A:\> COPY AUTOEXEC.BAT CON:

This is really simple. If you find yourself with a language and latency problem, SELECT A SERVER NEAR YOU THAT SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE. It's your problem, not the developer's.

Yeah dude, just enter your language preferences in your autoexec.bat file.

A:\> COPY AUTOEXEC.BAT CON:
@ECHO I LOL'D

1 file(s) copied.

A:\>

From how they've described it, the seamless (and unrequested) multiplay aspect of the game sounds like a key feature, and so I'm not sure about that — it might make the game a lot less fun and satisfying if they've balanced it around that being present. But we'll see, eh. We're still massively short of detail when it comes to just how the game will play!

Well, if it's like MMO launches when I say "until they can handle" it's usually a matter of hours not weeks like Invasion was.

I still theorize that they'll do what they (like not putting in Invasion for a couple weeks) and MMO's do to manage traffic, which is not enabling all online features until they know they are able to manage the traffic. They may disable random joining in Destiny until they know they can handle the traffic but you can still play with friends.

From how they've described it, the seamless (and unrequested) multiplay aspect of the game sounds like a key feature, and so I'm not sure about that — it might make the game a lot less fun and satisfying if they've balanced it around that being present. But we'll see, eh. We're still massively short of detail when it comes to just how the game will play!

Agreed — also I suspect that their online play will have a more distributed peer-to-peer nature than games like Sim City and Diablo III, which should hopefully ease the burden of online play.

However, there is one potential issue that I'm concerned about (perhaps it's already been voiced) with Bungie that's unique to Destiny amongst all their titles so far: each game they've released has included a major offline campaign too, which for a lot of players will be the first thing they play. The difference in difficulty level that players choose, how much they choose to smell the roses etc. will also stagger how quickly these players finish the game before moving on to multiplayer, and so the sudden burst of players going online isn't nearly as dramatic as it was with a game where you have to be online to play at all.

I still theorize that they'll do what they (like not putting in Invasion for a couple weeks) and MMO's do to manage traffic, which is not enabling all online features until they know they are able to manage the traffic. They may disable random joining in Destiny until they know they can handle the traffic but you can still play with friends.

This is really simple. If you find yourself with a language and latency problem, SELECT A SERVER NEAR YOU THAT SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE. It's your problem, not the developer's.

Yeah dude, just enter your language preferences in your autoexec.bat file.

One thing I found interesting about comparing the two is that that really pretty much is Maxis's first "rodeo" as DeeJ put it, hopefully since Bungie has 4 (5 if you count Marathon 2 on XBL) online games under its belt they can pull it off much better.

Agreed — also I suspect that their online play will have a more distributed peer-to-peer nature than games like Sim City and Diablo III, which should hopefully ease the burden of online play.

However, there is one potential issue that I'm concerned about (perhaps it's already been voiced) with Bungie that's unique to Destiny amongst all their titles so far: each game they've released has included a major offline campaign too, which for a lot of players will be the first thing they play. The difference in difficulty level that players choose, how much they choose to smell the roses etc. will also stagger how quickly these players finish the game before moving on to multiplayer, and so the sudden burst of players going online isn't nearly as dramatic as it was with a game where you have to be online to play at all.

Some great quotes from EA exec Frank Gibeau on this subject here.

I particularly liked this one:

[on suggestions that DRM was pushed onto Maxis] That's not the reality; I was involved in all the meetings. DRM was never even brought up once. You don't build an MMO because you're thinking of DRM - you're building a massively multiplayer experience, that's what you're building.

...sounds familiar.

One thing I found interesting about comparing the two is that that really pretty much is Maxis's first "rodeo" as DeeJ put it, hopefully since Bungie has 4 (5 if you count Marathon 2 on XBL) online games under its belt they can pull it off much better.

I particularly liked this one:

[on suggestions that DRM was pushed onto Maxis] That's not the reality; I was involved in all the meetings. DRM was never even brought up once. You don't build an MMO because you're thinking of DRM - you're building a massively multiplayer experience, that's what you're building.

...sounds familiar.

Agreed; the barriers already exist... why make them stronger? Give users better tools to handle barriers, don't just brick them up.

What tools do you imagine would mitigate signal latency and the language barrier? Superluminal switching and real-time machine translation would be wonderful, but are not, er, supported by the current state of the art.

-- Steve thinks it's far easier to demand these tools than it is to supply them.

How do you know I don't speak Mandarin and Cantonese? Maybe the language isn't a barrier for some people. Not everybody only knows one language you know.

