Destiny PS4

Bungie’s somehow managed to peeve its playerbase for the second time in seven days, announcing that Destiny’s end game raids will not be playable unless you have five available friends. The firm recently irked fans by confirming that there’ll only be four locations in the game, with more to follow as downloadable content – but now the company’s admitted that it’ll be impossible to team up with strangers in order to tackle its end game missions.

“It's a bit of a risk,” understated a nonchalant Luke Smith in an interview with IGN, where he also described the raids as “one of the pillars” of the upcoming game. “The activity requires you to have a group of five other friends to play with.” Much like end game objectives in MMOs such as World of Warcraft, these missions are designed to push your skills to their absolute limits – and that’s why they’re restricted to friends. In fact, it’s suggested that some tasks will take up to three hours to complete.

Considering that one of this scribe's biggest issues with the intergalactic escapade’s beta was its emphasis on bullet sponge enemy types, you can safely assume that this editor is rolling his eyes right now. Still, the developer promises that there will be a Normal mode that won’t be quite as difficult to complete – it’s the Hard mode that will test your abilities. “It's very much a team-building exercise,” Smith explained on NeoGAF.

However, whether the developer changes its stance on matchmaking remains to be seen. “I understand everyone's frustration about the decision to not have matchmaking in a post-matchmaking world,” the employee added. “I also understand the limitations that this places on the activity's adoption at scale. [But] that barrier to entry is a barrier that I was willing to erect to preserve the activity’s goals.”

You better start making friends, then – and pronto.

[source uk.ign.com, via neogaf.com, eurogamer.net]