Bright Future
With Beyond Light, Bungie looks to reshape – and redefine – Destiny 2 for a new generation
Making Destiny 2 sounds painful. Three years of expansions have seen it grow into a vast sprawl of multifarious activities, demanding an install of over 120GB on PS4 and developer Bungie’s constant maintenance so the monster-shooting never ends. Bungie knows there won’t be a Destiny 3. “We sometimes think of Destiny like running Disneyland, and there’s only so much space inside the Disneyland – but unlike Disneyland, it doesn’t close at 10 o’clock at night and is always running,” Mark Noseworthy, general manager of Destiny 2, tells us. And now, on the cusp of a new generation of consoles, it’s only halfway through its life. As Destiny 2’s attractions age; as Bungie stretches its resources to keep them going; and as the next generation raises expectations for the scale and fidelity of games another notch, something has to change.
So, on November 10, the very day the next generation begins with the launch of Xbox Series X and S, Destiny 2 will also begin a new future with the release of Beyond Light. On one hand, this expansion will kick off a new three-year cycle of storylines, magnificent sci-fi vistas and tight gunplay. On the other, it will be a far smaller game than it is today, because Bungie’s plan to prepare Destiny 2 for another three years is to cut a swathe of it away. Four entire planets, a stareating spaceship and a farm, as well as all the activities that took place in them; three narrative campaigns, five raids, seven strikes, quests for guns, multiplayer maps, and four weapon forges. All this will be deposited into what Bungie calls the Destiny Content Vault, where all these pursuits will abstractly sit until Bungie decides to ‘unvault’ it: to pick pieces of world, pursuits, arenas, and make them playable again.
“We want Destiny to be sustainable for us to be able to actually develop,” says Noseworthy as he introduces a new metaphor for the experience of Destiny 2’s development. “There are limits to how big and complex the game can get, and if we just constantly add more and more and more, eventually the balloon just pops, right? So, hey, let’s take a little bit of air out of the balloon, so we could put some new fresh air in.”
If Bungie gets this right, it will have solved a long-held problem which many other live games are currently facing: the ever-increasing pressure of administering years of accumulated content and bloated installs. If it’s wrong, then Destiny’s appeal really is wrapped up in its entirety, and Bungie faces a playerbase hot with the indignation of having treasured places and things to do – that it paid for – taken away from it. So, yes. Making Destiny sounds painful.
Naturally, Beyond Light will add lots of new content. It’ll introduce a whole new destination in which to shoot monsters. Europa, icy moon of Jupiter, is a free-roam space where players will fight Eramis, Kell of Darkness, who has reunited the Fallen houses and poses a new existential threat to humankind. There, players will discover the first new class-based powers to be introduced to the series since the first Destiny’s The Taken King expansion introduced Void powers in 2015. Stasis is about freezing enemies to gain spatial control and make them susceptible to massive damage, and with it will come a suite of new ways to tweak and customise the way they work.
Beyond Light will also add old content. It’ll bring back the Cosmodrome, an expanse of Old Russia littered with artefacts of humanity’s ancient push into space that was the set for the opening of the first Destiny, as well as the introduction of
Destiny 2’s free-to-play content. And, alongside a new raid, Beyond Light will also reopen the Vault of Glass, the puzzle box of ingenious and demanding team-based mechanics which introduced Destiny’s take on MMO raids. Vault of Glass is a piece of unashamed hardcore fan service: a chance to revisit the place where
Destiny truly found its voice. But it’s also a meta statement about the reality of a vault: that as well as putting stuff into one, you take it out of it, too. “The onus is on us to make vaulting content fucking cool,” says creative director Luke Smith. “That’s why the first thing that we’re unvaulting is – it’s goofy to say – the Vault of Glass, one of the prized possessions in Destiny’s vault, if you will.”
Vault of Glass shows that treasured things won’t disappear forever, and its reappearance will be cool because it’ll be led by a storyline, not simply turning up from out of the blue. “What goes into the vault, or comes out of it, is defined by a combination of things, but it starts with where the story needs to go,” Smith says. Things coming out will make some kind of sense, while things going in will be heralded by events that lead to their disappearance. “We want to tell this story
“IF WE JUST CONSTANTLY ADD MORE AND MORE AND MORE, EVENTUALLY THE BALLOON JUST POPS, RIGHT?”
of this evolving world, and to do that things need to change,” Noseworthy says. “It means you have to have something happen which now affects the world and makes it different, and that results in things no longer being available in some cases, right? Like if you blow up a planet.”
