Why Destiny 2’s Crucible is 4v4 now

With Destiny 2, we are seeing Crucible change from supporting 6v6 gameplay to only supporting 4v4 gameplay. Destiny 1's Crucible was fairly popular, which caused plenty of people to ask "why?" when the 4v4 change was announced. Why would Bungie change something that already worked?

According to Lars Bakken in an interview with DailyStar, the design lead for Destiny 2's Crucible, the change was created in pursuit of creating "team work, consistency, competition" as pillars within Destiny 2's multiplayer. In addition to those pillars, the change to 4v4 was more in line with creating a more PVP-player focused Crucible.

"Like, how can we make this for people who really enjoy PVP, because I think with Destiny 1 we talked about it in a way where it was important for everyone who wanted to play anything, it was like come on in, let’s give everyone a big hug.

"That felt good in some ways, but it also caused some strange problems, long form problems that we didn’t necessarily see until later after the game had been out. And we wanted to try and tackle some of those things and like rethink from first principles like how do we want the crucible to work in Destiny 2."

Bakken went on to address fan concern of the change from 4v4 to 6v6:

"For players that are uneasy, I want them to know the entire changes are built around players first. Whether they’re good at crucible or not our hope is that if they want to learn, we want them there. We want to welcome all players with open arms and have them though that this experience is going to be way more understandable, way more consistent, way more learnable than anything we’ve done in the past.

"But it’s still going to feel like Destiny and I hope people give it a chance because I do believe it’s the best crucible offering we have ever had in Destiny and I think it’s the most learnable crucible we’ve ever had – and I think that’s good for all players, even those who are nervous about the player changes."

Destiny 2's beta opens up to early access players on July 18th for PS4 owners and on July 19th for Xbox One owners, then to console players on July 21st.