The Sleeper Simulant Is The Taken King's Biggest Mystery, See It In Action

When we first posted this article on Destiny’s Sleeper Simulant exotic weapon during our month-long cover story for The Taken King, little did we know how elusive the weapon would turn out to be.

When we first posted this article on Destiny’s Sleeper Simulant exotic weapon during our month-long cover story for The Taken King, little did we know how elusive the weapon would turn out to be. Even as Destiny fans have continued to uncover new secrets in The Taken King, as of this writing, no one in the game has figured out how to acquire Sleeper Simulant. There’s even a dedicated subredditfilled with Guardians hunting out clues. As the community continues to search, here’s a look at our original article on the exotic heavy fusion rifle, including our exclusive video of an unleveled Sleeper Simulant in action.

[This article was originally published on August 7, 2015]

Original Story: For the Taken King,
Destiny is crafting a suite of new exotic
weapons for players to fawn over and collect. However, not all of these will be
acquired randomly; some truly powerful tools will require work to
unlock. The journey Bungie took to create Sleeper Simulant, however, is nearly
as interesting as the path players will take to unlock it. We spoke with a few of Destiny's weapon
smiths to get the rundown on how Bungie designs an exotic weapon from scratch, and then we took the weapon for a test drive ourselves.

The Sleeper Simulant
is a fusion rifle that will sit in your heavy weapons slot, so you know it packs
a punch, since it needs to compete with weapons like rocket launchers and machine guns for your attention and use. Unlike most fusion rifles, its charged up blast can penetrate through
multiple enemies and will ricochet off walls up to five times when fully upgraded. Think hand-held rail gun, and you're on the right track.

However, in
order to unlock the gun, players first have to collect relics of the Golden Age which have been scattered across the various locations of Destiny. After players
bring these pieces back to Banshee-44 (the Tower's gunsmith), the ancient artifacts trigger a memory in the ancient Exo gunsmith, and he will invite
players on an odyssey to repair and reactivate one of the Taken King's most
striking exotics. Bungie doesn't want to spoil the story content of this mission, but it did say
that there will be unique tasks and objectives required for completion, which might even include puzzles that are too hard for any one player to figure out on their own.

We asked Bungie to walk us through the process of creating this powerful weapon, and these are the answers the team provided:

Finding Inspiration:
"We wanted to design a gun that
matched the theme of cutting edge technology that was still in its infancy, but
bears the hallmarks of a prototype that is not ready for mass distribution,"
says concept artist Jesse van Dijk. "One of the designs that exemplifies this concept
to me is the prototype of the first stealth fighter. I remember seeing it for
the first time and thinking it didn't look like a plane. In almost every
conceivable way, it was a much more advanced version of what came before and yet
it looked so much simpler. It had all these incredibly primitive geometric
shapes, so it had that dichotomy of being super advanced on one end and being incredibly visually simple on the other. We latched onto that theme for the
Sleeper Simulant, and also looked at images from NASA, such as the Mars rover."

Breaking The Rules:
"When it comes to exotics, anything goes," says gameplay
designer Jon Weisnewski. "We have a joke in the design pod that we spend all
this time building all these rules for how combat works, and then, when we make
an exotic, we pick a rule to break. For the Sleeper Simulant our idea was to
take a weapon archetype and move it out of its current role as a primary weapon
and make it a heavy. We wondered how could we turn something like a fusion
riffle into a heavy hitter. The creation of the Sleeper Simulant was a happy
high-five. We said we wanted to make a laser that bounced off walls, and the
art team showed us this image and we were like, 'Sweet, let's make these things
kiss.'"

Finding The Fantasy:
"We try to hit two fantasies for every weapon," Weisnewski says.
"One is the emotional fantasy that the player has just by owning the weapon.
How do you feel when you get this weapon? That's all dependent on how it looks,
what it's called, its lore, what it sound like when it shoots, and just how devastating
it feels to use. Our second fantasy is the gameplay fantasy, which is more like
the water cooler line that someone will give you the next day after using it.
For something like the Red Death it might be, 'That's the gun that heals me
when I shoot.' For the Sleeper Simulant we're thinking it's, 'the laser that
bounces off walls and kills a lot of guys."

Fine Tuning In First-Person:
"The design of a weapon is constantly changing through
development, and it's critical for every weapon that it gets proven to work in
first person," van Dijk says. "The perspective you have on a gun is so
different when you hold it up close to your eyes. The field of view creates
distortions that you might not even think of when looking at a weapon from the
side view. What does the gun's heads-up display looks like? How well does it
perform in a combat scenario? Can you actually see what you're shooting at, or
is the weapon in the way? All this fine tuning generally takes a while to sort
out. At this point, we never assume that a gun's design is final until we put
it in the game and see how it looks down the barrel."

Putting It In The Game:
"We went back and forth on depth of view with this gun," Weisnewski says. "The nature of the gun is that you want players to take it
into a base and fire it off and watch it ping-pong around environment and hit
multiple guys. But in actual play, players kept wanting to use it like a
precision weapon, and they would charge up their shots and try to take out
their targets from a distance and continually miss. So we started playing with
the zoom, and trying to dial that in so we could help them out a bit. Charge
time was another issue. We wanted the gun to feel really heavy and feel
powerful, but at first it was too slow and took a long time to charge up, so
players didn't want to use it."

See an unleveled Sleeper Simulant in action as we shoot it for the first time in one of The Taken King's missions

Path To Glory

Here's a look at Sleeper Simulant's upgrade path,
charting how the gun grows as you level it up. Like all new exotics, Sleeper Simulant has an intrinsic property that is unlocked immediately upon acquisition, helping to make it stand out right from the start.

Intrinsic properties:
Projectile over-penetrates enemies and will ricochet once.
Projectile capable of dealing precision damage Barrel column upgrades:
CQB Ballistics - Bonus to Stability
Linear Compensator - Bonus to Range, straighter recoil,
bonus to Impact. Reduced Stability.
Accurized Ballistics - Bonus to Range, bonus to Impact.
Better Target Acquisition. Reduced Stability. Support Perk:
Just a Scratch - Reduces aim deflection on incoming rounds
while you're aiming with the weapon. Helps the wielder stay on target during
the long charge up. Stat upgrades:
Speed Reload - faster reload speed
Perfect Balance - Better Stability
Single Point Sling - Ready the weapon faster, and faster move
speed while aiming. Exotic Perk:
[Final name TBD] - Increases bounce count of projectile to
5.

That's our look at the creation of
the Sleeper Simulant, but you can get more details about Destiny's The Taken
King expansion in our cover story hub. We recently posted an interview with creative director Luke Smithwhere we asked more than 100 questions about the game, but you can
also look forward to more developer interviews as well as a look at why now
might be the best time to return to Destiny.