Destiny 2 is a fairly particular video game: it has a plot, but it is a massive online game (MMO) in which you play with more people.
Every few months, new seasons are launched with content, from new game modes to new stories and characters.
It is a complex balance that has taken years to get,
How has Bungie got, the study that develops it, do something like that?
How to count the motivations of a new villain while developing the sensibilities of new allies?
And how do you say something in a game about cosmic powers, invading aliens and robots traveling in time and space?
“Videogames are very collaborative by nature.”
Who talks is Julia Nardin, Senior Narrative Chief of Bungie, the study that develops the Destiny franchise and that in his day created a small saga of video games without almost importance called ‘Halo’ and that only changed forever how is played on videogames
Shooting.
“Designers of Gamepley, art, sound, production, ‘testers’ … […] we put everything together on a blackboard, we wear what common land there are among all parties and then we put a story in
Function to this. ”
Destiny is an ever-savous game for the taste that ships shooting, by the evocative science fiction scenarios and for the wide variety of activities, from incursions for six players to activities that reward their full solo and high difficulty.
But in the past, its history has often been criticized for not moving forward or not having a common core or giving lots of laps.
It is something that no longer happens and it seems that it is a matter of organization.
“We have planned everything much longer when it comes to seeing how all parties connect to have a clear boot, knot and outcome between expansions,” continues Nardin.
“But we have also made sure that each season has a clear start, knot and outcome so that they can also enjoy the margin of other seasons”.
As a video game, Destiny has two ways of counting his stories.
One is evident and is enjoyed in the form of weekly missions, dialogues between characters that occur within the activities or directly in kinematic.
But there is another plus subtle that is divided between books within the game, secrets by maps or as comments within the weapons that are getting.
The Lore, as the players know him.
“Once we have a closed story, we started thinking about how to give more context or information to those scenes.”
Who talks now is Nikko Stevens, Senior Designer of Destiny Narratives 2. “Perhaps that context is not necessary immediately in the game or about what the characters do, but they can serve to return to it and then learn more about the most motivations
Deep of the characters. Or maybe it’s a conversation that gives a new vision to the events of the season. ”
As a science fiction game, Destiny 2 usually rotates around the alien races and on how their plans collide with those of humanity, whose survival has been threatened.
But within this pure and hard science fiction there is space for more mundane issues and our present.
Without going any further, in the season of the symbolors, which ended last August, it was spoke in the foreground of a refugee crisis, which were not Afghans but Eliksni, one of the enemy races of the game.
How does it face such a current issue in a videogame?
“Destiny is ultimately a story about hope and about what it means to be human,” says Nardin.
“Given the long history between Eliksni and Humanity and the actors committed by both parties, we realized that the inhabitants of the last city were not going to receive them with open arms. But it was necessary to illustrate the positive and ugly parts of
Humanity that I think are there. ”
To tell all this, Bungie decided that the best possible format was a long mission with several weekly parons, or what is the same, pose the plot of Destiny seasons as those of a television series by chapters.
This is why Nardin expirates:
“When we know what are going to be all the important moments of the arches of the characters, what we do is look at the calendar and we put the first of all these moments in the first six or eight weeks of the season, and then we look how we distribute all
These moments. If, for example, we want to have a moment when Ikora Rey echoed Mara Sov her treatment of Uldren, we have to think about what is the best way to do it. We can not spend resources at a kinematics because they are reserved
For more important moments of the season, so maybe we can put it at the end of an activity. […] Or perhaps in a radio transmission in the Clme. It is a triage exercise, to know where to put everything. ”
However, an important issue of Destiny is that the protagonist, the character we handle, the guardian, does not speak almost never.
The mute protagonist is a habitual trope in video games and fulfills a function, but many players feel that they are a camera for the plot, a witness more than a participant in it.
“Well, I would say this is not something new for video games, right?” Stevens comments.
“Especially in online video games where there is a group of players doing something at a time, if you put a phrase in the character’s mouth, 60% of the players may think ‘that’s not something I would say'”.
However, in Bungie are aware of this complaint of the players, and Nardin says that, although “we can only make it speak in kinematics and it is only possible to do two per season, they are also working on” new options to make the
Player feels more involved in these moments of history. ”
Destiny’s plot advances at this time in a very clear direction, the next February 2022 expansion entitled The Witch Queen.
Said witch queen is neither more nor less than Savathun, a very anticipated character.
However, since Bungie announced the expansion and the great turn he supposes for the world of the game, it almost seems that his audience has eaten an immense spoiler.
It turns out that the power that gives meaning to the guardians, the power of light, now our enemies of the hive will also have.
