With the curtain formally down on Bungie’s Destiny, all eyes are now firmly on the company as the inevitable calm before the storm begins to wane. With promises of an always on-line world, a brand new expansive and dynamic universe to get yourself entwined in, not to mention a new take on ways to incorporate a social atmosphere into a console ‘shared world shooter’, just what has 
Bungie got up its sleeve with Destiny?
One of the things we know for sure is that Destiny will be integrated into your gaming experience in a number of ways. Just one of those that was shown off slightly during the unveiling was the Destiny Mobile App.
Now of course, mobile apps arn’t exactly new in relation to video games; World of warcraft has its own to check out the auction house and guild chat. Microsoft recently released Xbox Smartglass allowing players to check in on everything Xbox and even control their console. The possibilities are endless, whilst still being limited enough to guarantee that they don’t have too much baring on the game.
With very little information about how this mobile app is going to integrate or what additional purpose it will serve to Bungie’s Destiny, Gamebreaker breaks down the facts from the fiction and adds our own little swing on what we’d like to see. For Science!
The Destiny Mobile App – The Facts
In a nut shell, we know that Destiny is destined to hit the mobile app market in some form probably days before release. When the Destiny trailer hit yesterday morning we got a first glimpse of a prototype mobile app around about the 0:57 mark.
What do we see? Quite clearly a debugged iOS device used for testing applications with a push notification telling the mysterious floating hand that there’s a “New chapter on venus”. A quick slide of the destiny icon and we have more details on the venus chapter. Why is this even remotely interesting? Well to us, this is indicating that world truly is always online and the mobile app itself will be fully 
integrated into the game world, able to track things as they happen. In this case, the online world is updating as the player isn’t in game and more things are becoming available. So are we going to be seeing time sensitive missions/quests? it seems to be the case.
Next up – we have what appears to be some sort of community hub, probably akin to Halo Waypoint providing players with the latest community news, direct link to Bungie news and on goings in the background of all things Destiny. Pretty cool, but nothing ground breaking. As if by magic and on que we delve a little further into this hub screen and low and behold….a standard character screen. Hoorah? Here we can see that you can check up on what items you have equipped, character stats and most likely the stats of your friends too. Nothing too unexpected here as its pretty much the norm with these type of games.
One final point was raised by IGN in their featured piece on the Destiny unveil. So we aren’t too sure how this is going to play out but it was an interesting point raised. Apparently instead of being an app that directly effects your own world when used, it’s main function will be to effect the world of your friends, allowing you to have a more interactive approach with them. Now again, we’re not 100% sure on what that means, but does that mean we’ll have the opportunity to drop things to friends such as weapons? Or alter the quests that they’re participating in? We are truly not sure…
The Destiny Mobile App – The Fiction
Having looked at what we currently know is most likely to be in the Bungie Destiny mobile app, what about the things that aren’t? What would really make the social experience pop. Well here are some of our ideas that we’d love to see integrated into the Destiny mobile app, in order to really make it pop.
- Check out your inventory and trade items at your own leisure - now that sounds a little silly to some but think about the logic. You’re sat around and a friend sparks up a conversation over Skype about Destiny. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have x, y, z”. The normal response would be “Leme go check, just need to boot the game up”. Why not make it easier? Iphone/Android device On. Load up the app. Check what you have in your backpack. “Yup got it, sending it over”. Username entered and within seconds your friend is thanking you without you really having to make that much effort. I know for sure that I hate having to log over to different characters multiple times. Easy.
- Real time maps - track your friends as they game - So again another quality of life suggestion, a real time map
that can track where your friends are at any given time with just the tap of the screen. Okay I’m not talking a full 3D experience with a camera following them, but an over the head thing. Depending on how the travel system works and what information your console displays on their where abouts, you could drop right in and get into the action with your buddy! - Guild Chat/Communication system. Voice I think is pretty much certain we can say is out, but what about text communications? “Hey i’ll be on in 5 minutes, hang tight” scrolls across your visor in game. I know that the Xbox and PS3 have their own inbuilt communication systems which you can access online too, but it’d be pretty neat just to have a little something extra built in so that you don’t have to constantly press your menu button to take you out of the game to view messages. I don’t know, maybe its a terrible idea, but it works for others, why not Destiny?
I don’t know, I’m terrible at brain storming these sort of things without taking ideas that probably already exist. What do you guys think? what would you like to see from a mobile app that will really make it “Pop”. Throw us some ideas in the comment below!
