This is one I'll be watching closely. (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Sunday, January 12, 2014, 19:47 (3966 days ago) @ Schooly D

Sorry if this has been answered somewhere, but I couldn't find the answer.

Is Destiny going to allow cross generation play? Can someone on the PS3 play with someone on the PS4? I'm more concerned about Sony, so if MS doesn't allow it I really wouldn't care.

No. Source

I don't think we've seen/heard of much what might qualify as Papa Wu's Bungie Twist (which is also the name of a drink in need of a recipe); so I'm going to tiptoe out on a limb here and guess that maybe that's the reason why Bungie folks on a couple different occasions have commented about being so excited to see another player in the game space. The twist could be cross-generational/cross-platform play.

Most of us are familiar with Bungie's MO: Take established technologies and leverage them in a way that expands on the gameplay experience; not necessarily ground-breaking in terms of the tech, but revolutionary in terms of application. Knocking down walls between segments of their audience seems like a natural progression of the impulses that led to the "virtual couch" party system approach we came to know and love from Halo 2, which set the bar for the multiplayer experience on consoles from that point forward.

But let's think about this from a technical perspective for just a moment. What would the challenges really be there? What's stopping such a thing from happening? Corporate policy? The idea has been tossed around here and there that perhaps Activision would maintain a secondary login layer on top of the platform-specific network, similar to what EA has done; the thought being that whatever communication that needs to happen would take place through Activision infracstructure, effectively bridging the gap across platforms, whether it's generation-to-generation within a brand, or reaching from XBL to PSN (one could hope).

It occurs to me that voice may be a bit of a sticky wicket, though. Cross-platform comms does not seem to me to be something that is going to come without some extra hoops, so relying on emoting makes sense. If you're just going to have a passing interaction with someone from a different platform, that's one thing. If you're going to establish voice communications, I would think that would need to be handled a bit differently. However, we aren't even seeing voice comms between the Xbone and the 360 at the moment, so that puts a pretty big dent in the theory.

~D