es or even the finished content. Dragon's Breath Ruin Wings But when we can get into these areas already and see this content, there’s a feeling at the content is finished, cut and saved for DLC. Harold Ryan: No. Eris and her story were built over the last three months, long after the game was done. For example for The Dark Below, that included the activities and the bosses and all of the polish of it. More generally, you announced recently that 3.2m people play Destiny every day. That’s an impressive number, but I’m curious to know how the game is doing relative to your pre-release expectations now. Harold Ryan: In general it’s meeting or exceeding all of our goals for the game. Consumer engagement and people both in the game and on Bungie.net, average hours played a day, the total number of hours people are playing, with the number of people who are getting into the high 20s, approaching level 30, it’s pretty amazing. The number of people who have played the raid is pretty amazing as well. Matching ambition is always an interesting goal, because we have some competitive history to deal with at Bungie. I’m optimistic, but humbled by the challenges ahead of us as well. The reception to the game was interesting. There were heavy criticisms around the story. What was your reaction to it? Harold Ryan: We’ve always been very critical of ourselves internally as well at Bungie. We’ve built a really big game with a lot of activities that suit a lot of people really well. You always want to iterate more on your artwork when you roll it out to the world. There are bits and pieces of the feedback for sure we agree with internally, as far as, we wish we had put more time into some areas. Expansion_I_strike_shot_2 (1) Is there anything in particular you can point to in that regard? For example, what was the most common piece of feedback you received? Harold Ryan: It’s so broad. When I read a lot of the feedback, and I see it’s after playing for 100 hours, it’s hard not to couch that in, well if you played the game for 100 hours… What other game do you play for 100 hours, right? As we play the game and test the game, there are all kinds of things we want to improve and evolve, and we are improving them and evolving them over time. We had our challenges getting the game out on four consoles. Three of those consoles, most of us had never shipped on before. I’d only led the team to ship games on Xbox and PC. All the PlayStation stuff was an interesting learning experience. But overall, the fan reaction, the reviewer reaction based on how they’re playing, is pretty inspiring. We just committed to address the feedback. Because we’re getting the feedback from people who are playing so much, including the reviewers, there’s a lot of it over time, as you read the updates along the way, that’s pretty actionable and becomes common across a lot of people and their feedback. So you can address a lot of the complaints in the future? The thing people talk a lot about is the story, which you say you’re addressing in the expansion. Harold Ryan: Yep. The interesting thing is, in The Dark Below you’ll see us casting a new approach to rolling out story in Destiny. We’ll see how that works. There’s not a game exactly like this that exists. We’re learning as we go what works for people and what doesn’t work for people. It’s completely different for us and for players to engage with the game, in the way that Destiny plays. Starfire Protocol Can you give us an update on matchmaking for the raid and some of the tougher challenges such as the weekly nightfall and weekly heroics? I know Bungie has talked about this issue and is exploring it. Is matchmaking something that might be added to the game in time for The Dark Below, or maybe even sooner? Harold Ryan: It’s hard to commit to when matchmaking would roll out for weeklies for sure. It’s an active discussion with all of the designers about whether a raid should or shouldn’t. We’re testing and playing with that mode internally to see how we think how it feels. It’s a common ask for the raid, but it’s also interesting to see the number of people who actually successfully complete the raid without it. There are some other pieces as well. When you matchmake into a group, you don’t necessarily get people who play the way you want them to play. My colleague plays on Xbox One. I play on PS4. We wish we could play together. What is the issue there? Why can’t I play with my Xbox One friend? Harold Ryan: That’s a question for Microsoft and Sony. They seem to have a few competitive disagreements. It’s a shame, really. This is nothing new of course. But when a game like Destiny comes along that is so ingrained in multiplayer, it shines a light on the division. Harold Ryan: If you look at the service we built behind Destiny, there’s nothing from our point of view that would stop you guys from playing together. Technically, actually there are reasons why an Xbox and a PlayStation can’t play together. Anyway, the characters are all in a common back end.