Destiny 2
My third project at Bungie, Destiny 2 was an enormously exciting release to be a part of it. I worked as a Senior Designer on the Public Events team, where I created the majority of new Public Event content for the game and helped establish the studio’s documented best practices for open world content.
Going Heroic
Public Events in Destiny 1 used a tiered bronze/silver/gold tiered system to message levels of player achievement. If you did poorly, you might receive a bronze rating. If you did great, you received a gold. While Destiny 2 did away with the tiered medals, I pitched and implemented a new concept for “Heroic” public event objectives.
The idea is simple: give players an avenue for greater risk/reward by accomplishing secondary objectives that would really annoy the enemy faction they were fighting (or otherwise raise the stakes).
All Destiny 2 Public Events have a standard beginning, middle, and end. Somewhere in the middle, players are presented with an unadvertised opportunity to stick it to the enemy (such as destroying all of the exhaust vents on their war machine). If players pull it off, the event objective branches into a unique “Heroic” ending which often includes a more difficult boss experience. The guidelines I stipulated for this flow were:
1) The trigger conditions must be hidden in plain sight. Players should be able to figure out the trigger for a heroic event without resorting to a “second screen” resource, like Reddit
2) The player verb to trigger the Heroic objective must be distinct from the standard objective of the public event. Players shouldn’t be able to trigger Heroic on accident just by doing well.
3) Because a Heroic objective is more difficult than the standard objective, the trigger conditions themselves must also be difficult to ensure the players present are up to the challenge. If you want to fight Thanos, let’s makes sure you can lift Mjolnir first.
Public Event: Injection Rig
In this event, the Cabal drop a shielded Injection Rig into hostile territory, accompanied by a contingent of powerful Psions. Players progress through the event by defeating the Psions, but each one dies, the Injection Rig seeks to expel trespassing guardians by opening its thermal vents and filling its bubble shield with flame. After all Psions are defeated, a Valus Centurion comes down from the Cabal Assault Ship in orbit to put an end to the conflict.
Heroic Trigger: Each time a Psion is killed, the thermal vents open. This deals damage over time to players still within the bubble shield. However, stalwart players who remain in the bubble will find the open thermal vents vulnerable. Dealing enough damage to them permanently disables the Injection Rig, causing an enraged Valus Centurion to respond with Interceptor backup. Once players defeat the Valus, the crippled Rig attempts to fly away before blowing up spectacularly.
Public Event: Witches’ Ritual
In the Witches’ Ritual public event, the Hive are channeling dark magic in front of an inactive Ascendant portal and it’s up to Guardians to interrupt it. The two Wizards leading the ceremony are invulnerable, and may only be harmed by first capturing the Hive rune plates that provide their shields. Torrents of Thrall and Knights will attempt to dislodge players from these plates. When the Wizards have been defeated, the Portal opens. A short time after, an Abyssal Sorcerer emerges. This is a powerful boss that can teleport around the room and fire seeking projectiles.
Heroic Trigger: After players defeat the initial two wizards and the portal opens, players have a brief window to disrupt the portal. There are two shielded crystals on either side of the portal, and players may recapture the magical Hive plates to remove the shields from these crystals as they did with the wizards. If players complete this secret objective before the Abyssal Sorcerer emerges, an alternate boss appears instead: the Abyssal Champion. The lights go out and the arena’s doors lock everyone in. This is a difficult melee boss who can go invisible and teleport around the room, taking players by surprise.
Public Event: Ether Resupply
The Ether Resupply public event focuses on the Fallen’s efforts to harvest and supply precious Ether to its troops on the front. An enormous Ketch passes by overhead, bringing a Prime Ether Servitor. Players must confront the Prime Servitor, but it can lock onto Guardians and teleport them to inconvenient locations around the map. At certain health thresholds, it summons smaller “Transport Servitors” to feed it Ether, rendering the Prime Servitor invulnerable until players defeat the Transport Servitor. When the Prime Servitor’s health is low, it summons three Transport Servitor at once in a moment of desperation. Defeating the Prime Servitor routs the Fallen Servitor and sends them into retreat.
Heroic Trigger: If players quickly defeat all three Transport Servitors before they serve their purpose, the Prime Servitor is enraged. If it can’t receive Ether from them, it will reclaim it from the Fallen soldiers around it. It kills its own troops. And in return, it becomes super charged, taking less damage and dramatically changing its own firing parameters. Additionally, it seeks revenge on the Guardians who slew its children by teleporting them high into the sky, hoping they’ll drop to their deaths.
Silent Events
While Public Events are flashy, glamorous encounters that take over an entire area, “Silent” Events are smaller and less intrusive. They don’t feature any UI objectives or voice overs. Rather, they seek to make an area feel alive with micro-conflicts: a Vex overload holding a Cabal officer prisoner within a forcefield. Hive and Fallen forces battling over a cache of supplies. Silent Events provide contextual flavor to the world of Destiny.
One such silent event I created was internally referred to as Vex Cannon. Vex Hobgoblins appear alongside hovering rings in three remote locations around a level. If players defeat the Hobgoblins at one location, the ring beside them activates and players can jump through it, catching a ride through the sky to the next Vex location. Once all three locations have been cleared, powerful Minotaurs spawn in at each ring. These Minotaurs drop valuable treasure chests, so resourceful players can defeat them quickly and reap the rewards while having another excuse to jump through the rings! It was essentially a merry-go-round of destruction.
In another event, Treasure Chest Skirmish, two factions of NPC combatants are battling over a treasure chest. One faction is on defense, with a key-holding leader. The other is on offense. Players may attempt to crash the party and loot the chest themselves, but they’ll only be able to do so if the key-holder is defeated.
Design Documentation for Partner Studios
Up until the release of Destiny 2, Bungie had a strong reliance on tribal knowledge. However, this practices became unsustainable once we began engaging partner studios within Activision for additional content.
I created broad technical documentation for the construction of open world content such as Public Events and prefabs, as well as guidelines on their pillars and best practices. It may not have been the most glamorous work, but it helped set our live content pipeline up for success.