14 DAY TRIAL // Bungie has confirmed yet again that there are currently no plans to bring raid matchmaking to its sci-fi first-person shooter, Destiny.
The way this currently works, you can't really enjoy some of the game's end content unless you have a couple of friends with you. Destiny's raids take six people to complete, and you can only invite gamers on your friends list to join you in attempting to take down its bosses and – with a bit of luck – get mad loot.
Other games that feature such adventurous pieces of content, requiring that multiple people band together and work in unison for the greater good, have long since implemented methods for gamers to enjoy everything with perfect strangers.
World of Warcraft, the most notorious massively multiplayer online role-playing game, even went as far as to implement raid finders where you can assemble motley crews of adventurers, in order to streamline the process of taking down its meanest dragons.
Developer Bungie, however, has no such plans, at least not for the foreseeable future, as it believes that the sense of community is stronger and the action more satisfying, when you can't simply pick up random people to go through content with.
You still need friends for raids, but not necessarily real ones
Speaking to GameInformer, Luke Smith, Destiny's lead designer, explained why Bungie didn't add the feature to begin with.
He started by pointing out that instead of changing the raid-design philosophy in order to accommodate matchmaking, the team wanted to create content and elicit emotions from players in a more meaningful way.
"I think looking at the LFG [looking for game] - style mechanics is something we absolutely want to do. We would love to get to a place someday where you can advertise your intent to people. Where you can say 'I want to do this. Are you looking to do this with me?' But we have absolutely no plans to do raid matchmaking at this time," Smith revealed.
He also noted that the development team was very enthusiastic about the emerging community-driven websites that help individual players link up with one another, that basically function the same as a matchmaking system would, only with a bit more hassle.
Bungie's roadmap for the near future includes the launch of The Dark Below, a major content expansion, scheduled for December 9. In addition to this, a number of changes will be implemented when the upcoming Croata's End raid is added to Destiny, including a raid-specific upgrade system, energy shard trading, and improved raid drops.
