Bungie's upcoming massive first-person shooter, Destiny, won't have us connecting with friends in order to defend the city until next year. Thankfully, a new interview sheds some light on the game's social components in order to whet our whistles.

Destiny's engineering lead, Chris Butcher, spoke with Joystiq's Alexander Sliwinski about Destiny and its multiplayer experience.

Butcher talks about communication with other players in the game and how it can take place in-game, not just on microphones. You'll be able to hook up with others to take on missions of different intensities and cooperative levels.

In public spaces, all of the matchmaking is done behind the curtain and you'll be hooked up with other fire-teams without having to fumble through a user interface. And if you don't feel like getting dragged into a public event, you can choose to just walk away, obligation-free.

Participation can happen at any time and events can totally be ignored, depending on how much you want to do in the game and whether or not you want to be sidetracked from a particular mission.

You can look out for the game when it arrives on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 next year.

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