Would not it have been better to reveal such turn of events within the game?
“I think it would have been incredible, but we also have to deal with the realities of video game development and the fact that Queen Witch is a great launch on which we want many eyes on top. […] We knew that the
Players were going to have this information, so we focus on doing the season more about how that point is reached, “Stevens responds.
And despite everything, although we know that Savathun is going to steal light, it is difficult to believe everything that the villain is advancing this season.
After all, she is the goddess of lies and she has been playing for years playing with everyone.
How did you deal with such a beloved and expected character so as not to disappoint the players once we fight against it?
Nardin respond:
“We are always listening to the community and we are pending the stories in which people can get involved emotionally, for example, we did not have a leader for the mate and we wanted to move around, so we investigate the Lore and we saw that Caiatl wrath
Best candidate “.
And Apostille Stevens: “We know where we want to take our characters and where Destiny should go, but it would be stupid not to know the response of the players and the community to certain characters or some things and not take it into consideration.”
The role of the community, not so much in the development of history, but on how certain aspects of it are adapted, it seems crucial in Bungie.
As much as certain theories that, even if not true, serve as inspiration.
Follow Nardin:
“There was also a wish that Mithrax would return to history, […] so we used the feedback received in beyond light and we did the season of the symbiones. With Savathun, it’s just the same. When we talk about the
Content that we were going between arrivals season and the witch Queen, we talked about doing something new. […] We thought it would be good to give more time to the player to face a face with Savathun, but we realized a problem:
How could we do this without the player would like to shoot him and turn it into a weapon? As there is a very popular theory that Eris is Savathun, but that does not make any sense, but if I were Savathun, who would I try to impersonate?
“.
The answer we know all: Osiris.
“Throughout the year, and when we reveal that Osiris was Savathun at the beginning of the lost season, players could review and analyze dialogues with Osiris and realize that, oh my God, all these phrases have doubles
Senses. He has been playing with us since the season of the hunt. ”
Both Stevens and Nardin enjoyed as dwarves playing with their audience and drawing all the plan around Osiris and their dialogues and their attitude changes or of seeming that they did not fit entirely with the character.
“Anything that involved Osiris made us review and make changes constantly. ‘Have we gone too far with this? Are you going to realize that there is something that does not fit? Better changed this word. We are going to adjust this phrase'”,
Secure Stevens.
“I think we got a good intermediate point in which people, every few weeks, became questions about a specific line of dialogue. […] I think it’s over working as and how we wanted it to do it.”
And did not they bother them a little that a tremendously popular television program as Wandavision basically had a similar turn with the character of Agatha?
“It was quite exciting, in truth,” says Nardin.
“It was a bit like: ‘Oh, great, people have loved this, so hopefully it also likes what we are doing.'”
“After disastering the entire plot with Osiris, the truth is that we feel quite reinforced,” says Stevens.
Everything that has happened around Osiris has affected other two main characters of the plot, San XIV and Cuervo.
The first is the couple of Osiris, although this is something that in the game has not always been said explicitly and has always been dropped in a more subtle way.
“Your relationship is your relationship, you have maintained the feelings that you have by the other quite in private and even have not even shared them with each other. It was something very subtle in the Lore, but as we approach the
Destiny climax, there is something more freedom to talk more openly about these two characters. Bungie is committed to inclusion and representation. It does not scare us a negative response when decimally put these stories in the game and make sure that the players are
They can see themselves in the characters of this world. ”
As for crow, the guardian previously known as Uldren Sov, Stevens ensures that it was “a great opportunity to show a different side of how Uldren could have been if he had had enough support in his life. An interesting thing we are seeing
In the season of the lost is that Cuervo is starting to have tendencies more of Uldren, such as his arrogance. There are parts of his old being who are still there and suggests the idea of nature against education. Even if you are the same person,
Could you have been a better version of you with a better environment? ”
And continues: “Cuevo has given us many opportunities to make new players feel more integrated, but also to throw some freshness because it is not someone who takes a hundred years old. When fighting the fallen, it is not someone like Saladino, who
He has live from the dark era and has lived horrible things. People should take more in mind that Cuervo is in his childhood, he literally has a living year. ”
Destiny 2 has been developing a complex plot for four years and with a multitude of characters while creating new content that poses this story.
The new expansion, the queen witch, will be released after the usual, in February 2022, but Bungie has promised a content up and with new maps and challenges to overcome.
If you maintain the level of the last two years, you have not stopped growing until you reach the expected climax of this season, your fans will continue to support it until the expected conclusion for the year 2024. At the moment, everything looks good for the saga:
Become the third most played game of Steam in recent weeks, a milestone for Bungie.