14 DAY TRIAL // Bungie has explained just how it's trying with the newly-released Destiny to convince "lone wolf"-type players to collaborate with others across the game's world and how it's seen a big rise in people starting out solo and finishing missions as part of a multi-member Fireteam.
Destiny launched last week and finally delivered its long-awaited multiplayer-only first-person shooter experience, allowing millions of fans from all around the world to go through its story, its co-op missions, and its competitive encounters.
Solo players are welcome in Destiny
Of course, while many will certainly enjoy the social elements of Destiny, Bungie admits that plenty of people are content with going through the experience as a lone wolf, meaning they don't form up teams or call in their friends.
According to Bungie's Jonty Barnes, who has talked with GamesTM, a lot of people even go in the Explore mode, which is designed more as a cooperative experience, alone, or split up from their friends to complete more missions in the least amount of time.
The game has tricks to get people to cooperate
However, the studio has implemented quite a few different random elements to get people to work together, such as disruptions that bring forth special objectives in a certain zone of the level.
"We do this tactical thing where we’ve got these crossing activities and we just drop stuff on you and go 'disruption – are you going to engage on it?' Some of that is with public events, very much in your face and high reward, high value encounters, some of it’s just subtle things like in one area two forces of Darkness are actually battling against each other and whether you want to participate in that, we’ll leave you to it, up to you."
These activities get people to work together and share in the rewards, which in turn makes them join up as a Fireteam to continue their progression, according to Bungie, which has studied quite a lot of data from the recent alpha and beta stages concerning lone wolf behavior.
"We found that way more than expected we were seeing people do those activities then join up in fire teams and then going on to doing activities together because they’d had that collaboration and knew that the person they were playing with won’t mess them around or weren’t making it difficult for them."
"I think the emotes helped that a lot. An example is that not only do they have no social connections going into it, but we actually found pretty much half of people who started off lone wolf ended up in fire teams. That was totally rewarding to see, because that was very much the intention – just under half."
Destiny is available worldwide on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One platforms. Its first event, Salvage, has already taken place this weekend.
