The Places Of Destiny

Bungie art director Christopher Barrett broke down the enemies of Destiny for us earlier this week and now he's back to go in depth on the various locations you'll visit around the solar system.

The Moon

Barrett : The moon is interesting because we’re able to show the remains of very familiar human space exploration --  the first base that humans created after the Traveler came. You get this great visual that you’ve seen in a lot of movies about an abandoned space station and you’ve got old astronaut suits laying in the regolith. It’s a little bit darker tone. It’s a little bit of a mysterious tone on the surface in regards to the lost humanity. You get to play with all of the fun architecture of a space base.

And then what’s cool is beneath that is this crazy kingdom of aliens that’s being created. Why are the Hive here? I think because it’s close to Earth. It’s a place
that is easy for them to create their base to start launching
some kind of attack on Earth. And it
works well for their tendency of cratering, digging tunnels under moons
or planets and creating empires. Just imagining all of these holes that you can go down into and tunnels that go to this vast space underneath I think is a really neat vibe to play with.

The cliffs are probably higher than they’d be on the real moon. Craters are more exaggerated. You also get the really iconic view of a much-too-big Earth in the skybox because it’s always cool to exaggerate that stuff. Just standing there on the moon looking at Earth is just a cool visual for sure. And it’s cracking. There are huge chunks of the moon peeling off into space inspired by Thundarr the Barbarian .

Earth

Barrett : The main goal of the Cosmodrome is to establish Earth as it once was. To show that something has changed. You see things that are relatable now but have changed or grown over so you really understand that it is our history. Visually, just making that connection that it’s not just any sci-fi world. It’s the juxtaposition of what could be a post-apocalyptic grim scene made beautiful with flowing grass. It's an old industrial area grown over by nature reclaiming civilization. It fills in some of the story initially for
players. There’s a concept image of an old, rusted tank half buried with grass covered up
over it and birds sitting on the barrel.

The main thing in the skybox is a colony ship and the massive wall. This is the place where humans were building ships to colonize the
rest of the solar system. We’ve always said that was potentially the
last one that never left Earth.

It's primarily Fallen enemies here. There are human ruins
and it’s a perfect place for scavengers. The space pirates are here to pillage through old human relics and stuff like that. That’s a majority of what
you’ll experience there. That’s the first race we introduce.

I think over the span of Destiny we’ll be going to a lot of different places. The feel we want to establish is that Earth is hostile and you can’t just freely roam around. Earth is a great place because it has every possible type of environment you can use so I’m sure we’ll explore many interesting places.

[Next page: Learn more about the Tower, Mars, and Venus]