An emote wheel is officially on the way.
Bungie has shared insight into the improvements it’s planning on making to Destiny 2’s social systems.
Social designers M.E Chung and Steve Dolan shed some light on Guided Games, in-game chat, and the possibility of an emote wheel in Bungie’s weekly blog post.
Below we’ve broken down some of the key highlights from Bungie’s Q and A style post.
How is Guided Games going?
Steve: ”We have several of our superhero engineers working on really important things, like network stability across the game, but we hope to continue making progress on Guided Games as soon as possible. Here are some short-term fixes we’ll deliver with the release of Curse of Osiris on December 5”:
- We’ve added an audio cue so that you know when you’ve found a guide.
- Full clans can now guide.
- Added reminders that if you reject a clan, you’re still at the front of the line, so you can only pick guides with a mission statement that looks appealing.
- Guided games will support the new Nightfall and Raid content you’ll find in Curse of Osiris (and you’ll learn more about that next week on our first livestream).
Why aren’t there checkpoints in Guided Games?
M.E: ”The original goal was to prevent checkpoint farming (where players would start a game with a pickup group and drop right when they reached the right checkpoints to take to their buddies), but not having checkpoints causes different issues that we’re not happy with either. We’re still looking at this.”
Steve: ”We also wanted to make sure every player had the same expectation of where you would be starting. When you go into a guided game, you will always start from the beginning. We considered breaking up the starting points by checkpoints, but our fear is that if we split up the matchmaking pools on a per-checkpoint basis, we would make queue times even longer. It’s always a balancing act when putting new players together to play endgame content.”
Will we see improvements to chat functionality?
M.E: ”We can do a waaaaayyyyyy better job in the game to encourage players to communicate, like making more obvious public/team channels and a good time to enter (i.e., NOT when the player gains control when boots are on the ground), or letting players know about chat setting defaults up front when you start the game, or letting you know when someone is trying to whisper you, etc. These are the kinds of things we have on our backlogs, but again, everything is prioritized against all other tasks.”
What about that emote wheel?
M.E: ”Yes! No one wants this more than me, and we’re trying our best to make it happen as soon as possible.”
Steve: ”I’ve wanted this forever! Even without an emote wheel there has been amazing content put out by the machinima community. I can’t wait to see what y’all create once the wheel is out and it’s easier to chain your favorite moves together.”
We’ve made sure to highlight all the key details, but make sure you check out Bungie’s post for all the information.
