Question for the coder types regarding custom games.

So if you're super interested in all this coding stuff, I'm curious what you might think the issue would be with custom matchmaking for crucible: specifically, if it's more a coding issue or a philosophy issue. Could it be implemented easily? Is it more likely that Bungie doesn't want custom matchmaking? Talk amongst yourselves.

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It's hard to say exactly without knowing specific details about how the Destiny engine handles matchmaking.

On the one hand, there is the possibility that they have something very similar to Halo's multiplayer code in there. If the Crucible works much like Halo, then I'd think it's mainly about creating a UI for custom games and finding a place to fit it in the story. One possible niggle in this case is that the playstation platform may be different enough from MS that they may have to make additional changes to make this work across all platforms. In that case Bungie may not want to do custom games until it's supported for all platforms.

On the other hand, Bungie talked a lot about how they were using new matchmaking technology for their "shared world shooter". That could mean any number of things. Perhaps the host for a crucible game isn't a particular person's console? Instead Destiny's servers act as host? That would mean that the Destiny servers likely need a significant number of changes to support custom games in addition to a UI.

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It'd be a lot easier to get your thorn playing with a bunch of friends who could feed for you. Not that you can't do that anyway, though.

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It'd be a lot easier to get your thorn playing with a bunch of friends who could feed for you. Not that you can't do that anyway, though.

No XP/bounty progress during custom matches would pretty much negate "cheesing" the bounties.

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It'd be a lot easier to get your thorn playing with a bunch of friends who could feed for you. Not that you can't do that anyway, though.

No XP/bounty progress during custom matches would pretty much negate "cheesing" the bounties.

XP, sure why not. Bounties, that could be a problem.

Stuff like this would last forever.

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2 of the other players are your friends, so you can organize this kind of cheese-fest at your leisure.

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I think Beorn's idea was a nice solution.

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Really it depends on what the underlying architecture of matchmaking is. It's really hard to say how difficult it would be without knowing how they handle it. I don't even know if games are hosted on someone's console or on a server. I suspect they're on a server now, but I just don't know.

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Well:

- A couple of Crucible game types, Relic and Rumble, could be filled by the standard six person fireteam but Bungie doesn't let you do that. Here the limitation is clearly philosophical and not technical.

- Destiny's engine will let you join a friend in the middle of a Crucible game and will even correctly balance teams by splitting up fireteams as necessary. If it can do that it doesn't seem such a big step away from starting with a double size fireteam and forming the teams at the start of a match.

- Destiny also has no problem joining you into a friend's Story Mission or Raid. Clearly the networking supports pulling players into the same virtual server shard at will, so again making that be a Crucible match instead of a Story Mission doesn't seem technically impossible.

Therefore, I think it's philosophical. Destiny feels to me like it's a clever reimplementation of Halo's matchmaking tech... with everything from a Raid, to the Crucible, to even The Tower basically being a matchmade Firefight type game... just with different teams and rules. So if its not technical, then why not have Custom Games?

- Lack of development time? Maybe? But we have no proof one way or the other really...

- Maybe Bungie wanted to encourage players to play the whole package? New players start Destiny without access to the Crucible. It's hard to envision a bigger display of intention than not letting a player do something...

- Perhaps it was done to limit tournaments and the culture that surrounds them? Destiny, as is with no custom games or adjustable rules, won't be springing up a slimmed down till it's unrecognizable MLG type ruleset anytime soon. To someone who like playing Halo's multiplayer... not MLG's or Swat or Shotty Snipers or Infection... this is a good thing.

- Maybe they wanted to prevent boosting? But cutting out custom games seems unnecessary as we've already seen sections of single player turn off experience gains and replaying standard story missions doesn't give you the experience bonus it does the first time through...

- Pessimistically, perhaps Custom Games were held back for a future release to have something that will be of guaranteed interest.

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I think it's a matter of priorities. Custom game types were lower on their priority lists because (while Destiny has the Crucible) Destiny is designed as a game where everything you do is part of the Universe. The Crucible is just one more way you train for taking on the PvE encounters so having custom Crucible games does not really fit into the Universe. Plus, if they allow custom games but shut down bounties then it messes with player progression. So they may need to think about how to accommodate that.

I wish they would at least take the simplest route of allowing us to just run regular Crucible matchmaking with two fireteams of six each and just disable bounty collection in that case. Maybe have Lord Shaxx decide to open up "practice" sessions or something. The rules would still be normal Crucible rules but now you can control who you are playing with. Perhaps later on they could come up with special bounties for this mode that would mitigate the progression problem.

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I think it's a matter of priorities. Custom game types were lower on their priority lists because (while Destiny has the Crucible) Destiny is designed as a game where everything you do is part of the Universe. The Crucible is just one more way you train for taking on the PvE encounters so having custom Crucible games does not really fit into the Universe. Plus, if they allow custom games but shut down bounties then it messes with player progression. So they may need to think about how to accommodate that.

