Destiny 2 developer Bungie revealed a whole lot of information about the game’s upcoming crossplay support in a blog post on Thursday afternoon. Let’s get this out of the way first: Bungie still doesn’t have an exact date for when you’ll be able to play with your friends on other platforms, but the studio promises the feature will launch “early” in Season 15, which is expected to kick off on August 24th.
Season 15 will also bring an important change to ensure you have a persistent identity across platforms for crossplay: a new Bungie Name system. Your Bungie Name will be generated based on the name associated with the platform you play Season 15 on first, and will look something like PlayerName#1234. You can get a better idea of how it will look in-game in this screenshot:
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Bungie won’t have a name change feature available at the launch of crossplay — that’s not expected until the winter. So make sure you first play Season 15 on the platform with the name you want associated with your Bungie Name.
The studio will run names through a moderation process to help prevent offensive terms from slipping through and says that characters in names that “we are unable to display in the game or that can’t be typed into the player search box via console virtual keyboards” will be stripped.
Bungie also discussed how players across different platforms will be matched up at the launch of crossplay. For PvE modes, “there will be one global matchmaking pool,” Bungie says, but for competitive modes (Crucible, Iron Banner, Trials, and Gambit), matchmaking will break down like this:
- PC players will match with PC players
- Console players will match with console players — and, notably, Stadia players, who can use mouse and keyboard
- Fireteams with any mix of PC and console players will be matched with other PC players
This approach at launch may change at some point, however — Bungie says that it “might not be the answer forever.”
One missing feature at launch will be voice chat between platforms, Bungie said. “We have run into some late-breaking issues with development and are currently working on making sure this experience is ready before shipping it live,” according to Bungie. The company considered delaying crossplay to make sure the feature was included, but has opted instead to launch without it and add it in an update “targeted for shortly after Cross Play goes live.”
Bungie details a lot more about crossplay in its latest blog, and if you’re interested in learning more, I suggest taking a few minutes to read the whole thing.
Bungie confirmed in December that Destiny 2 would be getting crossplay in 2021. But in May, some players got to try it out early when the studio accidentally turned the feature on for some players — a loophole the company eventually closed. There was also an official crossplay beta later that month.