In other words, vaulting could be a way to tell dynamic and meaningful stories in live online games. Since the vault’s announcement, Destiny has delivered through the current Season of Arrivals’ quests a narrative that is reflecting the coming changes. Characters on the planets which will be devoured by the coming Darkness (a big bad – the biggest bad? – which has been foreshadowed since the first Destiny) have been wrapping up their storylines, some surprisingly poignantly, such as that of the truculent scientist Asher Mir. The atmosphere of the game has become sombre, but also pregnant with the exciting promise of true change which until now Destiny 2
– like most MMOs – has struggled to reflect, such as that time the Tower hub area was nearly razed by a 3000-kilometre long Cabal spaceship falling on it, and yet bears only a few superficial scratches that changed nothing before it was time for players to jump on the next existential threat.
But story won’t be everything. Once narrative potential is proven, the process of looking at the technical limitations and requirements of vaulting or unvaulting content begins. “Then we validate and challenge our assumptions with analytics data of real-world usage: ‘How much is Crown of Sorrow played each week and by whom?’” Smith says.
Bungie comprehensively announced the Destiny Content Vault in June to a predictably varied response. For one thing, it meant that the clock was suddenly ticking for many players to experience a swathe of activities they’d overlooked and to claim their rewards. Quests left languishing in the Pursuits tab for months have suddenly become vital, no matter how onerous the task of completing them. And it’s never good to be told that a set of stuff you bought is being taken away from you. But few players could claim that even, say, Menagerie, the cooperative horde challenge introduced in summer 2019’s Season of Opulence, has the same appeal it had at launch. Its rewards – its guns and armour – are stale and it takes little place in endgame progression systems.
“[The announcement] went about how we expected it to,” says Noseworthy, who is adamant that the Vault is not some attempt to instil FOMO. “I think the reason was that we spoke to a lot of players.” On top of its usual consumer research, Bungie directly talked with “30 or 40 players from the community” to gauge their response. “The message resonated with them,” Noseworthy says. “They understood, and many of them said to us, ‘Hey, if you just come out and tell the
community, everyone’s gonna understand. Some folks might not be happy to like it; they want to hold on to The Red War campaign forever; but they’ll understand.’
“But you know,” Noseworthy adds, “It kind of doesn’t matter how people feel about it right now. What matters is how the game feels in November. You know, the ecosystem of content and experience. Is there enough for people to do? Do they feel engaged and want to play Destiny with their friends?”
Right now, he and Smith aren’t absolutely sure of the answer. Destiny is an unknowable beast, even to its creators. They do not know how, exactly, a feature will play out amid its other competing, intersecting systems, whether it’s a pursuit which, 30 hours of playtime later, feels less rewarding than the effort of playing it, or the Exotic weapon with the unforeseen quirk that starts overwhelming Gambit and becomes the only viable way to play. These things are difficult to test for. “Every time we make an expansion set, every time, there are people who play, love it and keep going, and there are people who play and churn out and they’re like, ‘F this’,” says Smith. “I don’t know that we’ll be able to earnestly answer that question until this fall.”
At the root of the Content Vault is the idea that Destiny has to change. The internal push to satisfy Bungie’s creative ambitions and manage its technical and logistical realities are strong reasons. But there are also external ones, namely the complexity of its player base and the shifting context in which the game sits. For all that Destiny’s unique voice and style helps it stand distinct from other shooters, it’s the venue for a very wide range of playstyles and interests. It hosts sternly competitive play and challenging cooperative play. It’s a stage for almost absurdly detailed, but fragmentary, grand space-opera lore that’s ripe for feverish interpretation. It’s a place to relax and to socialise, a place for intricate theorycrafting and brain-melting puzzle-solving. It’s a grind-lover’s paradise that’s also happy to serve immediate FPS fun. Every change Bungie makes impacts each of these interests differently.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever really feel like we have the balance totally right, because of the diversity of our player base,” says Smith. “You know, we don’t have a canonical Destiny player. I mean, we have data that speculates what they’re like, but even that data says that these players are unlike any of a game we’ve ever seen.”
