No Custom Games at Launch?

It doesn’t appear that we’ll be able to have custom matches in Destiny at launch, which worries a lot of people.

In a recent interview, Eric Osborne was asked,

Will we see more unique modes like races or oddball?

EO: “It’s definitely something our team is interested in. Step one for us was to get a really competent game up and running, making sure it was meeting our expectations and all the modes players demand from their shooters. In the future who knows, we’ll be having a lot of fun and there’s plenty of opportunity for us to do new stuff.”

However in the same interview he mentioned that the community will dictate a lot of the future updates to the game,

“let’s give ourselves the ability and flexibility to continue to build and grow and change over time.”

In addition to that, when asked about private matches in a Beta livestream, DeeJ said:

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tqNJCilKBA#t=4505′]

DeeJ: “Really all we’re talking about is the first version of this. If you look at how Halo 1 compared to Halo: 3 or Halo: Reach, in terms of the services that it provided, and the complexity of the tools we put into your hands, with Destiny we’ve invested most of our effort into polishing and refining the core gameplay experience.”

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Gamebattles.majorleaguegaming.com has already set up room on their site for Destiny ladders and tournaments, but only because they were “under the impression that Destiny will have private lobbies just like all previous Bungie games.” 

Update: In an interview with TSA, they plainly ask, “Will there be the kind of custom modes which you had in Halo games?”

Director of Production Jonty Barnes replied,

I think we’ve been asked quite a bit about whether or not we’re going to do private games and things like that. It’s certainly an active discussion, but it’s really about how we wanted to make sure for launch that we had the best gameplay that we could offer for the core competitive multiplayer activity.

I think what you’ll find is that over time we’re going to see some things arrive, and I think players are going to inform our prioritization of what features we update. We’re going to build on Destiny. 9/9 isn’t just launch and forget. We did a bunch of this with Hoppers [temporary playlists], I guess, in previous Halo games, but we’re on a much greater scale of potential change, if we choose to do it.

[divider] Custom matches will inevitably be a part of the game, but most likely not at launch. In an interview with Jason Sussman, when asked about custom matches he said,

“We absolutely want to broaden the multiplayer and we have things ready to go.”

Maybe in a few months after 9/9? What do you guys think? Talk about this and much more at our community forums!