If it's going to be something that shocks players across the server, I imagine something that changes the spirit of gameplay in Destiny. In a single player campaign, players by themselves can be emotionally affected by a twist of fate, but what can be done to affect [b]entire servers of players all interacting in a single, grand world[/b]? If Bungie has an answer, we will find out soon enough. It is a profoundly awesome question to ask, though. I have an idea to share as an answer. Bungie has stated that our campaign in Destiny is heroic, hopeful, and what we do will affect the world we live in. [i]What if what we [b]didn't[/b] do affected it as well?[/i] What if it were possible to [b]fail[/b] and have there be [b]true, persistent consequences[/b] for a shortcoming? What would the player community think of an event such as that occurring? You can have missions that are building into an eventual canonical end of the game's campaign for your character, yet, for the peripheral events that may even simply be occurring by standard A.I. aggression, could unanticipated things happen without appropriate interruption? The video game [i]Defiance[/i] will have events that tie-in to the show, but will the events persist or have permanent impacts on the world the players participate in? Who knows, but the game developers are probably responsible for coding in all the changes via patches. I can only wonder if Destiny will work the same way for my evil, evil little plan below, considering that buildings themselves probably cannot be destroyed without making them already destroyed with the architecture methodology Bungie is using. I could think of an [i]artful[/i] contrivance of a scenario Bungie could plan out to make this idea of consequence vividly and (perhaps) painfully clear to the Destiny-playing community. You take a civilian-inhabited settlement, with sympathetic and relateable NPCs among them trying to make a life for themselves (can you tell how cruel this example is going to be, yet?), somewhere amidst the wild that is also inhabited at the time by a number of guardians who have interacted with the populace, and force an infinite and fast-flowing spawn of enemies of any race that makes sense to attack that settlement. The fast-flowing and infinite part is important. To make the occasion as dramatic as possible, make it something like a three-front battle situation, like Star Wars movies of old. Perhaps a space armada positioning for an orbital bombardment, an air/ground battle at the outskirts of the settlement, and a fateful duel of guns against an elite (and invincible?) saboteur team within the town's reactor facility... or something of that nature. All fronts would be threatening to destroy the settlement! If the guardians can keep them at bay, Bungie is doing it wrong; if the few guardians there call back-up and it's enough, still doing it wrong; if the entire available and attentive resource of players cannot stop the settlement from being infiltrated, the settlers cut down (men, women, [b]children[/b], gone forever), and/or the edifices glassed and burnt to the ground, that would send a vivid message about what this game is capable of... that Bungie's new world is not going to take it easy and wait around for you to simply conquer it. If you are going to push it, it will push [b]back[/b]. Reception will be the most difficult challenge in presenting such an experience, especially with the zealous, attentive, and perceptive fans that Bungie has. Many may notice such a contrived scenario as "too much like something out of Star Wars" (they'd be right for my example, because it WAS), "a doomed scenario we could not be expected to win" (also a true statement) and then "against what Bungie promised", citing Bungie's ideals of hope for the game (to which my example scenario is clearly in contradiction by being futile in the most dramatic way possible). Unfortunately, I can't expect to please a crowd that would focus more on the "winnability" of their experience than focusing on implications to be derived by the fact that the game [b]actually beat[/b] the players at something. Perhaps the deliberately forced nature of the idea is also over the top and makes itself fairly obvious as something the game cannot do by itself. Perhaps there is a more subtle, but impacting way to show the players that mistakes can be made. (Yes, I am thinking as I currently type.) I could imagine that some visionary in Bungie could figure out the best thing to do without going overboard in the eyes of too many people. Perhaps set something in motion within the A.I. factions' motivations and priorities that simply becomes a perfect storm of an incident someplace in the world, even as guardians notice it happening over time but simply cannot fight it back. This sort of manipulation would be hard to detect due to the subtle method of a simple redirection. It would be like the switching of a bishop with a queen, a specific lie being told in a political gambit, or the pulling of the last Jenga piece before the inevitable collapse. This probably isn't even the only other idea possible for this sort of presentation, but the effects on the players aware of the failure mechanic would nonetheless enhance the experience, especially in terms of emotional immersion. I would be thrilled for them to make it so every time a you, as a player, witness unusual behavior and movement of a faction thereafter, you shall think "I've got a bad feeling about this." And Qui-Gon will say "I don't sense anything, derp!" And you will say, "It's not about the mission at hand, master; it's something elsewhere... elusive". And while Qui-Gon is telling you to live in the now, you will already be on the global chat/hub/whatever and asking if anyone else is witnessing strange faction movements in relation to the context of your own observations. The game will become a massive cooperative operation the likes of which only EVE Online has ever seen... and THAT player base is still divided into pirates and separate corporations, while Destiny will be all of us united as one! (DAMN IT, I want it to be Monday evening already!)