Bungie: Destiny's sci-fi fantasy setting "gave us this freedom"

It took Bungie years of pre-production before the company decided on the "mythic science fiction" theme found in the studio's upcoming title, Destiny. According to Bungie design director Joseph Staten, the theme gives the studio "freedom" to play around with genre conventions.

"We thought of a good handful of other genres as well," Staten told the Official Xbox Magazine. "We've had a pretty long pre-production period and we explored everything from straight-up fantasy to something a little bit more modern to many, many other things as well."

"Ultimately we gravitated towards this mix of science fiction and fantasy because it gave us this freedom," said Staten. "You saw small things like the prevalence of cloth in the game, a lot of characters have capes or cloaks and the combatants have cloth as well. Fantasy brings us this texture that we can wrap around sci-fi, which is really appealing, especially if you're an artist who's just been stuck making straight up space armor for ten years. A bit of cloth is very refreshing."

"[Technical director Chris Butcher] called it 'mythic science fiction' and I think that's a great way to think about it," he added.

Destiny is currently expected for release on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, and the next-generation Xbox