Destiny Dev: Gameplay Is What Matters, Not Necessarily 1080p

Destiny production director Jonty Barnes is more interested in achieving great gameplay than hitting benchmarks like 1080p or 60fps. In a new interview with The Sixth Axis, Barnes says although platform holders like Microsoft and Sony like to make a big deal about which console is more powerful, gamers overall are caring less and less about statistics.

"I feel like as an industry, people are caring less and less about numbers, which is great," Barnes said. "It always used to be about graphics, and though 1080p and 60Hz are still out there, and as platform providers get competitive around those things it seems to magnify the importance of it."

"But it isn't about that," he adds. "It's actually what is an awesome gameplay experience for the player and anything that gets in the way of the best player experience is baggage. I'm quoting directly from [Bungie co-founder Jason Jones] there. And, you know, as we've seen over the last few years, computer games are so much better, they're so much higher quality, and it's much more about the experience and less about those statistics."

Barnes' comments came in the context of a response regarding criticisms about Destiny's world being too small. Like he said in a previous interview, Jones explained that Destiny's four main planets--the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Earth--are incredibly deep worlds with many places to explore and activities to do.

"I mean, when people think of it as being four things, it's really hard for them to understand the real estate that is there and the complexity of all the different spaces that you can visit," Jones said. "Then, when you add it to another layer, which is that you may be going back to places that are familiar to you, but there's going to be completely different activities for you to participate in. So you'll be getting a very different experience even though you get some familiarity. We actually like that property, because we want people to be able to navigate and go through things."

Destiny launches September 9 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4. For more, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.