According to Bungie, it took them years of pre-production to settle on “mythic science fiction” for Destiny. Bungie design director Joseph Staten says this gave them the freedom they wanted in this new franchise.
“We thought of a good handful of other genres as well,” said Staten. “We’ve had a pretty long pre-production period and we explored everything from straight-up fantasy to something a little bit more modern to many, many other things as well.”
“Ultimately we gravitated towards this mix of science fiction and fantasy because it gave us this freedom,” said Staten. “You saw small things like the prevalence of cloth in the game, a lot of characters have capes or cloaks and the combatants have cloth as well. Fantasy brings us this texture that we can wrap around sci-fi, which is really appealing, especially if you’re an artist who’s just been stuck making straight up space armor for ten years. A bit of cloth is very refreshing.”
Source: Official Xbox Magazine