to help game developers increase frame rate and game performance, announced on its website, "Bungie, the creators of the Halo-franchise and all around amazing developers, are busy building their new game and world. We are proud to say that the most awesome crew at Bungie are using Umbra’s latest technology, Umbra 3.1, for their next big thing."


 * December 27, 2011 - Online video game development magazine Gamasutra published an interview with Bungie senior graphics engineer Hao Chen. Though the interview is mostly from a high-level point of view with no specifics, Chen does have a few interesting things to say that might reveal more about what might be going on under the hood in Destiny:
 * "So having our own engine, where we are intimately familiar with every aspect of that engine, allows us to have the flexibility to change, first of all. Second of all, nowadays we’re also using a good mix of middleware to do a lot of the nitty gritty functionality that typically would take a lot of time. So it makes even more sense for us to focus on the ones we consider to be the bread and butter, and things that give us competitive advantage. And if you adopt an engine wholesale, you lose that competitive advantage."
 * "Our project right now is at a very exciting stage. For the first time we’re now shipping on multiple platforms, and then the new consoles are at least not far on the horizon. We have a brand new game, a brand new IP."
 * "We re-architected our graphics engine, and the primary reason is the need to go multiplatform and get ready for the next gen."
 * "An even bigger challenge is to future proof the engine so when the next generation of consoles is here, we are already pretty good at squeezing the performance out of it."


 * June 7, 2012 - On Bungie Day 2012, Bungie music director Martin O'Donnell made a surprise announcement via his Twitter account. In his Tweet, he posted a picture of himself sitting next to former Beatles member Paul McCartney and revealed that the two are working together on "new music," presumed to be music for Destiny.  Soon thereafter, Paul McCartney himself confirmed this via a Tweet from his own Twitter account.


 * June 7, 2012 - In a thread on NeoGAF responding to the Paul McCartney Tweet on Bungie Day, Urk made several clarifications, confirming that O'Donnell and McCartney were collaborating on music for Destiny. Among Urk's posts:
 * "They’re not working on an album of singles. The game’s score will be orchestral."
 * "We didn’t hire Paul. Paul contacted Marty because he heard his work and wanted to collaborate with him."
 * "This wasn’t handled through our publisher, or with development resources. Paul is adding his talent to the mix, and taking the opportunity to work with Marty and Mike. Marty and Mike are excited about the music they’re making together, and when they get excited, so do we. It’s really no more complicated than that."


 * June 7, 2012 - Also on Bungie Day 2012, new forum avatars were added on Bungie.net displaying the logos of what are widely speculated (but not confirmed) to be Factions for Destiny. In addition, similarly emblazoned shirts were made available in the Bungie Store, with the descriptions seeming to match up to the faction names upon which the Bungie community generally agrees.  Finally, a set of Geomancy signals was posted in a Bungie Day news story, but despite the efforts of the Community to figure out their meaning, DeeJ confirmed that it was a dead-end and the Community need only know that the symbols are geomantic figures.