Bungie's new, ambitious, futuristic shooter (sound familiar?) Destiny, is set to offer a large scale FPS experience, but as with every game that incorporates a lot of players, how do you get them to play nicely?
The short answer is, that you can't guarantee it, but you can try and make sure those that are keen to ruin everyone else's fun, don't succeed.
Bungie is aware of this, which is why it's thinking up new ways of improving online shooter communities. Bungie technical director, Chris Butcher explained to Edge, "If you look back at online multiplayer gaming for the last ten years I think the dominant thread has been adolescent males shooting each other in the face and squatting on each other's corpses."
"And that emerges from design decisions, some of which were intentional, some of which were not, but the community gets attracted towards that, and that is popular to a lot of other people and so it kind of tends to exclude others."
The key he says, is keeping players from ruining the experiences of others, whilst making it easier for them to improve their behaviour.
"I don't think you can ever design toxic behaviour out, you can't ever stop players from being toxic," Butcher said, "but what you can do is prevent them being able to ruin other players' experiences."
He continued, "You give people these tools that encourage them to interact positively with each other and then if someone is interacting negatively with you, well, they can't ruin your experience."
Destiny is set for release on PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4, sometime in early 2014.
