Destiny didn't ship with the same kinds of problems as, say, Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Battlefield 4, but it's not like everything worked straight out of the box. That's to be expected: Destiny is a huge game, and glitches were bound to sneak through, especially given the game's prevalent multiplayer component. When things don't work, players have to cut Bungie some slack. The studio is clearly trying - otherwise, Destiny wouldn't be getting regular patches a full eight months after release.

That being said, it's still frustrating when things go wrong. Engaged in the middle of a firefight, only to have the connection fail and get kicked back to the menu screen? Yeah, that's a bummer. Thankfully, Bungie's trying to do something about it. In the latest Destiny Update, matchmaking engineer Damian Frank discussed Destiny's upcoming Connection Recovery system, which will prevent players from getting kicked back into orbit - at least, that's the hope.

As Frank explains, a Guardian goes back into orbit - i.e. returned to a location's menu screen - "when basic network problems occur on the Internet." Frank says, "If you can't talk to our servers because some network router somewhere got too busy, you may be kicked to orbit." That's not just inconvenient, it ruins the flow of the game, and players who lose their connection risk losing the progress they've made during in-progress raids and strikes, too.

Connection Recovery won't eliminate network issues, but it'll help reduce their impact. Frank says that Connection Recovery "gives you a fighting chance at rejoining the server you were playing on. If it's successful, you'll keep your progress and your Fireteam." The Connection Recovery system is designed to counter "the most common kinds of networking problems"; when it kicks in, the screen fades to black and a warning appears. After a few seconds, players will either move into orbit, or rejoin the action.

For now, Connection Recovery will only be part of the House of Wolves DLC's Trials of Osiris mode. Trials of Osiris is a player versus player combat mode that pits two teams of three against one another in a brutal, five-round death match. Lose the Trials three times, and its admission pass expires - and players can only buy one pass a week. As such, it'll be incredibly frustrating to notch a loss just because a network connection goes sour; with Connection Recovery, that shouldn't happen often.

Eventually, "if all goes well," Bungie will roll out Connection Recovery to other gameplay modes, but Frank says the developer is going to start small. After all, as players know, no amount of testing can prepare developers for the issues that crop up once a piece of software is in the wild. Better safe than sorry.

Source: Bungie