

This feels like one of the most audacious lies I have encountered in my time covering games. “This is all playable terrain,” he added, gesturing to what I now know to be little more than a backdrop. So as they carefully rotated the camera to face away from the level, pointed to a shape on the horizon and said something like “you can climb that mountain,” I guess I believed him. But back then I had no idea where this sprawling landscape ended, where its invisible walls lay. The person demonstrating the game spawned at what I now know-after hundreds of hours in Destiny ’s world-to be the hard edge of the map. In that theater, we would be taken through the opening to the game: the wall, the breach, the first areas of the Cosmodrome. I remember being shepherded into a theater, the outside marked with huge printed artwork, among a group of whispering journalists. I was at E3 when Destiny was first shown to the world in 2013.
