Question for the coder types regarding custom games. (Destiny)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Monday, February 09, 2015, 19:09 (3382 days ago) @ squidnh3

Sometime before release Bungie said something like: custom games are not a shipping feature but Destiny is meant to be a back and forth between the developer and the players and if there's enough demand...

So yeah, it wasn't a priority, but I don't think it's out of the ballpark.

Unfortunately this now seems to be what game developers say when they have cut a feature that a minority of users are passionate about (see 343 and Halo 4 campaign films). I suspect Bungie took a look at custom game statistics, saw that the number of custom games was dwarfed by matchmaking games, and allocated their resources accordingly. Custom games require quite a bit of additional UI work (for the full suite of options we would expect from a Bungie game) and a lot of it must rarely get used.

It's unfortunate we don't have custom games, but I don't think that's an unfortunate explanation for them, or anyone, to give - I think it aligns with your theory exactly, actually, and I don't see where it's wrong for a studio to focus on their main objectives, new experiments (fully-online, Raids, etc.) or what people play most. :)

I also think since Destiny was a pretty different beast than Halo, so they also wouldn't be able to know how much those past statistics would apply to their current project.

But Destiny is still the first foray into this series. I could see lots of features added in sequels, just like Halo did for a decade. :)