There was a time once when the online console gaming experience was dramatically different than what we know today. Back in the infancy of Xbox Live, gaming online was a completely new and unknown experience for the majority of the players entering into that world and community. We had grown up playing in arcades, plucking down quarters at the bottom of the screens to claim our place in line on solo cabinets and then more and more playing alongside friends as multiplayer cabinets became more and more popular. When home consoles started creeping into living rooms across the world with early pioneers Atari, Colecovision and Intellivision, we discovered the joy of escaping to these virtual worlds we could drop into whenever we wanted and not be beholden to a pocket full of quarters. Then Nintendo kicked down the doors with the original NES. I can still remember the sheer disbelief of being able to play Super Mario at home and the wonder of actually having time to really learn and actually beat the game. The first system I bought for myself was the original Playstation. I will never forget sitting in a movie theater as the previews came on and instead of another BIG SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER; a trailer for FFVII came on and just floored the entire theater. To this day I could not begin to tell you what movie we saw that day, but I'm willing to bet I was not the only one to own a Playstation and that game within a few days after. The next real industry game changer was GoldenEye. Games like Doom had paved the way for first person shooters, but GoldenEye was the first game that all my friends and I had to play to where living rooms would fill up to take turns playing 4 player split-screen PvP (in our case on a 13'' screen!). It was a definitive moment in my life the first time I played that game, but while GoldenEye brought the FPS genre to the forefront of the industry, Halo was about to revolutionize the multiplayer experience. Suddenly players weren't just sitting taking turns on one console on split-screen and the ''wouldn't it be cool if teams could have their own screen'' was a reality and LAN parties became the way to get together in groups and play. Where 4 player PvP was a revelation in the N64 era, 16 players all battling on Blood Gulch was completely mind-blowing. I can still remember posts from Bungie from those days of the devs bringing in fans and the pictures of them all playing together in LAN parties at the studio. The problem was that it wasn't easy dragging consoles, cables and controllers all over to actually get those epic games going. Then Xbox Live happened and gaming hit in my opinion, a critical juncture in what the industry would become. I was not on the original Xbox Live for a long time, I joined a few months before the version we know today went live with the release of the 360, but I do remember it was very Wild West. There was this vast new landscape to explore with the ability to suddenly play other gamers from all over the world in Halo 2 and this is where we first got a real glimpse of some of the negative aspects of what that could mean with trash talking and insane cheating with players able to mod the game and destroy opponents. Xbox Live version 2.0 sought to smooth those rough edges with player reputations and systems to report positive and negative behavior and with the launch of the 360 we saw maybe the finest days online console gaming will ever see. Today when we get online to play, we generally don't expect to talk to anyone and everyone we meet in game. We are in private parties or games just don't opt players into that experience much like Destiny and D2. Things were different back then, you went online with a headset on and that was the experience; to play with, interact with and converse with these strangers from around the country and world as we played these games together and for a brief time it not only worked, it flourished and was as close to gaming Utopia as I've ever seen. Unfortunately like everything else in this world, nothing gold can stay. And here is where I think Bungie unwittingly played a huge role in altering the landscape of what online social interaction would be and to an extent even as they had just helped usher in this new age, they almost immediately cut the legs out from under it as well. This isn't a new revelation and it's something that I questioned on Bungie forums a decade ago, but it is something that has had a tremendous impact on not only how we as players game online, but it's directly impacted many of the challenges that Bungie face today in creating this game and universe. When the 360 went live, Halo 3 wouldn't be ready for another year yet and in that space there also weren't a ton of games actually available to play particularly at launch. I was first in line at my local game shop to get my 360 and came home with Perfect Dark, CoD 2 and Project Gotham Racing. The later 2, I barely touched, but Perfect Dark was everything I'd dreamed Xbox Live would be. I've written many posts on these forums referencing that game, particularly in regards to matchmaking and how the principals of PD could be applied to enable systems to match for raids and more in Destiny. We actually got a very watered down version of that for guided games, but to take a moment for those who don't know how it worked in PD, it went like this. When you played PvP in PD you could set matches to play with just a couple friends privately and fill in opponents with bots or you could allocate spaces for the game to bring in matchmade opponents. The games could actually be up to 25 vs 25 and map sizes would change depending how many players there were. The person who started the game and created the lobby was obviously the host and beyond determining the number of actual players, those allowed to mm in, map selection, weapon loadouts, scoring, number of bots and bot personalities, etc. These lobbies were static just like we see with private match lobbies in Destiny and D2 and players who were matchmade in would stay in that lobby until they left, were kicked or everyone quit playing. This approach to matchmaking and online multiplayer was then picked up by Epic Games and implemented for the original Gears of War; and maybe there were games that had done this on PC or elsewhere, but these early 360 games that adopted that philosophy ended up creating communities that were incredibly social and did more to build friends lists than anything I've seen since. The magic of the system was in keeping players grouped together from match to match. Yes there would be players coming and going within that, but it created a situation and environment where players had time to acclimate to each other and feel each other out. There were so many times a player would join a lobby and not be talking for game after game but then eventually they would get comfortable with the group and pick up on the personalities who were talking and eventually feel trusting enough to open up and join in the chatter. And yes there were also players who would try to troll, but they'd just get kicked and when being a dick meant not getting to stay in lobbies and actually play ever, it went a long way to tempering that kind of behavior. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/247045093?sort=0&page=0&path=1]Part 2: Bungie and the impact of their matchmaking philosophy[/url]