HIGH MOON STUDIOS
Embracing its destiny, a support act takes centre stage
INSIDE THE TEAM HELPING TO SALVAGE DESTINY 2
“YOU FEEL THE FULL WEIGHT OF MILLIONS OF PLAYERS EXPECTING YOU TO DELIVER HIGH-QUALITY STUFF”
The call came, as High Moon studio head
Peter Della Penna recalls, when Destiny was six months old. By which time, he and his team were already well and truly hooked on Bungie’s MMO shooter. As a brand-new proposition for both developer and publisher, it had already become apparent that this multi-year project was going to struggle to sustain its player base for its planned duration. And so Activision phoned Della Penna and asked if High Moon fancied making the switch from Call Of Duty to Destiny. Before he knew it, he and his senior staff were on a plane to Washington state. “There were some positive expletives involved,” the studio’s VP Matt Tieger says. “We loved the game and as gamers we’d always been fans of Bungie’s work – so the opportunity to work with them was really exciting for us.” Three and a half years later, the studio now finds itself entrusted with the expansion that not only begins Destiny 2’ s all-important second year, but is also responsible for killing off one of the game’s most popular characters.
It feels like a pivotal moment in the life of a studio that, before that phone call, had taken a fall before coming back swinging. In 2014, High Moon partnered with Sledgehammer on another Activision behemoth, developing the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Call Of Duty:
Advanced Warfare – incidentally, the last editions of the series to support older hardware. This established their reliability as a support team after having previously worked alone on a succession of licences, including Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy, three Transformers games and Deadpool. If the Transformers trilogy was a success, the latter – released before Marvel’s recent revival of the character – was not, and 40 employees lost their jobs after development finished.
High Moon may have downsized somewhat, then, but it still ended up working on one of the biggest games around. And that experience gave Della Penna confidence that it was the right choice to partner with Bungie, having proven its chops within such a highpressure environment. Besides, much as it had enjoyed working on Call Of Duty, the studio’s previous experience with fantasy and sci-fi meant that Destiny was more in its wheelhouse. “It was definitely closer to our design sensibilities than some of the realistic military stuff that we became proficient in,” Della Penna says.
With any new partnership you’ve got to earn your stripes, Tieger suggests, and so High Moon initially cut its teeth in the Destiny universe by helping develop the game’s co-operative Strikes. Evidently, Activision and Bungie were pleased with the job it was doing: after a short period of acclimatisation, the studio has gained another 50 staffers, bringing it up to 125 fulltime employees. As such, it’s well-positioned to contribute more to Destiny 2 as the game continues to evolve.
Which brings us to Forsaken, in which High Moon has a major stake. But while it’s undoubtedly a collaborative effort, Destiny is still Bungie’s baby. How much creative influence can you have on someone else’s game? Della says that some back-and-forth was inevitable, but it found a relatively open partner in Bungie. “Look, making games isn’t easy,” Della Penna says. “It’s also a team sport: Bungie is obviously just as passionate as we are about the franchise, and we have a common goal. It just wants to get to what the best game is.”
While the studio
may not have felt the pressure of being involved with Destiny at the start, surely this is the point at which that begins to tell? “There’s a sense of – I wouldn’t say pressure,” Tieger says. “Responsibility is the way we think about it. You do feel the full weight of millions of players expecting you to deliver highquality stuff, but at the same time you have to try and be careful about how much you read on Reddit because you can spiral yourself into a negative place.” He does, however, acknowledge that Destiny 2 currently isn’t quite where it needs to be. “The reality is that there
are things that needed to change, and continue to need to change, about Destiny. But by and large it’s a great game and people are ravenous for it – they have such a reaction to it because they care so deeply about the game.”
According to Tieger, High Moon’s involvement with Forsaken has a lot to do with a conscious decision by Bungie and Activision – and the studio itself, for that matter – to switch things up. It’s time to start telling new types of story within the Destiny universe. “The best way to do that is to get some people who love the franchise but are just culturally, and in terms of game-design sensibility, a little bit different”, he says. “What that gives you is a different flavour of a similar kind of ice cream, within the broadness of the Destiny universe. As a fan of
Destiny, I feel like that has huge value to me: to get a fresh set of ideas that aren’t going to wildly rewrite the playbook but are just going to give me a new flavour that I haven’t seen before.”
