I've been thinking a lot about what I personally want Destiny to become over the long term with the recent announcement, and I keep coming back to one idea: I want Destiny to become the World of Warcraft of FPS games. I don't mean Destiny should literally become WoW with guns, or that Bungie should copy it. What I mean is taking the fundamental things that have made WoW such a long-lasting game and building those ideas into the Destiny universe, while keeping the first-person combat, movement, abilities, weapons and identity that make Destiny what it is. I know this won't be everyone's vision for Destiny, and I'm not suggesting it should be. This is simply what I personally would love to see from the franchise in the future. One of the things I loved most about WoW was that the world itself felt like the main character. It wasn't simply a collection of activities you loaded into when you wanted something to do. It was a persistent world that had existed for years and would continue to exist whether you were playing that day or not. You could return years later and there was still history in the places you visited, characters you'd met, factions you'd interacted with and stories you'd never finished. I'd love Destiny to reach that point. The Last City, Europa, Nessus, the Cosmodrome and future destinations shouldn't just feel like places we visit to complete activities. I'd love them to feel like actual places that are constantly evolving. NPCs could have their own lives, factions could have conflicts and territories, settlements could change, world events could happen without us specifically launching an activity, and new stories could emerge naturally as the universe changes. Destiny has one of the most interesting science-fiction universes in gaming. I want to actually live in it, rather than simply visit it. That's where I think Destiny could borrow heavily from the MMO formula. I'd love to see the character system become dramatically deeper. We have three fantastic classes in Titan, Hunter and Warlock, but imagine eventually having many more classes and meaningful specialization within them. Instead of simply choosing a subclass and building around an exotic, your Guardian could develop into a genuine role within a fireteam: tanking, DPS, healing, support, crowd control and other specialized roles. Imagine two Titans who play completely differently because they've invested in different specializations. One could be an aggressive frontline tank while another is built around protecting the rest of the fireteam. One Warlock could specialize heavily into healing and support while another focuses on damage. The possibilities become much greater when your build isn't just about maximizing your own damage, but about deciding what kind of Guardian you actually want to be. I'd also love to see more playable races eventually. Destiny already has Humans, Awoken and Exos, while the universe contains numerous other intelligent species and cultures. Imagine eventually being able to play as an Eliksni, with their own passive racial perks, appearance options and perhaps unique introductory experiences. Nothing so powerful that everyone is forced to choose the "best" race, but enough to give your character another layer of identity. Then there's the part of WoW that I think Destiny already comes closest to understanding: raids and loot. Destiny's raids are some of the best content in gaming, and I'd love to see Bungie build even further on that foundation. Give us more raids, including larger 10-player experiences, and make the rewards something people genuinely chase for a long time. One of the things I loved about WoW was knowing that a particular weapon, armor piece or item came from a particular encounter. Sometimes you could spend weeks or even months trying to obtain it. When it finally dropped, it actually meant something. Destiny has some of that already, but I think it could go much further. I want to see someone inspect another Guardian and recognize that they have something incredibly rare because of where it came from and what they had to do to obtain it. I want gear to have stories attached to it. I want someone to be able to say, "That came from the final encounter of that raid, and it took me three months to get it." That's a completely different feeling from simply obtaining another weapon because it happens to have a higher power level. That same philosophy could apply to professions and crafting. I'd love genuine professions such as weaponsmithing, armorsmithing, engineering or whatever equivalents make sense within the Destiny universe. Furthermore, I want gathering materials to actually matter. Imagine exploring Europa and finding a rare material that another clanmate desperately needs for their profession. Suddenly farming materials isn't just collecting another currency because the game told you to. You're contributing to an actual economy and progression system. Exploration has a purpose, crafting has a purpose, and helping another player has a purpose. I'd also love to see the world filled with an enormous number of quests. Not just the major campaign or seasonal story, but thousands of smaller stories that gradually reveal the history of the Destiny universe. WoW was incredibly good at having quests that told the story of a particular zone or group of people while contributing to the larger narrative. Destiny has an absurd amount of lore, but so much of it has historically existed outside the actual gameplay experience. I want to discover that lore by playing the game. Give me a long questline about an Eliksni settlement. Give me a series of missions about a Cabal commander. Give me a story about an isolated human colony. Give me obscure quests that players are still discovering years after an expansion launches. Give me reasons to explore a destination because I genuinely don't know what I'm going to find there. And then there's something I think could be particularly special for Destiny: clan housing. Imagine every clan having its own physical location somewhere in the Destiny universe. A place where clan members can meet, hang out, display raid trophies and achievements, customize the environment and show off what the clan has accomplished together. As the clan progresses, perhaps the headquarters grows and develops. Imagine completing a difficult raid and eventually having a physical trophy from that raid displayed in your clan's headquarters. Imagine visiting another clan's headquarters and seeing what they've accomplished. It gives clans an actual identity beyond a name and a roster. It becomes our place in the Destiny universe. Ultimately, the biggest thing I'd want Bungie to change is the relationship between the player and progression. I don't want everything to be immediately obtainable. I don't want every piece of gear to become irrelevant a few months later. I don't want the entire purpose of playing to be reaching the next seasonal reset. I want things that take time. I want rare weapons and armor, extremely difficult achievements, rare cosmetics and items that tell other players something about where I've been. I want professions that take months to master and reputations with factions that I've spent years building. I want my Guardian to feel like a character I've been developing for a very long time. Because that's what an MMO can do that Destiny has never quite achieved for me: It gives your character a history. After playing for ten years, I want to look at my Guardian and see ten years of accomplishments. I want my gear, titles, achievements, clan, reputation and collections to tell a story about the time I've spent in this universe. And I think there is a very real market for that kind of game. World of Warcraft is now more than 20 years old and still has a player population measured in the millions. Blizzard no longer publishes current subscriber numbers, but regardless of the exact number, WoW's longevity demonstrates that there is an enormous audience for a game where the world persists, characters develop over many years and players always have another reason to return. I think Destiny could take that concept somewhere completely different. Imagine taking the longevity, depth, character development, professions, exploration, social systems, quests, factions, raids and persistent world of an MMORPG and combining it with Destiny's gunplay. You could log in one night and run a 10-player raid. The next night you could work on your weaponsmithing profession. Another night you could explore a planet looking for rare materials. Maybe you're working through a huge questline that tells the history of a particular settlement. Maybe you're helping your clan unlock something for its headquarters. Maybe you're hunting a specific weapon that only drops from one particular encounter and you've been trying to get it for weeks. Or maybe you don't have a plan at all. You just log in and wander around. That's the kind of Destiny I would want to play for another 10 or 20 years. I'm not saying every Destiny player wants this. I know they don't. Some people want Destiny to remain closer to what it is today, while others want more PvP, more traditional looter-shooter mechanics, or something completely different. That's fine. But if Bungie ever decides that Destiny is going to evolve into something much bigger than the game it is today, this is the direction I'd love to see explored. Don't make Destiny into World of Warcraft. Take what makes an MMORPG world so compelling and ask what those ideas would look like if they were built from the ground up around Destiny's universe and FPS gameplay. Keep the gunplay. Keep the movement. Keep the raids. Keep the weirdness. Keep the Destiny identity. Just give us a universe that we don't simply play. Give us a universe that we live in.