I wish they would at least take the simplest route of allowing us to just run regular Crucible matchmaking with two fireteams of six each and just disable bounty collection in that case. Maybe have Lord Shaxx decide to open up "practice" sessions or something. The rules would still be normal Crucible rules but now you can control who you are playing with. Perhaps later on they could come up with special bounties for this mode that would mitigate the progression problem.

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...

Don't know where to begin to try and find the source... but it's in my head, so you should all take it as empirical evidence.

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

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But I forget the source.

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Just in general. In regards to PvP it seems like their focus is on mechanics, i.e. pulse rifle fixes, shotgun nerfs, etc.

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Because players could organize controlled PvP environments and then test anything they wanted to find weapon stats, damage values, how much armor that new helmet really gives, etc..

This would be a big step towards opening up that "conversation" between the players and Bungie.

Right now, the conversation is a lot like "Hey Bungie, fix this broken raid!" "Okay, we've added more random elements and bugs."

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Because players could organize controlled PvP environments and then test anything they wanted to find weapon stats, damage values, how much armor that new helmet really gives, etc..

This would be a big step towards opening up that "conversation" between the players and Bungie.

Right now, the conversation is a lot like "Hey Bungie, fix this broken raid!" "Okay, we've added more random elements and bugs."

Why wouldn't Bungie want to let the community identify glitches or broken mechanics for them in PvP, much the same way that the player base found all those raid bugs?

Alternatively, what might accurate metric analysis mean for crucible? Further discussion points.

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Custom matches allow you to get so much more information back to the devs.

Of note: Titanfall delayed custom matches for a very long time as well - I wonder if the new "cloud server" architecture of XBL makes it harder to do?

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Custom matches allow you to get so much more information back to the devs.

Of note: Titanfall delayed custom matches for a very long time as well - I wonder if the new "cloud server" architecture of XBL makes it harder to do?

Maybe XBL and PSN don't play by the same rules, which creates issues there? Cross generation platforms is probably wrapped up in this.

I also wonder if the fact that next gen consoles record so easily made Bungie feel filmmaking/theater modes weren't a priority?

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I also wonder if the fact that next gen consoles record so easily made Bungie feel filmmaking/theater modes weren't a priority?

I'd think so. I also wouldn't be surprised if Bungie wanted to keep exact feature parity between all four version of Destiny and the older consoles (especially the RAM starved PS3) couldn't handle it. They are, after all, displaying decently more complex graphics and shadows than we had in Reach
while also doing constant background matchmaking all on the same old hardware. Perhaps something had to give?

Perhaps the significant work Bungie also did to advance beyond Halo 3's "grind to a halt" co-op networking model has something to do with it too? If I understand it correctly, Halo 3 / ODST / Reach would slow down and even outright pause the entire game world until every player was completely in sync. Destiny never pauses the game world. Instead it seems to try and get players back in sync when it can while keeping gameplay smooth when it can't. This sometimes causes enemies to blip backwards in time or to die and undie and die again as Destiny works out all your fireteam's inputs. Maybe that harder to write down in a coherent, theater-mode-able state?

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I also wonder if the fact that next gen consoles record so easily made Bungie feel filmmaking/theater modes weren't a priority?

I'd think so. I also wouldn't be surprised if Bungie wanted to keep exact feature parity between all four version of Destiny and the older consoles (especially the RAM starved PS3) couldn't handle it. They are, after all, displaying decently more complex graphics and shadows than we had in Reach
while also doing constant background matchmaking all on the same old hardware. Perhaps something had to give?

Perhaps the significant work Bungie also did to advance beyond Halo 3's "grind to a halt" co-op networking model has something to do with it too? If I understand it correctly, Halo 3 / ODST / Reach would slow down and even outright pause the entire game world until every player was completely in sync. Destiny never pauses the game world. Instead it seems to try and get players back in sync when it can while keeping gameplay smooth when it can't. This sometimes causes enemies to blip backwards in time or to die and undie and die again as Destiny works out all your fireteam's inputs. Maybe that harder to write down in a coherent, theater-mode-able state?

That only happened with enemy AI. In non-firefight matchmaking that never happened. I think the main reason we can't review clips is that the main story modes / patrol modes are all run mainly on the destiny servers somewhere instead of on our consoles.

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Right, but where Halo had two different networking models I kinda have a suspicion that Destiny only has one.

In Halo having the host drop or having host status swapped to a different player in a multiplayer game was somewhat frequent. You would get hit with the black screen and scoreboard, basically a way to pause a game world filled with humans the system has no control over while a new host was being worked out. That doesn't really happen in the Crucible. At worst, a few players can't respawn for a few seconds, probably while their games are reconnecting after someone joins or drops, but other players keep playing just fine. If it were the old Halo model both the players waiting to respawn and the players who were still alive would see some kind of massive disruption but I've seen the other team stuck not respawning while I'm free to smoothly run around and shoot which ever enemy Guardians are left...

