The Next Generation of Xbox - May 21st reveal

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Thursday, April 25, 2013, 10:10 (4018 days ago) @ Mr Daax

The only bummer I feel is this: what about the LAN parties? Having come late to the bungie.org party, I have missed out on all the awesome LANs, and couldn't quite afford to make it to the most recent HBO LANs. But when Destiny gets here, on multiple platforms, how will that work for a party? Will there just be console specific Destiny parties? Or bring-your-own-console-and-hope-for-the-best parties? Sorry if this comes across as really negative, I surely don't mean it that way :) It's just one of very few downsides I see with Destiny.

No, it's a totally legitimate concern. I'm not seriously entertaining the idea of cross-platform play so this could be a real issue. And not just at LANs - my ability to play with people from this community could be affected all the time.

Given that much of this community is made up of Halo fans, if I had to guess I would think we will end up having at least a slight XBox majority, simply because many of us are already more invested in the XBox platform, and might lean toward getting a NextBox before getting a PS4. But that doesn't take into account the differences there might be between the consoles. If it turns out that the XBox is a movie/TV/music machine that just happens to game, whereas the PS4 is the more hardcore game machine, it is feasible we could see a migration. I imagine this will become more clear after the MS announcement next month.

I do want to add one thing which I think is relevant. I don't think we'll see cross-platform play, but depending on how much of your data is stored on Destiny's servers, it might be possible to play it in XBox, then switch over to a PS4 and play the same character. We'll have to see whether this is actually doable of course. And even if it is, there are problems - you'd have to buy two copies of the game, and you could still only play with one group at a time, so it's far from perfect.