To work on a game like this, he says, is to feel that every decision you make is to tip the scales from one group of players to another, and to watch one group lauding a new feature while another simultaneously castigates it. During Destiny’s third year, which is now just ending, Bungie’s aim was to deliver many smaller but regular drops of new content, instead of focusing it in fewer large drops. “I could hear someone saying, ‘Hey, this year felt really good.’ And I could open up a tab and bump into 55 people talking about how this year stank,’” says Smith. Planning for Destiny’s future is about taking in this spectrum of sentiments and smashing them together with Bungie’s reams of player data, before sticking a finger in the air to gauge the ways games around Destiny are evolving.
“You’re like, ‘oh shit, this is where things might be heading. We’ve got to keep up with this’. But the truth of working on Destiny is that there’s always something changing your plans,” says Smith. “It’s the embodiment of best-laid plans,
“THE TRUTH OF WORKING ON DESTINY IS THAT THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING CHANGING YOUR PLANS”
right? A lot of times it doesn’t matter what we believe what our strategy was, because it’s about the team executing to the highest level that they can with the time we have.”
Ask Noseworthy and Smith about how they plan adding new guns and abilities to the game and they’ll deny that they have the luxury to have one. “Like how we build Exotics, right? Holy cow, players love these things; we could have hundreds of designers just working on them and we still couldn’t make them fast enough to keep up with demand.” He points towards Witherhoard, one of the emblematic Exotics from Season 11. This single-shot kinetic-type grenade launcher leaves behind a long-lasting circle of area damage on explosion which is great for applying to bottlenecks and it was given to all buyers of the season pass at the season’s beginning and to all players once they’d reached rank 35. “Look, it wasn’t part of the strategy, it was just the team who came up with something rad.”
It may sound messy, but don’t forget that Noseworthy and Smith have now been working on the series for over 10 years. They talk about it existing in this chaotic state, but they’ve steered and managed it nonetheless, through good
times and bad. Noseworthy celebrates constraints, remembering how The Taken King was a product of a failure to build on the game’s core technology in time for it. “We got a small allotment of engineers and quite a few artists and designers and said, ‘Okay, we’re not going to get many features here. What’s the best thing we can make?’ And we set off and made, I think, an excellent expansion pack.” Home to the secret-filled freeroam area The Dreadnaught and introducing the Void subclasses, it was an excellent expansion.
“Many games lose tons of development time to tools that change and break over time,” Noseworthy notes. The subtext to this, of course, is the fear that the second half of Destiny 2’s life is going to be resting on increasingly old tools and technology, but he says that his team is finding a balance between working with what they’ve got and building new things – he calls out recent advances in deploying patches more seamlessly.
Moreover, Noseworthy and Smith say that Bungie’s independence from Activision has gained the studio more insight into its players. “Now that we can understand the full scope of the business, it’s empowered us to make decisions where we can put players first, like removing loot boxes from the game, or delaying Beyond Light by two months to improve its quality.”
There’s certainly evidence of a greater focus on players in the way this oil tanker of a game has been steadily been turning towards putting greater flexibility in their hands. It started a year ago in the Shadowkeep expansion, with the ability stats you can accrue by equipping armour and the bonus effects you can gain by setting mods in it. Destiny’s library of mods is now huge – there are over 300 of them – and they’ve come to form the backbone to Destiny’s daily and weekly loop: you’ll collect precious Enhancement Cores and Prisms through completing bounties, and then use them to upgrade armour so each piece has enough energy to pay for the mods you want to equip. Mods encourage fresh ways to fight and open up new opportunities to use abilities that might have fallen by the wayside, and it’s become more or less mandatory to set up specific character builds to take on Destiny 2’s most challenging pursuits, such as Nightfall: The Ordeal and Master difficulty Nightmare Hunts.
Mods have been so successful, in fact, that Beyond Light will further build on them. Loot found in its new raid will debut a range of new mods that will define new builds. It will also extend mods to your ghost, the floating bot once voiced by Peter Dinklage. Ghost mods will give you greater granular choice over similar perks that they offer today, granting XP bonuses for completing specific pursuits, raising drop rates for Enhancement
Cores, providing bonus Glimmer, showing nearby chests on your tracker. Three slots will be open from the off, with a fourth that’s unlocked when you Masterwork it by maxing out its energy level.
