Bungie defends Destiny's lack of Raid matchmaking

There's no denying that Destiny is a game that's been designed from the ground up to be played with others. It is, after all, essentially an MMO, requiring a combined player effort to successfully complete its tougher challenges in order to obtain the best loot.

Despite this Bungie still hasn't added a matchmaking facility to allow players to team up to undertake the game's Raids and weekly Nightfall strikes. Instead players must recruit friends or scout forums for potential teammates.

This is far from convenient for many players who want to spontaneously get in on the action, but Bungie has so far avoided incorporating the feature in order to encourage players willing to put in the effort to complete these high level end-game activities, as well as minimise the number of potentially game-ruining dropouts.

In an interview with Edge (via GamesRadar), creative director Luke Smith said: "I think matchmaking can make other players disposable to you."

Further defending Bungie's stance he added that "the reason that people quit out of strikes is because there's no consequence to their departure, just a punishment for that disposable person on the other end of the line. It's pretty hard for me, emotionally, to want to subject groups of players to that."

Given the high volume of players quitting and unbalanced teams in the game's Strike playlists, Smith's reasoning is valid, but players nonetheless remain unsatisfied with having to jump through hoops in order to get the full Destiny experience.

Bungie is, however, still looking into ways of improving matchmaking, with Smith revealing his hopes regarding a future solution:

"What's not hard for me to think about is a version of Destiny that makes it easier to look for and find groups to go engage in difficult content with, a version that helps bring people together in a way that the current software doesn't."

So while it does look unlikely that any major changes to matchmaking will be incorporated into the current version of Destiny, a more player friendly approach could well be included in a future instalment. In the meantime check out our review of Destiny's recent major expansion, The Taken King, which we praised as 'a fantastic continuation and evolution' of the series.