It kinda makes sense. Destiny is always matchmaking in the background unless you're playing a mode where matchmaking is disabled. And which mode is that? Even Nightfall Strikes and the Vault of Glass matchmake people into the open world until you get to a instanced off area. My guess is that a Crucible match isn't so different than Patrol behind the scenes. In both cases I think Bungie's servers are acting as the host instead of any individual player. So, if I'm right, and if this new network model affected the ability to do saved replays in single player it would have the same effect on multiplayer.

Or who knows? It might not be the networking at all and instead be limitations of RAM or CPU or development time. I just think it's a fascinating thing to speculate about. :)

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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.

That being said, it sure would be nice to have them. Matchmaking is fun, but custom game nights were/are a blast. However, what I might like to see even more is some new innovative gametypes. How about implementing a "Hold the Relic" gametype?

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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.

That's not it. About 10% of players have finished the Vault of glass, assuming Bungie's figure of 1.2 million players finishing it, and sales of 16 million. Yet Bungie put a lot of resources into the raid. I imagine Crota hard mode has even fewer finishing it.

So Bungie has no problem with putting in awesome things that most people don't play.

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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.

That's not it. About 10% of players have finished the Vault of glass, assuming Bungie's figure of 1.2 million players finishing it, and sales of 16 million. Yet Bungie put a lot of resources into the raid. I imagine Crota hard mode has even fewer finishing it.

So Bungie has no problem with putting in awesome things that most people don't play.

My guess, as someone who generally didn't like custom Halo games, would be that low utilization did play at least some significant part in their not returning in Bungie's next franchise.

There were around 3.9 billion games of Reach played as of 2012. How many custom games do you think were played during that time? Keep in mind that 10% would put the number of Reach only custom games close to the total number of Firefight games ever played across both ODST and Reach... the latter of which had Firefight matchmaking. (390 million vs 350 million).

Most people don't finish games at all (reports put the range anywhere from 50% to 90% NOT completing campaigns) so putting resources into a mode that a full 10% of your population finished within a few months even though it takes substantially more time and effort than any of your other content... not to mention the grind to get there... That seems pretty good to me!

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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. :)

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It seems that this might be trivial, but it came to my mind as something they may have considered...

Part of the fun of custom games in Halo was creating unique gametypes with special characteristics. Halo was a game that had default weapons. Master Chief could pick up any weapon and use it as a disposable tool. You could customize your loadout in Reach, but that was still from a list of default weapons. A shotgun was a shotgun was a shotgun. You could make a shotty-sniper gametype. Petetheduck would make amazing metagames off of that level of choice.

People have come to expect that from Bungie's custom menus.

With Destiny however, they have stated that they want you to have a relationship with your guns. You can customize them so that they feel right for you. If you were loaded into a game with a crappy pulse rifle using perks you hate, that would be off-putting. They have talked about giving users a continuous experience and this runs against that.

Now, I know what you're saying:"Why don't they just let you keep your guns but still allow custom matchmaking?"

That is a good question. I think it may have to do with consumer expectations and the idea that Bungie wants to have features live up to their legacy when they roll them out. Rather than release halo 1.5 with matchmaking, they put their energy into Halo 2. My gut says that they want to add the feature, but they want to do it in such a way that it will work with all of the crazy permutations people would want from bungie's custom menus. I think it was too much for them this time around and they're still figuring out a way to make it work smoothly.

I could be totally wrong about this, but my sense is that this is probably one of the hurdles.

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That is a good question. I think it may have to do with consumer expectations and the idea that Bungie wants to have features live up to their legacy when they roll them out. Rather than release halo 1.5 with matchmaking, they put their energy into Halo 2. My gut says that they want to add the feature, but they want to do it in such a way that it will work with all of the crazy permutations people would want from bungie's custom menus. I think it was too much for them this time around and they're still figuring out a way to make it work smoothly.

I could see that being a real issue with server load, depending on how their servers are maintained.

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So if you're super interested in all this coding stuff, I'm curious what you might think the issue would be with custom matchmaking for crucible: specifically, if it's more a coding issue or a philosophy issue. Could it be implemented easily? Is it more likely that Bungie doesn't want custom matchmaking? Talk amongst yourselves.

It's entirely possible that game mechanics like supers and heavy ammo drops completely break any gametype that is not slayer. Notice how every single game type in destiny is basically slayer. Even salvage nets you points when you kill, and you can very well win without taking a single relic as they don't give you that many points.

I'm sure there are team and skill compositions that would just wreck CTF for example.

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