This is really simple. If you find yourself with a language and latency problem, SELECT A SERVER NEAR YOU THAT SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE. It's your problem, not the developer's.

Wouldn't it be really awesome if all users took responsibility for their own actions, and didn't blame others for mistakes they made?

In a multiplayer game, how do you avoid the douchebaggery if there isn't some sort of fundamental difference between your game and every other multiplayer game out there?

Make it too costly in the long run to be a dick. Make history matter. Make reputation real, quantified. Make it stick. But make it an easier proposition to turn your rep around than dump your character and start over. Make it attractive to be a good teammate. Make it easy. Teach the player useful things to say. When to say it. Reward them for good teamwork and leadership. Both explicitly and implicitly.

Examples:
Costly to be a dick: voice ban.
Easy to be a good teammate: 'spotting' button in GoW/BF.

Agreed; the barriers already exist... why make them stronger? Give users better tools to handle barriers, don't just brick them up.

What tools do you imagine would mitigate signal latency and the language barrier? Superluminal switching and real-time machine translation would be wonderful, but are not, er, supported by the current state of the art.

-- Steve thinks it's far easier to demand these tools than it is to supply them.

How do you know I don't speak Mandarin and Cantonese? Maybe the language isn't a barrier for some people. Not everybody only knows one language you know.

This is really simple. If you find yourself with a language and latency problem, SELECT A SERVER NEAR YOU THAT SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE. It's your problem, not the developer's.

There, fixed for intention. I'm truly curious... is there a way to increase a quality experience while accounting for latency and assuming a decreasing language barrier among the anglophilic global society that might have the intent to play together.

Latency is latency pretty much, you canna change the laws of physics, after all. Language though, that we can handle. Real time audio language translation is a thing, but probably too resource intensive / inaccurate for a game. But spoken word is not the only way to communicate. In Portal 2's multiplayer for instance each player is given a way to point the other player to an object / location, and they are given a way to give the other payer a short countdown by pointing to an object and pressing a different button. Surely basic messages like: "Move here" , "Attack this", "problem ahead" , " Run away! Run away!" could be sent to other players using symbol instead of words.

I have no idea if this is at all possible, but I wonder if Bungie figured out a way for players to communicate without actually voice-chatting with one another.

Well, it certainly wouldn't be without precedent if they did; over a decade ago Phantasy Star Online allowed players armed only with a joypad to communicate using a basic symbol chat system (not a million miles from emoji or emoticons). There are often pictorial ways to express the most commonly-used expressions you'd find in a game setting - Blizzard's Hearthstone TCG announced at PAX lets players do exactly this, sending simple messages from a predefined list.

I'm still thinking about those last few lines. In a multiplayer game, how do you avoid the douchebaggery if there isn't some sort of fundamental difference between your game and every other multiplayer game out there? Perhaps change the way the players communicate with one another? Rather than having voice chatting between players, players can only communicate within the context of the game and its story. You have options of what to say to another player, eg, "I'm doing X mission," or, "I'm just shooting up some of the local fauna today," or, "Would you care to join me, fellow Guardian, on my journey to save the solar system?" And since these are pre-programmed conversation options, language barriers wouldn't be an issue. The game already has the French version of that conversation option you chose, and it displays that to the French guy you just came across in the game. This communication restriction feels a lot like limiting player choice, in which case I think there would be an personal option to allow other players to chat with you.

Totally feasible, but I have to wonder if they weren't more talking about competitive play rather than cooperative; I can't recall any really bad incidents with teammates in (say) Firefight, and in fact my best ever spontaneous co-op gameplay moment came playing with complete strangers when we had a shared goal, in a game of Left 4 Dead. I think so long as players are immersed and their goals align, behaving well is more than possible. Competitive gameplay is another story entirely, though. I'm interested to see what they come up with.

Region-specific locks exist in MMOs for a few non-trivial reasons. First of all there is the language barrier: most MMOs involve a lot of communication, and if you can't communicate then it's going to affect the experience.

I have no idea if this is at all possible, but I wonder if Bungie figured out a way for players to communicate without actually voice-chatting with one another. Of course, if you were in a party with your friends, you could be chatting with them. But when you have some random encounter with another player(s) in the game, maybe you can just choose to follow them around, or have a list of conversation options to choose from to convey to the other player what you are doing (kind of like conversation choices in Mass Effect.) The reason I think of this is that "In Search of the Heart of Bungie" interview by Polygon a couple months ago had this quote

"We were going to make this online universe where people are going to be able to sit on their couch and play games with people from the other side of the world...It was going to be this great communal experience. Everybody was going to realize that we were all just one shared humanity, and look, there's gonna be an outbreak of world peace. What it actually turned into was a bunch of frat boys teabagging one another and calling each other names. So I think we can do a lot better."

