Destiny 2 Cross Play Details Include Offensive Name Scrub And Lack Of Cross Voice Chat For Now

It's been a couple of months since Bungie announced beta testing for the upcoming Destiny 2 Cross Play feature. Now that they've been through that and the actual feature release draws closer with the eventual arrival of Season 15, Bungie is ready to provide players with everything they'll need to know when the time comes.

As with anything that takes a bunch of players who were broken into different groups and throws them together, the implementation of cross play is going to result in some very important changes -- things like how the player will be identified in the game's system. This particular issue has a few facets. First, since players will now be able to play and save across multiple systems, those with the same name on different systems will need unique identifiers. No, you won't have to give up your name for someone else to have it. Bungie's going with the same system as Discord, attaching a hash and a four digit number to your Bungie name. The hash and number won't show up as your display name, but when another player looks at your information, it will be available.

In addition, Bungie will also take this time to run names through a filter. This will do two things -- address offensive terms and eliminate names with characters that can't be typed in on virtual keyboards. The result may be that players will end up with a generic name of "Guardian" with a random number. (Unfortunately, there won't be a name change feature when this launches, so you'll just have to ride with that for a while.)

To help players find others to play with the devs have implemented a Fireteam Finder (as well as a block system and other privacy tools for those who need it). As for the matching system, the game will match players based on their systems. PC to PC, Console to Console (with Stadia being considered console) and PC/Console mixed Fireteams will match to PC.

On the downside (for now) voice chat will not be enabled across platforms. There have been some issues in that area that need to be hammered out first. At launch, text chat will be available to Steam players -- since it already is, with it rolling out to other platforms at a later time.