Bungie (DeeJ, if I remember correctly) all but explicitly said that it was Sony and Microsoft holding that feature back.

How could they stop Bungie? Neither control Bungie.net, and both versions of the game connect to bungie.net to pull your guardian. The only way they could stop them is contractual, not technological. Which means Bungie chose this by agreeing.

Exactly, which is why I suspect it was Sony who put the breaks on sharing characters across platforms. Sony paid a lot of money to secure their position as "lead platform" for Destiny. These kinds of deals are always a 2-way street. Sony gets some exclusive content which allows them to use Destiny to lure players to their side, and Bungie/Activision get a major marketing push from Sony. I guarantee Sony wouldn't like the idea of paying all that money to secure players, only to have Bungie allow them to switch consoles at the drop of a hat.

As for it becoming a PS exclusive, I can't see it. there are still a HUGE number of Xbox players and at launch a big chunk of them were on 360. Bungie/activision would not want to forgo that group of customers (and if they could do without the XBOX players they would have just from a development cost perspective long before worrying about data sync issues). Would have been deafening to see the outcry if they had, though.

I am going to assume this is because of PS exclusive stuff and not being able to work out how to deal with that.

This seems extremely unlikely. As an example, I know people who bought the collector's edition on one generation of console, but also played on the other console generation in the same family, and only had access to the collector's "exclusive" content on one of those consoles. When they played on the console that had the exclusives and equipped one of those items, then went and logged in on the other console, the game just unequipped the item, and it went back into their inventory (but either wasn't usable, or wasn't visible at all, I don't remember which). The game then equipped some default item in that slot.

The point being, there are mechanisms to handle that kind of thing. If your guardian has an item equipped that isn't available on the system you log in from, Destiny just puts something else in its place. Easy. I don't see any reason this couldn't be done in the cross-platform scenario. The game doesn't need to know or care WHY the item's not available (whether it's a platform exclusive or just because of a Collector's Edition code), it just needs to know that it is so.

No, I think it's far more likely that the platform holders are just being dicks, because that's what they do.

...Except Warthog AI. That was like the one thing they never figured out in 5 games, hah! :)

Vehicle AI must be incredibly difficult. Forza, though I love it dearly, still has weird issues pretty frequently. The AI drivers will sometimes brake VERY heavily for no real reason, for example, coming to a near stop in the middle of an open track. And here's the thing: Forza drivers only have to deal with driving on a static track, with just a few other vehicles providing obstacles. And the ideal route is always the same, other than said obstacles. Whereas the Halo AI won't necessarily have the same start or end point, so the whole route is often dynamic. Additionally, there are WAY more things that could potentially get in the way, or otherwise affect pathfinding.

But the exotics should be recreated. Don't take my MIDA Multi-Tool away again, dammit!

My hope is there will either not be a collector's edition I care about, and can buy it digital, or they will make a collector's edition that replaces the plastic disc with a download code.

Halo 5 did that and everyone just bitched about it. I don't see that happening, honestly. I'd actually be really interested to see the numbers on how many of that edition were sold compared to how many people went through the process to get the physical disc for it.

I'm with you, though. I've pretty much accepted that I'll just never buy another special edition (which isn't necessarily a bad thing; most of them are garbage anyway. How many statues do I really need?), because not having to use a disc is much more important to me than a collectible that I can probably pick up on ebay for cheaper in a year anyway.

Unless they agreed, there would not be Destiny on multiple platforms and so the feature still could not exist. And i'm 100% sure that neither Sony nor Microsoft wanted cross platform compatibility (though I think from a business decision Sony SHOULD want it and would benefit from it.)

I mean, let's be honest. That's a dumb position for either Sony or Microsoft to make. Not having Destiny on your console would be a much larger detriment to Microsoft at this point than for Bungie. Even before we really knew what Destiny would be, we knew Destiny was going to be huge.

I'd jump ship to Sony in a heartbeat if it suddenly became a Sony exclusive. I actually might anyway if Destiny 2 provides a good point for a fresh start.

Bungie (DeeJ, if I remember correctly) all but explicitly said that it was Sony and Microsoft holding that feature back.

How could they stop Bungie? Neither control Bungie.net, and both versions of the game connect to bungie.net to pull your guardian. The only way they could stop them is contractual, not technological. Which means Bungie chose this by agreeing.

Unless they agreed, there would not be Destiny on multiple platforms and so the feature still could not exist. And i'm 100% sure that neither Sony nor Microsoft wanted cross platform compatibility (though I think from a business decision Sony SHOULD want it and would benefit from it.)

Wonder what is going on with Seagate?

IIRC a natural disaster affected Quality control at a lot of their suppliers on drives built a few years back.

Bungie (DeeJ, if I remember correctly) all but explicitly said that it was Sony and Microsoft holding that feature back.

How could they stop Bungie? Neither control Bungie.net, and both versions of the game connect to bungie.net to pull your guardian. The only way they could stop them is contractual, not technological. Which means Bungie chose this by agreeing.

well, all games/updates have to be approved by MS/Sony, no? They could just deny them publication rights to their console.