Bungie's Endgame: Destiny's Raid Philosophy And The Scope Of King's Fall

Aside from the fact
that King's Fall will be Destiny's biggest and most complex raid to
date, Bungie has been reluctant to talk about it.

Aside from the fact
that King's Fall will be Destiny's biggest and most complex raid to
date, Bungie has been reluctant to talk about it.
The studio hopes for King's Fall to be a complete surprise for players when
they first dive into it in September, but we managed to wrangle up an interview
with The Taken King's creative director Luke Smith, who was also the lead designer on
Destiny's Vault of Glass raid. In our interview, Smith shares the history of
Destiny's raids, explains how Vault of Glass showed the team they needed
to redesign Destiny's gear system, and hinted at what players can expect from
Destiny's biggest raid to date.

Was the concept of
a raid always part of the Destiny experience? Where did you come up with the
idea for this six player experience?
Raids were something that [franchise director Jason Jones]
wanted pretty early on. He wanted raids in Destiny, and he felt it was really
important that players have a cooperative activity that requires coordination
and communication. One of our goals was to make raids different from the rest
of the game. All the activities in Destiny rise up to meet you in different
moods. You can get through strikes with minimal cooperation, and that's one of
the experience goals for our strikes. We want you to just plow into those and
have a great time shooting monsters, because shooting aliens is relaxing. But
with raids we wanted something different. We wanted something that would
challenge players. We wanted to challenge player's minds, and their thumb skills,
and their coordination skills with other players.

During the
development process did you guys have a lot of iteration on what you thought
raids should be like?
We were pretty set on six players pretty early. There's a
pretty old prototype we did during very early Destiny development that even
took place in a different engine, and even in that early period we had raids as
a six player activity. But I think we're still discovering what raids can be
gameplay-wise. We're still exploring and learning. Each of our raids has provided
a different type of experience. The Vault of Glass is a journey with your
friends into a dark series of caves, and navigation is a big part of it. Crota's
End is a much more kinetic and frenzied experience, because you're in an evil
Hive fortress. We're continuing to solidify what the gameplay of raiding looks
like in Destiny. We have a bunch of experiments and prototypes of different
mechanics that we've tried along the way. Some of those experiments and
mechanics have showed up in raids we've shipped, but we're going to continue to
experiment and work on those mechanics we haven't totally nailed yet.

Raids have an
element of discovery in that the community usually has to figure out what
they're about and discover the best way to complete their challenges. Does that
continue to be a goal for King's Fall?
The raid coming in the Taken King is objectively and
emphatically our biggest raid yet. It is a journey that we hope players and
their friends are going to remember. We're really excited about it, and we
think it will raise the stakes again for what the raid team is asked to deliver
next time. It's big. The name King's Fall is really like a shot across the bow
in a game called The Taken King. That story of Oryx and his presence in our
solar system is going to continue after the credits roll and were going to
continue to tell you more about Oryx and his minions after you face them for
the first time in the game. The raid is really the culmination of that story.

What were some of
the lessons you learned while designing Vault of Glass and Crota's End that
helped you during the development of King's Fall?
In Crota's End, we learned a bunch of valuable lessons
about the difficulty of player containment. And when I say player containment I
mean the players' ability to manipulate the environment to their benefit.
Players do these amazingly intelligent things that we don't plan for when we're
designing the game. In an hour of Crota's End going live, the raid was probably
played more than it ever was during the entirety of its development. Our
players are playing the game in a way that we can't always anticipate. Crota's
End was an awesome learning opportunity for us at Bungie where we said, 'Oh my
gosh, look at how we could be testing these experiences better. Look at the
ingenuity of our player base. How can we react to that?'"

It seems the
new strikes in The Taken King have learned a lot from Destiny's raids in that
they are more crafted experiences requiring players to do unique activities
and encourage players to work together. Does that push the raid team to try to
up the ante even more?
I don't think there's that kind of competition between the
two teams. They both have very different goals. There's a real verve on the
part of our player base to see more things that evoke feelings like raiding but
with a smaller team. We're responding to that. I think Prison of Elders had
some cool mechanics that evoke feelings of raiding, and we're trying to build
this journey for players where the game is preparing you for what the raids
will ask you to do later on.

You guys have
continued to experiment with the reward drops in raids. How do you feel
you have improved the reward systems for King's Fall?
The Taken King is going to
continue to feel like an outgrowth of what's come before. I think Crota's End
vastly improved the drop system from Vault of Glass. We made that better. The
forever 29 meme was pretty heartbreaking for us as developers, because if you
did not get a pair of raid boots you could never hit 30. It was this disempowerment
for a player. The conflation of gear and character level led to this place
where your identity was determined by things that were out of your control, and
it was something that we looked at and said 'We don't want to do that.' We
don't want to have only four slots that contribute to this number. We want all
the slots on your character to matter. We want every piece of gear that you get
to have the potential to be something that excites you or makes you more
powerful in both great and small ways. In order to do that we had to separate
your light level from your character level.

But player gear is still very significant in measuring each player's
power. Do you still see raids as the gateway to gaining the best gear as it was
in the past?
We believe the highest gear level
is a little less important to the game now. We hope that players see their
light level as a tool that allows them to climb the mountain they want to climb
in the way that's most interesting to them. If they look at a raid and they see
it's recommended light level is 280, then we want them to think, 'I want to get
my light to 280, so I can climb this mountain in front of me.' In the same way,
we want players to look at the PvP activities they want to do and say, 'I want
to get there, so I can go into that activity and have a great time.'
Post-launch, we've created a bunch of ways for players to chase progression,
chase creativity, and look how they want to look. That's all stuff we want to
carry forward. But the gear you have is just a tool to reaching those
activities and not the end goal.

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