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In Season 15, Cross Play comes to life. Guardians across Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Stadia will be able to join fireteams to take on the Darkness together. Boundaries will be broken and new friendships will be forged – no matter the platform.
Check out this Bungie article to learn more about Cross Play!
Who Am I?
In a Cross Play world that also supports Cross Save, it quickly became clear to Bungie that they had a Guardian identity crisis.
They didn’t want the name over your Guardian’s head to change based on where you logged into the game. Bungie felt this fought against the fantasy of who you are in this new unified Destiny community. Even more concerning, they didn’t want the names of your friends and clan mates to change based on where they logged into the game. Having to keep a who’s-who cheat sheet of your friends’ names didn’t meet our effortless bar for Cross Play.
As such, they are converting everyone’s name over to an identity that will remain consistent across all platforms you play from. Bungie calling this your Bungie Name. While this will cause a one-time naming reshuffle, they feel this is better for everyone in the long run.
The image above is an example of a player tooltip in the Roster screen, surrounded by players from different platforms and here’s how Bungie Names will work and look:
- “Bungie Name”: PlayerName#1234
- “Display Name”: PlayerName
- “Hash”: #
- “Numeric ID”: 1234
The image above is an example of what players will look like in the Tower.
Bungie Names?
As part of the creation of Bungie Names, Bungie will be running all player names through a character filtration process and an offensive term moderation process. First, Bungie will be stripping out all characters that they are unable to display in the game or that can’t be typed into the player search box via console virtual keyboards. This means some of the extended character sets they have supported for player names on Steam will no longer be able to be used.
It is possible that due to removing these characters, players will end up with empty names, or names that result in offensive terms. If your name ends up empty or includes a moderated term, you will find the quite unremarkable “Guardian[Random Number]” name over your character’s head. While Bungie won’t have a name change feature at launch, they are working diligently to get you an early version of this feature this winter. Bungie highly recommends you think carefully about what name you’d like to rock in Destiny 2 sooner rather than later, as they don’t want you to be stuck with a handle you’re not overly fond of when the name change feature goes live.
Bungie Friends
Bungie created a system to bridge the platforms called Bungie Friends. You’ll still find all of your friends in one flat list. To make it a bit easier to find a specific friend, Bungie also added a platform filter. You can still see just the friends who are logged into the same platform as you.
You’ve always been able to have clan members across multiple platforms in Destiny 2, but finally with the launch of Cross Play you’ll be able to see everyone who’s online and team up to go earn your clan rewards. Hopefully there are some new friends to be made in your clan.
Adding Bungie Friends
Cross Play without an easy way to add new friends, well, doesn’t get it done. As such, there are three different ways to add your friends from all platforms to your Bungie Friends.
- Log into Destiny 2 on a device where you want to turn platform friends into Bungie Friends, and then issue requests via our Roster screen.
- Search for your friends using player search on the Invite screen.
- Use Bungie.net friends finder, where you can link all of your platforms, and then issue Bungie Friends requests to all your platform friends.
The Bungie.net friend finder will become available alongside Cross Play, and will be found at https://www.bungie.net/friends (not yet available).
In Game Options
In order to make fireteam invites work across all platforms, Bungie pulled all of the invite infrastructure into the game. When you get a fireteam invite you’ll see an in-game invite notification. To accept the invite, you’ll navigate to the Roster screen, then the invite section, and then interact with the invite to accept and join your fireteam. Notice that the Invite screen is where you can search for other Guardians, accept friend requests, and clan invites.
Teaming up with Potential New Friends
To help players find each other, Bungie has built a series of external group finding forums and tools. Including Bungie’s Fireteam Finder, which can now issue fireteam invites to all platforms! The invite screen allows for players to search for each other and issue fireteam invites.
That said, there are members of our community who experience targeted harassment. To help players protect themselves, Bungie added a block system so that players can protect themselves. Bungie also added additional privacy tools so that players can protect themselves from broad harassment. Most of the social privacy settings can be accessed from the Roster screen, where you will have control over the different kinds of invites you’re willing to see and consider. For the time being, your privacy setting for clan invites will still be controlled through your personal Bungie.net privacy settings, which can be found here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Profile/Settings?category=Privacy
Reminder: Targeted harassment can result in account restrictions and bans. Be kind to each other, Guardians. Check out the Code of Conduct for details.
A Level Playing Field
In Cross Play Bungie is striving to create a global community of Guardians. At the same time, Cross Play enabled them to ask a ton of questions about input methods, and how they create a level playing field in competitive modes. While the following might not be the answer forever, it will be our approach for matchmaking in competitive modes (Crucible, Iron Banner, Trials, Gambit) at Cross Play launch:
- PC players will match with other PC players.
- Console players will match with other console players.
- Note: Stadia will be in the Console pool.
- Fireteams with any combination of PC players and console players will match in the PC player pool.
For PvE modes, there will be one global matchmaking pool.
Chatting With Your Friends
When Cross Play releases, voice chat between platforms will not be enabled. Bungie have run into some late-breaking issues with development and are currently working on making sure this experience is ready before shipping it live. They know this will create a less-than-ideal player experience out of the gate, and they even considered delaying Cross Play as a whole. Since they know that there is a lot of excitement and that the community will find ways to work around this in the interim, they decided to go ahead with the launch. They are currently targeting a fix for cross-platform voice chat in an update targeted for shortly after Cross Play goes live.
Bungie sees text chat as a critical tool for player communication in their action MMO game. At Cross Play launch, text chat will still be available on Steam. From launch through The Witch Queen, they will add text chat support across the console platforms. Bungie will start with displaying text, so that console players can at least see what their PC friends are talking about. And then they will add USB keyboard support, so that everyone can join in. NOTE: USB keyboards on consoles will only be for chat and will not be able to control your character.
Launch is Just the Beginning
There are a number of improvements Bungie will be bringing to the social experience of Cross Play leading up to The Witch Queen:
- Early Season 15
- Bungie Name and Bungie Friends
- Cross Platform Invites, Multiplayer, and Matchmaking
- Player Search and Social Privacy
- Soon after launch – Cross Platform Voice Chat
- Winter – Bungie Name Changes
- Winter – Text Chat Display on Consoles
- Winter – Text Input Via USB Keyboards on Consoles
- Till We See Each Other Again, Using Cross Play!
That’s all for now. More details will be posted and updated here once Cross Play becomes available.
Source: This Week at Bungie – July 29, 2021