Beyond Light will even allow you to fiddle around with the specifics of your character’s Stasis power. You’ll be able to slot Aspects – presented as named items you’ll find in the world, such as a robotic Fallen arm – which grant extra effects on using your class’ abilities. Warlocks, for example, will have an Aspect called Frostpulse that freezes nearby enemies when they use their Rift. Aspects will in turn have slots for Fragments, items similar to mods which trigger further effects, so you could put a Whisper of Bonds Fragment into Frostpulse which grants Super energy when you shoot and defeat frozen enemies, setting up a virtuous circle in which you ice enemies and then gain energy from them. Hunters get Shatterdrive, an Aspect which adds the ability while airborne to plunge to the ground and shatter nearby enemies, and Whisper of Hedrons, a Fragment that grants bonus weapon damage after freezing a target. But this one comes with a cost – equipping it also reduces your armour’s Strength stat by 10 points.
“What we’re trying to do with Stasis and wielding the Darkness is to show you as a player more freedom,” says Smith. “There’s also a meta statement that we’re making about the difference in the powers between light and dark, but there’s this other part, which is the fantasy of, ‘This is my guardian, there are many like it, but this one is mine.’” He admits that Destiny 2’s early days were a little too restrictive. “I think we’re trying to get a little bit back to the feeling of Destiny 1, but updated to how we’re thinking and some of the systems that we’re using today.
“I’ll use a MOBA as an example,” Smith continues. “They get to have a lot of tuning vectors for their four abilities. The modularity and the piecemeal nature of Stasis allows us more flexibility to do more to introduce –” He almost reveals more but catches himself. “There’s cool stuff. I know that Kevin [Yanes] and the abilities team have a pretty strong desire to keep iterating on it. We’re just getting started.”
Beyond Light and Destiny 2’s next two years of expansions to come – 2021’s The Witch Queen and 2022’s Nightfall – are being built on a foundation which is exciting for Destiny’s players.
Change is difficult for any live game, but it can make it feel more vital. Look at the way Fortnite happily replaces entire islands in the course of a day and holding strictly limited-time, must-attend events – perhaps at the cost of a measure of unfair FOMO. The Vault is a gentler, perhaps more player-friendly and definitely more narrativefriendly way to achieve the same efficiency of development – if Bungie can pull off the gamble.
At the same time, the next three years of Destiny 2 aren’t Destiny 3. Destiny 2 will launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S, and thus become nominally next-gen. They will allow it to support 60fps at 4K on consoles for the first time, which any PC Destiny player will tell you is transformative, and they’ll presumably benefit from the next-generation’s improved load times. But it’ll still be 2017’s Destiny 2, with the same broad restrictions over the size of its levels, the number of players you’ll encounter at a time, and only incrementally evolved to suit the shifting interests of its players and the shifting nature of the realities of its production. And Noseworthy seems comfortable with that. Destiny has always been a little bigger than the reality waiting on your hard
“I THINK WE’RE TRYING TO GET A
LITTLE BIT BACK TO THE FEELING
OF DESTINY 1, BUT UPDATED”
drive; its promise has always been a little grander than it has ever lived up to. It’s never really had the kind of sharp focus of, say, Call Of Duty or Fortnite. But that’s because Destiny’s promise is so encompassing, and the space into which it could expand so large. “Our vision for Destiny is to be, you know, an amazing action-MMO single evolving world that you can play anytime, anywhere, with your friends,” Noseworthy says.
And so, in many ways, Destiny resists the next generation: PS5 and Xbox Series consoles simply offer another place for Destiny to be, alongside playing on phones via Google’s Stadia and Microsoft’s XCloud, and the previous generation, so it can reach as many players as possible. “Higher framerates and faster load times and higher resolution, we’re excited about that, but we don’t think of next-gen uniquely, like we’re going to just make Destiny 2 for these platforms. We kind of see Destiny as the platform.”
“I’m excited to have new hardware to play with because I’m a dork,” Smith adds. “But, you know, one of the things I love about working on Destiny is that we’re working on something that’s agnostic of generation, and console and affiliation. Like, we’re just Destiny.”