In this week’s This Week at Bungie article, Bungie announced that cross play is going to be coming to Destiny 2 in Season 15. It outlined in quite a lot of detail how this system will work, and honestly, it’s blown my mind a little. There’s so much to the whole idea of cross play that’s complex, and Bungie has clearly been weighing this all up for a good long time. Looking at what’s coming, I still can’t really differentiate between the simple and the complicated. In this article, I want to address a couple of the most complex points about this upcoming system.
First, let’s talk about our Bungie Names. This is what every Guardian’s name is going to shift to. It’s basically your current Guardian name, but with a bunch of numbers attached to it. It’s like you’re a teenager making their Xbox account for the first time ten years ago. It makes total sense that Bungie is implementing this system because there’s no way to accurately track our names across all systems. The idea is that your identity will be consistent across all platforms.
However, I don’t really like the idea that my account will be unified by name. I like people knowing if I’m on my Xbox, PlayStation, or am playing on Stadia. It makes me feel like a part of that community, and my IDs for each of those platforms is a part of that. By taking it away, I don’t feel like I’m part of that community anymore, and that’s sort of taking away from the overall experience.
The second point I want to discuss is the brilliant decision to keep competitive game modes platform specific. You can’t match PC Guardians up with PlayStation Guardians in the Crucible, because I’ll lead to absolute chaos. The PC brigade all believe they have the superior power due to the 100 GB of keyboard or whatever they have going on that makes them so fabulous. Speaking as a console Guardian, I can tell you now that Xbox, PlayStation, and Stadia all perform about the same. I’m fine with the changes regarding competitive that Bungie is making.
There’s a lot more to cross play that I could dive into, but I think these are the two major points that need to be addressed. Identity and fairness are being maintained in some form for the future. That’s what we should be concerned about, and I think the changes will please everyone. Even the PC Guardians who hate everything.
