I mean, Reach pushed the boat out with a massive feature set; Forge, custom games, theatre and file sharing.

Obviously theatre and file-sharing are taking a back-seat as the new consoles have built-in capture tools which are...okay for now. Forge may be too ambitious to throw in to a new IP. But custom games? Weird they aren't in for launch. Maybe it's something to do with the game not being Peer-to-peer and has to be hosted on dedicated servers which, for launch, are all being set up to host a specific catalogue of multiplayer game types?

Wow. That is surprising, given the huge swath of custom options that Halo Reach had for all its game modes. I'm disappointed, to say the least.

This is kind of surprising. Why would this be even up for discussion? OF COURSE you add custom games. Shouldn't that be the default, given it's hugely popular from Halo and expected?

It's hugely popular, but to play devil's advocate, is it really the core multiplayer experience of the Halo games? Arguably it's actually just one of many cool sandbox features, but the majority of people just play Team Slayer on whatever maps come up in the standard rotation.

I'm not sure how well stuff like Forge fits into the overall vision of Destiny, though; it's kind of a slow-burn activity that a minority do so that a larger number of people can then participate in, but it's not an inherently social sandbox thing (forging) in the same way the majority of the other activities you do in Destiny are. Maybe they just looked at it and thought it was better without?

Where I think this could potentially all get interesting is when/if they decide to release Destiny on PC. If that happened there's always a possibility they could also release Grognok to the general public as a means of expanding your activities in the game. That would certainly be interesting to a lot of people, I'm sure.

No private matches was what eventually killed my enthusiasm for Titanfall early. I had a lot of fun playing matchmade games initially, but pretty soon I wanted to set up private games with teams/settings that I chose. Without that option it was just back to the random meat-grinder again and again which got stale quickly.

Even exempting Destiny from having the myriad of customization options available in Reach, simply being able to stage multiplayer games between specific people with standard settings is valuable and, as I think they'll find, necessary to keep competitive people playing.

I realize that Destiny isn't purely multiplayer but this is still a huge disappointment. I wish I could say it's also a surprise.

The momentum continues its shift away from Bungie/Destiny and toward 343/MCC/H5.

There's a lot of "not the end of the world but disappointing nonetheless" aspects to the game. Gonna be a great game but can't help but feel it could have been even better.

http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2014/08/19/interview-bungies-jonty-barnes-on-destinys-locations-multiplayer-and-beta-test...

TSA: But there won’t the kind of custom modes which you had in Halo games?

Jonty: Um, I think we’ve been asked quite a bit about whether or not we’re going to do private games and things like that. It’s certainly an active discussion, but it’s really about how we wanted to make sure for launch that we had the best gameplay that we could offer for the core competitive multiplayer activity.

This is kind of surprising. Why would this be even up for discussion? OF COURSE you add custom games. Shouldn't that be the default, given it's hugely popular from Halo and expected?

How hugely popular is it, exactly? Do you have numbers? Have such numbers even been released ever? I would expect that matchmaking games far outnumbered custom games over Halo's internet enabled lifespan. I can understand people who loved custom games being disappointed, but unless I'm grossly underestimating the matchmade / custom game ratio then there is no surprise here.

I also disagree that custom games should be focused on first, full stop. I like matchmaking...

I think this might be just another case of paring down features which are either unfeasible or not ready to be implemented. I agree that it's disappointing to see them absent at release, but it sounds like something that they have already put a lot of work into and will likely see in the future. That's the impression I got from the interview.

You guys are SO old hat. You don't want custom modes of multiplayer. That's right - you tricked yourself into thinking you want it. My! How clever of you.

In fact - what you really want is something you didn't even know you wanted. <3 Bungie.

(Custom Raids)... Hey! What are you doing reading this! That's not what words are for!

Sounds like they'll implement it later. Customs would be a good thing at launch, and I agree that it seems really stupid not to, but whatever. Maybe it's technical. But oh well, hopefully it'll all work out.

- No text -

Outside of just us old halo players.

Some early reviews of Titanfall slammed it for not have this option (it was added in post launch). I think it's a great way to compliment matchmaking. Allowing people to scope out maps and practice jumps or just screw around.

In a game like destiny you have to balance it with progression but that doesn't seem that hard (to my ignorant self). Maybe it is a big internal debate but I'm willing to bet if it doesn't launch with it that there will be enough demand by the players to get it in pretty quickly.

Maybe the project is under more time pressure than it seems?
The estimated cost of resources to get it to the correct quality level was too much?

Hopefully it means they want to do it really, really well.
I just hope that by launching without it, they don't inadvertently [or intentionally] kill it's presence in the conciousness of the player base, meaning that when it hopefully does launch, people ignore it because they're set in their Destiny ways.

I loved the Destiny Beta and am looking forward to the game, but this is seriously disappointing news. With a (supposedly) $500 million price tag, you would think that this game would be one of the most fully featured games Bungie has ever created. I'm not seeing where that money went though. This game is different from Halo, sure, but no customs? Really?

I've seen so many games suffer from not having customs; Battlefield 3 being my favorite example. I purchased the game on Xbox 360 and thought it was one of the dumbest mistakes that they made (Along with the multitude of other things that negatively impacted the game).

The issue here is that if Bungie does not include custom games, people are going to cheat the system and try to do it anyway. They will go into matchmaking with a full party, and spend the whole match playing something like "The Floor is Lava" or something like that.

At that point, you have to wonder why they were't included in the first place. I know this isn't Halo, but this is Bungie. And many Bungie games have allowed us to play the game how we want. So far, it seems that Destiny is kind of going away from that. Keep using all these terms that will resonate with their fans, but they aren't really showing it to us. They say the game is a social experience, but we can't talk to anyone in the game without going through a convoluted menu system and we can't play the game how we want with our friends. But I don't think the game will be sustained off matchmaking alone. I mean, even I got tired of Halo matchmaking, but there was something else I could always do instead. That seems less true with destiny. If you don't want matchmaking, you play campaign, if you don't campaign..... well I guess you can play another game.

Halo was always full of options. You could do campaign, multiplayer, custom games, forge a map, forge with friends for fun, watch saved films, do glitches. You always had something to do. With Destiny, I feel like Bungie is just trying to tell us what is fun about the game and only offering that (and to be honest, offering even less than that).

So I can't say I'm happy to hear this. All i can hope is to see custom games added in a future update.

I said what I think about it here. I'll add that it's really disappointing. I don't know what else to say. I've been preparing myself for this to be the case for a few months; I think when E3 came and went and we heard nothing about custom games, the writing was on the wall.