There are certain things that have shown up so far in Destiny: Rising that I honestly can say that I desperately wish Bungie would take notes on for Destiny 2. I’ve played well over a thousand hours of D2, and while the game is alright, there’s still a bunch that could be improved, and it seems NetEase might be learning from Bungie’s mistakes. One such thing is something that I think every D2 player has fallen victim to one time or another.
There’s nothing, and I mean nothing, that frustrates me more than trying to hop into an activity only to find that matchmaking has failed me again and I’m stuck running through it solo when I’m meant to be on a fireteam of three. As much as I’d like to say that I’m great at D2, certain activities that are meant to have a full fireteam absolutely humble you as a solo player. It’s a pain.
Since I’ve been able to get my hands on Destiny: Rising and get some real playtime in, the thing that’s impressed me the most has been the addition of bots to fill in your fireteam if the matchmaking just ain’t doing it for ya. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things I enjoy about Rising so far, but this just seems the most significant due to my failed matchmaking-induced trauma.
With Rising only being in closed Alpha at the moment, I’m sure you can imagine that I’ve come across quite a few issues with matchmaking so far. Honestly, it’s more rare that I actually do get paired up with a full fireteam of real people. That’s beside the point, though; I blame that more on the purposely lower player count than the actual game. The point here is that even though I’m the only person in the fireteam, it doesn’t mean that I’ll be heading into a strike as a lone-Wolf. I’ll be paired up with a couple of bots to valiantly take the place of my absent teammates. And somewhat decent bots, at that.
To say that Bungie could learn from this is an understatement. For as long as I’ve been playing Destiny 2, which has been quite a while, I’ve consistently had issues with fireteam matchmaking, and it doesn’t seem to be something that Bungie wants to put any actual effort into fixing. Sure, they added the whole Fireteam Finder feature, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out the way I want it to. In my opinion, this is one thing that Destiny: Rising does much better than Destiny 2, and I can’t wait to see more of that.
