Throughout the week, some very interesting new information about Destiny came to light, including how the PvP competitive multiplayer won’t be available right off the bat. Instead, you’ll have to unlock it, but once you’ve done it with one character, all characters tied to your account (up to 3) are granted access.
Taking “a couple of hours, tops,” Bungie’s Tyson Green explained to Eurogamer why you’ll have to unlock competitive multiplayer in Destiny:
We found early on that people here in the studio, when they jumped on the game – these were people who were already really familiar with the game mechanics – they would roll a new character, play through the first mission then go right into PvP, and they would just get really beaten up by the other players because they didn’t have a super ability yet and they’d only got an auto rifle from the first mission.
And they said, ‘this is really awful, this is a terrible experience!’ And we said, ‘you’re right, we have to make sure that doesn’t really happen.’
So when your first character unlocks PvP, you’re a little bit further into the game. You’ve probably done one or two of the campaign missions, probably unlocked a special weapon and your super ability. And then once that’s happened we unlock it for all the characters on your account. Once you know how the game works, if you want to take a Hunter into PvP at level three, yeah, we’re okay with that. You know what the game is at that point, so that’s your decision to make.
We’re interested in making sure that last gen character can move to next gen. A lot of people are going to buy Destiny on PS3 or Xbox 360 and then get a PS4 [or Xbox One] for Christmas. Don’t tell me I wasted those last 100 hours there. So we’re really interested in supporting that. Our longer-term platform plans, I couldn’t speak to right now. But we don’t want to lock people in.
We’re really excited about creating a player economy. This is going to be a game that the community really drives, but for launch we’re going to be restricting it to trading items between your own characters.
As well, it’s “actually a pretty quick process” when trying to hit the level cap, because “we wanted leveling up and reaching a cap something you don’t look at and say, ‘Well, that will take me weeks so therefore I can’t play with my friends who are already at the level cap.'” For micro-transactions, Bungie says, “It’s not something we’re focusing on at all.”