One of those flavours comes in the form of a new faction. The Scorn are a group of mutated Fallen, more aggressive than the Taken, and more diverse in both their art design and behaviour: these aren’t mere reskins of previous enemies. Among the Scorn are eight Barons, powerful leaders that are essentially the campaign’s bosses – and the player can choose which order to take them on. All of this is playing to the studio’s strengths, building upon the work it did within the earlier Strikes. But, as Tieger appreciates, a lot of Destiny players don’t just run through the campaign and walk away.
“We talk a lot about the endgame, about how people like to digest Destiny, and making sure that we’re meeting those expectations,” he says. “So that means regular rituals, events that open up and close... and now there’s this destination, The Dreaming City, which is geared entirely around endgame ritual and exploration.”
Yet as much as the studio has been involved in encounter and enemy design, it’s had a big say in the story and its themes, working closely with one of Bungie’s game directors, Christopher Barrett, to thrash out broad ideas before refining them over time. “At first we talked to Chris about two different destinations,” Tieger says. “I was most passionate about wanting to explore The Reef more. I always felt there were more stories to tell there, and that evolved towards becoming The Tangled Shore. And we were also passionate about making, if you squint your eyes, a western.”
A single, short
phrase became the studio’s guide throughout development: “brave the lawless frontier”. It’s a sign that Forsaken is an expansion that’s willing to bend the rules, if not break them. And that starts with a major narrative development – which would, admittedly, be more of a shock if we hadn’t already been told about it. Talk to anyone in the
Destiny community and they’re likely to have a fairly strong opinion on Nathan Fillion’s Cayde6. Though he may be a divisive figure, he’s certainly one of Destiny 2’ s most prominent characters. Killing him off, in other words, is a very big deal. But Tieger doesn’t seem too anxious about the consequences, viewing it as more of an opportunity to surprise Destiny players. ”When we committed to this decision about Cayde we all knew that this was going to be a lightning rod. We knew it was going to be a sensitive topic. We knew people were going to be potentially angry. But we also knew they were going to feel something,” he says. “[Bungie’s] Steve Cotton and I would talk about this often: in a world full of immortal heroes, how do you tell a story of consequence? Well maybe they’re not immortal – and that starts to get very interesting. Then we said, ‘Alright, well, what do people care about the most?’ And that’s how we ended up where we got.”
How, then, do you meet the challenge of telling a story when you already know its dramatic highlight? This is the equivalent, after all, of a major character departing a TV show, the kind of watercooler moment that commands column inches and feverish social media debate. And yet it’s already out there. “Well, my wife is fond of saying that Titanic’s her favourite movie and she knew it was going to sink before the movie started,” Tieger says. “I feel like you can tell great stories even if you kind of know the ending if the journey is really exciting.” If nothing else, it should do plenty for player motivation: this is a classic revenge tale after all, and we already know our ultimate target and our destination. And though he’s naturally playing coy about details, Tieger is promising a few twists and turns along the way.
This is a journey that’s firmly rooted in the studio’s past. Its dark western theme nods back to High Moon’s very first game, 2005 PS2 and Xbox FPS Darkwatch, whose protagonist’s vampiric powers are comparable to those of
Destiny’s Guardians. Likewise, the mobility, the vehicular elements and the longer time-to-kill (certainly compared to COD) of the Transformers series. This is, we suggest, the first time in a while that High Moon has really been able to show a wider audience what it’s capable of. “I think on the surface it’s very easy to say, ‘You guys support other studios and that is a shitty job,’” Tieger says. “It’s not. I have great love for
COD and Destiny and we’re the only people that have really worked on both of those major franchises – and built enough of a relationship with our partners that we’ve had the creative latitude to be able to influence things on a franchise level. That’s very exciting to us.”
With Forsaken’s September launch day fast approaching when we speak, is the studio feeling more nervous or excited? “I’d say 50/50,” Tieger laughs. And what are their plans for the big day? He pauses for a moment. “We’ll probably have a beer or two at work,” he says. “We’ll be relentlessly looking on Reddit or Twitch to see what people are up to.” With an open-plan office, the response should quickly filter through to everybody at High Moon. “When good things happen, you’ll hear people cheer and applaud, and that’s a great experience – especially when you’ve worked so hard for so long on a product. We do try to celebrate our victories, and I believe this will be a great victory for us.”
“I FEEL LIKE YOU CAN TELL GREAT STORIES EVEN IF YOU KNOW THE ENDING IF THE JOURNEY IS REALLY EXCITING”