Combining behind-the-scenes quotes from studio staff intercut with excerpts from a cinematic trailer, Bungie's first video documentary for Destiny starts to crack open a video game that's designed to last for ten years.
Much of it is conceptual, emphasizing Bungie's commitment to ambitious projects, its success with the Halo games, and its interest in creating social experiences, with clips of a mobile app in action; the four-minute video contains around four seconds of gameplay footage.
The game itself concerns the arrival of a UFO, a huge sphere known as The Traveler, and the fate a city that has been built up beneath that mysterious globe.
Players step into the role of Guardians, tasked with protecting the city and taking back the wilderness from "strange, deadly creatures" that are now appearing.
There are key Bungie traits already visible: an ambitious gameplan, a desire to introduce new standards in solo and social play, and a detailed fictional lore.
Even the trailer's title, Pathways Out of Darkness, is a nod to Bungie's own history, the successful Mac game Pathways into Darkness released in 1993.
And while Bungie's deal with Activision, publisher of action game Call of Duty and the massively multiplayer World of Warcraft, establishes the pair as a video gaming power couple standing on the cusp of a new console generation, others have been exploring similar online spaces.
In the last year, for example, the PC-based Planetside 2 and Tribes: Ascend have launched, tracing their histories back to sci-fi themed, online, and massively multiplayer titles in "Planetside" and Starsiege: Tribes respectively.
Red 5's Firefall, too, has an Activision connection, via studio founder Mark Kern of StarCraft, Diablo II and World of Warcraft, but is now backed by Chinese gaming firm The9.
No date has been given for the release of a Destiny game, though a May 2012 contractual agreement between Bungie and Activision had identified Fall 2013 for an Xbox 360 debut, with PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 releases to follow.
However, Activision's February 18 press release closes by saying that it "has not included the launch in its 2013 outlook and there should be no speculation or expectation of a different result."
