Bungie explains why Destiny’s multiplayer isn’t cross-platform

Destiny’s galaxy may be vast and currently well-populated with beta Guardians, but players aren’t able to team up with heroes hailing from different consoles. While technical issues might seem like a likely culprit, Bungie engineer Roger Wolfson told Digital Trends the lack of cross-platform play is more about maintaining a consistent experience for everyone. “Regardless of where the reality is, there’s definitely a perception among gamers that better hardware means you have an advantage,” Wolfson explained. “We don’t want to have to enter that fray, so to create the best, most level playing field, both actually and perceptually, we separated it by platform.”

Destiny isn’t the first game to straddle two generations of gaming hardware, but it’s one of the few currently in play that was built from the ground up with that in mind. With its latest title, Bungie took on the Herculean task of building a game for four systems: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. With the foundations now laid and the all-important beta just around the corner, we spoke with Bungie engineer Roger Wolfson to find out more about the challenges of building a game that runs on just about anything. “There is a huge amount of complexity behind the scenes,” Wolfson tells Digital Trends. “Our platform engineering team has done an awesome job of hiding all of that complexity from the end-user.” Don’t think in terms of “next-gen” and “last-gen” here; each console presents its own set of challenges for capturing the experience that Bungie wants players to have. As Wolfson puts it, “We want to let the designers drive what the game means.” So for the platform engineers, it’s not about pushing a console to its limits. Wolfson and his team are simply focused on ensuring that the base experience dreamed up by Bungie’s creative types can be faithfully recreated in four very different playgrounds.