# You're playing Destiny 2 alone, and a stranger runs past. No lobby, no menu.

- Series: [How It Spawns](https://miu.fm/howitspawns.md)
- Published: 2026-10-17
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitspawns/you-re-playing-destiny-2-alone-and-a-stranger-runs-past-no

## Story

You're playing Destiny 2 alone, and a stranger runs past. No lobby, no menu. Where did they come from?

Bungie's Halo games had matchmaking lobbies. For Destiny, Justin Truman (Engineering Lead) told GDC in 2015, "we wanted to get rid of all of that, and just let strangers wander into your game, automatically and organically."

The world is cut into bubbles, and bubbles are also the unit of matchmaking: in the first Destiny (2014), "6 players, and 25 AI in a single bubble active at any one time." Between two bubbles there's a corridor, and the game uses it. "15s out from the bubble swap, you start precaching all resources for the new bubble." At the 10 second mark it starts matchmaking you to a copy of the next bubble ("there could be thousands copies of a single public bubble, each connecting up to 6 strangers"). If none is found by 5 seconds, you get your own standalone bubble "that other strangers should eventually join". A stranger who ran the corridor beside you can "just phase out midway" into a different copy.

Who runs a bubble changed. In the first Destiny a player's console was the host, and "The average player in a public bubble experiences a Host Migration every 160 seconds." For Destiny 2, Matt Segur (Engineering Lead on Destiny 2) wrote in 2017: "Every activity in Destiny 2 is hosted by one of our servers."

The islands, figures and timings in this film are our own simplified version, built in code.

Which game's hidden trick should we cut open next?

Sources: Justin Truman (Bungie), "Shared World Shooter: Destiny's Networked Mission Architecture", GDC 2015, slides and speaker notes (GDC Vault). Matt Segur (Bungie), This Week at Bungie, 25 May 2017.
Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Bungie.

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