Release: The Season of the Chosen, 2021
Role: Creative Lead

After the engine porting effort from the previous entry was complete, my remaining team members and I were tasked with reprising and remastering some classic strikes from Destiny 1.

My role for this project was to select the team members who would do the work, provide creative oversight, and handle any alignment with other stakeholders or resource teams.

Because the Destiny 2 sandbox and gameplay balance were different from Destiny’s, we couldn’t do a straight port. We had to re-envision the major combat encounters. I had the designers look to the design goals of the original encounters for direction, rather than the original implementation. We needed to try and recreate what the players felt, the emotions and experiences, and the design aesthetic. If that meant redoing the actual details, it was well worth it.

One strike was The Devil’s Lair, a strike players were very nostalgic for because it was the first strike from the original Destiny beta. We had to greatly increase enemy combatant count to achieve the same degree of combat pressure on players. One encounter in particular we had to redesign from the ground-up. It took place in a large area that players had to fight through in the original, but Destiny 2 players could easily skip past and through it. I instructed the designer to throw out the original enemy composition and behavior and redesign from scratch, to try and hit the original player fantasy in a new way. We made much more strongly defined combat fronts with a lot more suppressive fire, and successfully built an unusual experience where players had to fight for every inch forward, but had lots of free lateral movement, allowing them to pick their battles from different approaches.

The other, Fallen S.A.B.E.R., required a different approach. It took place in areas that were too cramped for us to double the combatant count, so I instead directed the designer to replace fodder combatants with officer combatants wherever it made sense, and also to add some additional minor encounter beats.

In both strikes I had to coach the designers on combat legibility. Destiny 2 is a game where a lot can be happening at the same time and combat can get very confusing. Inexperienced designers often make the mistake of building too-complex encounters, or mixing and matching elements that muddy players’ ability to read the situation. During the closing stages of production, most of my feedback and direction was related to fixing this problem.