Destiny 2 offers players a massive amount of cosmetics and customization options, including fully-body animated emotes. There are numerous emotes in the game, with no signs of slowing down on new additions any time soon. The emotes in Destiny 2 span a wide variety of contexts, like taunts, lore references, and pop culture memes, but none of the emotes really serve as dedicated communication tools.
There are several activities that offer in-game matchmaking to find a full team of players, and lower-difficulty activities like these don't quite warrant using voice chat to communicate. These activities are generally straightforward enough that a group of players can have little interaction with their teammates and still complete Destiny 2 activities in record time. However, the simplicity of the activities shouldn't dissuade Destiny 2 from adding in-game ways to communicate outside the voice chat because it would still be beneficial to the game overall, especially in endgame content.
How In-Game Communication in Destiny 2 Could Benefit From Dedicated Emotes
When players use emotes in Destiny 2, the emotes show up in the player feed alongside casting Supers, generating Orbs of Power, and fireteam changes. Even though emotes already have a highly visible platform for communicating with everyone on the fireteam, they serve little to no functional purpose. The handful of emotes that are somewhat communicative are few and far between. Also, unless fireteams discuss and assign certain meanings to any of the few communicative emotes, it's very likely that their meaning could be misunderstood, or easily missed by players that don’t know enough to recognize them in the feed.
Without Destiny 2 overhauling the current emote systems firsthand, it would take an impossible effort from the community to get everyone on the same page about the meaning behind particular emotes in the context of communicating mission objectives and other cooperative concepts. The biggest reason for Destiny 2 to explore quick chats and an expansion to the emote system is that it would improve accessibility throughout the game.
Not everyone that plays Destiny 2 speaks the same language, so in this particular scenario, in-game communications could bridge the language gap between players in both casual and endgame activities alike. Any player that has utilized external LFG platforms to find teammates for Destiny 2 activities without matchmaking has likely encountered a language barrier that affected playing with other teammates. If Destiny 2 were to expand upon the emote system, the hurdles of language barriers could be mitigated and/or entirely overcome.
In-Game Communications That Destiny 2 Should Learn From
Overwatch 2's ping system, emote wheels, and quick chats are popular examples of what a modern game's in-game communications can look like and how effective they can be. The most prominent examples in Overwatch 2 are the ability to request healing, to reveal how close players are to obtaining their Super/Ultimate ability, and to mark the location of enemies. Options like the "group up here" communication are also invaluable to the performance of the team in Overwatch 2.
Having the option to communicate to the team as effectively as the variety of methods Overwatch 2 offers would be particularly useful in Destiny 2’s endgame activities, like the new Root of Nightmares Raid. While Overwatch 2’s cosmetic wheels like emotes, images, and voice lines offer no functional purpose, Destiny 2 fans would make good use of an expanded inventory for equipped emotes, beyond the current maximum of four.
Another game that handles in-game communications extremely well is Rocket League’s quick chats. Being able to tell teammates call-outs such as someone needing to be "in position" makes a big difference for teams that have little experience playing together. Given the massive concurrent player count in Destiny 2 and the sheer diversity in available playstyles, it's very likely that some, or most fireteams, just don't have the desired amount of awareness and synergy with each other to coordinate efforts. Especially since there are so many activities in Destiny 2 that have matchmaking with random teammates by now, the need for an update to in-game communication methods has never been higher.
Destiny 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
