Back around November, I decided that it was about time to get my son his very own PlayStation 4, this way we could finally play Destiny together. Before, we had to share a PS4 which meant that although we could both play Destiny, we could never play Destiny together. He has always wanted to play Destiny with my and it just wasn’t possible under the current set up so it was decided that for Christmas, we would finally get him is own PS4 and a brand new copy of Destiny: The Collection.

On Christmas day when he opened up that brand new PS4 and his very own copy of Destiny, it was like the happiest day of his life. It was a dream come true because all he’s ever wanted to do was be able to play games like that with me. So we quickly set up his new PS4 in his room, connected it to the WiFi network and installed all the necessary game content and updates to play Destiny.

The Problem

Upon booting up the game and loading into his profile, he sat in orbit waiting for me to turn on my PS4 and join him. Now, my PS4 was also connected via our WiFi network and upon entering orbit with my character, trying to join his fireteam game the error “Unable to join the target player. Please try again”. This was really odd because we were both online and both connected to Destiny’s servers but could not join each other even though we could both see each other online. Not only that, we were both able to join other friend’s fireteam, just not our own. This was a huge downer obviously because this was one of the main reasons we got my son his own PS4.

A quick search on Google showed that lots and lots of other people had the same issue with Destiny that involved trying to connect to members who were all connected on the same network (same household). This also seemed to be an issue Bungie was aware of with no time frame for a fix. Of course the internet is filled with really smart people and many of them had solutions that seemed to work for them but not for others. I decided to try all I could to get Destiny working properly for both of us.

The Solution

After a few hours and some trial and error, I seemed to have found a solution that worked for us. Now please note that this might not work for you at all but this is the method that works for me, at least most of the time.

For starters, my son and I can’t both be on WiFi. I know that sounds weird and have no idea what the reasoning is behind it, but while one of us is on WiFi, the other one has to be playing on a wired connection. Since I had some Power Line Network adapters laying around, I decided to use those to connect to the network.

Another thing that seems to help is setting the default DNS on both machines to Google’s OpenDNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). Again, not entirely sure why this works but it does.

One last odd thing we aren’t allowed to do before we connect is join a private chat party on PSN. If we join a private chat party, we usually can’t connect to each other at all. What we have to do first is attempt to connect as normal and if successful, then make a private party for chat.

For the most part this has worked out for us and we are able to join each other’s fireteam finally, though there are some instances where the “Unable to join the target player. Please try again” errors comes up again. In these instances, we both have to either manually disconnect from the network and reconnect again or completely restart our PS4’s in order to connect to each other.

This isn’t a perfect solution, but it seems to work for us.

Have you experienced this same issue as well? Let me know in the comments below and what solution you used to remedy this. I know there are a lot of people with this problem so it would be nice to see what other players have tried that works.