If you play games on PC, you’ve almost certainly had the experience of browsing a server list – whether it’s recently on any game with custom servers or a long time ago when it was the only option. That sort of experience is what has driven Bungie’s take on matchmaking – or how little there is – for Destiny 2.
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In an interview with the Financial Post, M.E. Chung, social lead on Destiny 2, discussed why you can’t jump into matchmaking for raids in any traditional manner. In short, while they hear the community asking for matchmaking, Chung sees it as not having the charm of communities that were built through online server lists. She proposes that, instead of playing with random people every day, you could foster a community on one server together.
Drawing on her experiences as a woman and the reactions when using voice chat, Chung says having a community you can feel comfortable in is important. It was her first thought when discussing what was right for Destiny, saying that “first and foremost, we have to make sure it’s a welcoming experience.”
“Server communities were beautiful because that was a way for people to sort of manage the kind of communities that they felt like they belonged to, and they were able to really … That was a way that I felt safe, right?,” Chung says in the interview.
So, while there is minimal matchmaking with the Guided Games feature, the focus of raids is allowing players to create their own communities that are welcoming and ensuring everyone’s comfortable.
It’s also revealed in the interview that Destiny 2 is using the ‘Super Bowl ring’ philosophy – in the NFL, there’s a tradition where the team that wins the Super Bowl gets rings for everyone. Not just the players, but every single person behind that team, from the managers to those that manage the grass on the field.
There are going to be some challenges in Destiny 2 that follow the same philosophy: if one group in the clan completes a task, the whole clan is rewarded. Chung didn’t describe what those rewards would be, but did say “a lot of those details are going to come out later.”