Post-Beta thoughts: how Destiny can reach its full potential (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 07:58 (3769 days ago) @ kidtsunami

I just so strongly disagree with you on this. Communicating with randoms has an almost guaranteed chance to be obnoxious. I can't imagine how stupid the tower would be with the nonsense randoms would say.

It feels social when you run into other people and wave at them before joining them in the fray. Waving, pointing, sitting, and dancing just about cover how I want to communicate with randoms.

I totally get the reluctance to embrace full open chat, but at the same time I definitely feel like Destiny is lacking. To me, the communication tools at our disposal might as well be being paralysed in a wheelchair only able to communicate through blinking. It actually discourages me from any social interaction, since the only way to properly communicate is to dive full-on into inviting people into a fireteam. That's a little bit intense for some people, and it'd be great if there were some less-commital ways of starting up a conversation or otherwise engaging socially.

Others have talked about proximity voice (yes, this could be problematic, but there are also ways of dealing with it; you can mute/report people who abuse this feature, and if they have too many negative reports they could be permanently muted in proximity, say). The range of gestures could be wider, too.

It does occur to me however that for a game which is primarily co-operative, the default communication black-out seems misplaced. It's generally in competitive games that the worst behaviour of gamers is exhibited, and it's not hard to see why: if somebody beats you, then some players might feel compelled to lash out verbally. But in a game where you most need more communication in a co-operative environment, I'm not certain that players would be regularly abusive. Players in MMOs can be offensive, but generally speaking having free text-based chat is more positive than negative, after all.

I have to wonder if Bungie have perhaps jumped the gun a little.