I'm still thinking about those last few lines. In a multiplayer game, how do you avoid the douchebaggery if there isn't some sort of fundamental difference between your game and every other multiplayer game out there? Perhaps change the way the players communicate with one another? Rather than having voice chatting between players, players can only communicate within the context of the game and its story. You have options of what to say to another player, eg, "I'm doing X mission," or, "I'm just shooting up some of the local fauna today," or, "Would you care to join me, fellow Guardian, on my journey to save the solar system?" And since these are pre-programmed conversation options, language barriers wouldn't be an issue. The game already has the French version of that conversation option you chose, and it displays that to the French guy you just came across in the game. This communication restriction feels a lot like limiting player choice, in which case I think there would be an personal option to allow other players to chat with you.

These are just some thoughts that I have on this, albeit not very thought out. What do you guys think?

Honestly from the few tidbits we've gotten my theory on how they are going to tackle that is mainly one of game design. The main experience is cooperative, and it will be harder to grief since you have to opt-in to PvP (whether that means a checkbox or going to a separate location remains to be seen). So that would be my main guess, I play a lot of Battlefield 3 online and the way they set up the gameplay for that has had similar results, so maybe that is what Bungie has in mind?

Region-specific locks exist in MMOs for a few non-trivial reasons. First of all there is the language barrier: most MMOs involve a lot of communication, and if you can't communicate then it's going to affect the experience.

I have no idea if this is at all possible, but I wonder if Bungie figured out a way for players to communicate without actually voice-chatting with one another. Of course, if you were in a party with your friends, you could be chatting with them. But when you have some random encounter with another player(s) in the game, maybe you can just choose to follow them around, or have a list of conversation options to choose from to convey to the other player what you are doing (kind of like conversation choices in Mass Effect.) The reason I think of this is that "In Search of the Heart of Bungie" interview by Polygon a couple months ago had this quote

"We were going to make this online universe where people are going to be able to sit on their couch and play games with people from the other side of the world...It was going to be this great communal experience. Everybody was going to realize that we were all just one shared humanity, and look, there's gonna be an outbreak of world peace. What it actually turned into was a bunch of frat boys teabagging one another and calling each other names. So I think we can do a lot better."

I'm still thinking about those last few lines. In a multiplayer game, how do you avoid the douchebaggery if there isn't some sort of fundamental difference between your game and every other multiplayer game out there? Perhaps change the way the players communicate with one another? Rather than having voice chatting between players, players can only communicate within the context of the game and its story. You have options of what to say to another player, eg, "I'm doing X mission," or, "I'm just shooting up some of the local fauna today," or, "Would you care to join me, fellow Guardian, on my journey to save the solar system?" And since these are pre-programmed conversation options, language barriers wouldn't be an issue. The game already has the French version of that conversation option you chose, and it displays that to the French guy you just came across in the game. This communication restriction feels a lot like limiting player choice, in which case I think there would be an personal option to allow other players to chat with you.

These are just some thoughts that I have on this, albeit not very thought out. What do you guys think?

I'm truly curious... is there a way to increase a quality experience while accounting for latency and assuming a decreasing language barrier among the anglophilic global society that might have the intent to play together.

I think the reason why we see this kind of decision being made is because presently the answer is no, and the alternative to 'bricking it off' is to leave a sub-optimal experience as an option for the user. The approach taken in the example I gave reflects this: better not to support a feature at all than to offer a shitty attempt at that feature. I think you'll find most game developers hold this view, too.

I've been working on that quantum time-computer, but he ended up making some mistakes, we copied ourself a few times, and it got weird.

Scientific progress goes "boink"?

Agreed; the barriers already exist... why make them stronger? Give users better tools to handle barriers, don't just brick them up.

What tools do you imagine would mitigate signal latency and the language barrier? Superluminal switching and real-time machine translation would be wonderful, but are not, er, supported by the current state of the art.

-- Steve thinks it's far easier to demand these tools than it is to supply them.

I guess my post was lazy... I didn't mean to sound demanding.

Agreed; the barriers already exist... Why make them stronger? Why couldn't you give users better tools to handle barriers, and not just brick them up?

There, fixed for intention. I'm truly curious... is there a way to increase a quality experience while accounting for latency and assuming a decreasing language barrier among the anglophilic global society that might have the intent to play together.

I've been working on that quantum time-computer, but he ended up making some mistakes, we copied ourself a few times, and it got weird.