Destiny endgame raids will have six players, no matchmaking

Bungie's Destiny is not an MMO (or is it? We're somewhat split on the issue) but it nonetheless uses some terms very familiar to MMO players to describe some of its gameplay. Case in point: raids. In an MMO, raids could typically be described as massive dungeon crawls that can take several hours to complete, where 20-plus players band together to take down otherwise-impossible foes. Destiny, however, will be scaling things down quite a bit.

In an interview with IGN, Bungie writer Luke Smith says that raids will be six-player missions that open up at level 20; they lack waypoints to tell you where to go and what to do. According to IGN, they're also friends-only, no matchmaking. Smith also promises monsters and situations that "demand of you things you've never even really been asked to do in a shooter before." Think Halo 3: ODST's Firefight mode meets World of Warcraft's Ulduar (or Naxxramas, or Icecrown Citadel, or <insert your favorite raid here>).

"I think the E3 experience video had the narrator talking about the hardest thing we've ever built and we showed a jumping puzzle," Smith told IGN. "Like, the hardest thing we've ever built is a jumping puzzle? The jumping puzzle is just one part but it's this interesting representation of the philosophy behind a bunch of the raiding which is taking something simple, something that you've done, you understand, and then asking six of you to do it together. In a nutshell, that's some of the philosophy that was driving raid design as we were building the first raid in Destiny."

You heard the man: call up your friends and tell them you've got jumping puzzles to solve and monsters to shoot on September 9. After all, you don't want to face your Destiny alone.