Bungie Is Relying On Stadia For Playtesting Destiny 2

With the coronavirus (COVID-19) forcing most people around the world to stay indoors, Bungie employees were among some of the first to move to working from home. This is great for the health and safety of those employees, but it could have been disastrous for playtesting any updates to Destiny, if not for the Stadia version.

Testing Over Stadia

In an interview with IGN, COO of Bungie, Patrick O’Kelley explained that the developer is using the Stadia version of Destiny 2 for playtesting. Usually it’s easier to do this from a central location, but when that becomes impossible, a central version of the game is the nest best thing.

Given how fast the Stadia version of Destiny 2 is, I can believe that Bungie is finding it easy to work with. The game loads extremely quickly, all matchmaking and area loading times are reduced to nothing, and it just. makes for a much more enjoyable experience.

For Bungie, the advantages of Stadia will be even greater. It should be possible to put up a separate version of the game, one that only Bungie employees can access, and have it run alongside the main version.

Thanks to the forethought that Bungie had, enabling their staff to get set up to work from home, the internet speed and technology is already in place to make it possible to update the Stadia test build of Destiny 2, and then have the playtesters mess around in it.

Once everyone is happy with the changes that have been made to the Stadia test build, it would simply be a matter of taking that build and copying it over to every other version. Of course, I’m missing out the complexities of transferring an update to several different platforms, and all the differences between them, but you get the general idea.

Anyone who has ever worked in development will understand how good it is to have test versions of software. You can do anything you want to it, and it doesn’t matter if you break it. It’s even better when multiple people can work on changes to that software together, speeding up development time.

Stadia has had a rough start in life, but I believe that it’s picking up as it goes on. The vital power that it gives Bungie at this time is more than enough to justify its existence, but also shows how other developers could take advantage of it if they brought their games to it.

Let us know what you think about how Bungie is working in the comments.

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