It’s almost Valentine’s Day and even though the Garance Days have been removed from Destiny 2 after the 2020 edition, love has not disappeared from the universe of Bungie, quite the contrary. We saw it again recently during the Season of Wishing with the relationship between Riven And Taranis or in multiple ways on the side of Mara. Between feelings towards his brother Crowthose for his lover first Wrath of Queen Sjur Eido and a fun reminder of his adventure with Shaxx (“He kept his helmet”) thanks to theAhamkarathis was a recurring theme of the seasonal story, which gave rise to this beautiful quote from the Queen of the Awakened : “We don’t love rationally. We love, that’s all. » This sentence could also summarize the relationship that some of the players have with the game, but let’s not digress any further. If we bring this up, it’s because we were recently able to attend a round table in the presence of members of the development team and a rather surprising subject related to this theme was discussed.as you might have guessed from the title of this article.
Speakers
- Carlos Ascencio – Senior Communications Manager.
- Clayton Kisko – Activities Designer and Feature Lead on Season Activities and Episodes.
- Jonathan To – Narrative Lead of the Vanguard Alpha team (one of two working on writing seasons).
- Ryan Baker – Senior Environment Artist on the Raids and Dungeons team, especially the latter.
- Todd Juno – World Art Lead of the Vanguard team.
- Nikko Stevens – Senior Narrative Designer of the Vanguard team and one of the main contributors on everything written in the game.
Whilemention was made of the activities and in particular of the slightly rogue-lite of the Spire giving it good replayabilityClayton Kisko responded to a question about possible borrowings from other video game genres. He then stated that the team has already experimented since its members are also gamers, like to think of new cool ideas and are not just game lovers. shooters. It could have ended there, but A particularly surprising question was asked in the chat, asking if the team had ever looked into the gender of the dating sim (or seduction game if you prefer). Carlos Ascencio then humorously asked not to respond to this strange request, but that was without counting on the intervention of Jonathan To!
We have, what do you call it, game jams, and stuff like that was created in developer game jams within Bungie.
Necessarily, there is reason to be curious about what such a concept could give within Destiny 2 itself. After all, even a dark universe like Dead by Daylight was treated to his flirting game Hooked on You. Additionally, as Ryan Baker later noted, the implementation of fishing in the game when Season of the Deep is a good example of experimentationeven if the concept here remains very basic it must be admitted, unlike titles like FFXIV.
Todd Juno, for his part, mentioned another way of experimenting with elements present between each combat arena of an activity, for example the sections with the traps of the Spire or methane in Deep diveswhich serve as connective tissue modifying the flow of an activity and variable in its repetition.
After this generally rather light introduction, let’s move on to slightly more serious subjects. About the Spirethe team is happy that the reception from the players has been positive and, if all the elements are met (theme, history, etc.), it’s entirely possible that more content like this will see the light of day in the future since the desire is there. Nikko Stevens has also put his finger on two essential elements of this activity andRiven’s Lair (shorter and simpler version with a single path versus a succession of four maximum for the Spire), which are its variable difficulty and the fact that we have the feeling of being rewarded in all cases.
I really like the fact so you can take part in the action at any skill level and progress to a point where you are challenged and you feel like when you get to that point and you succeed, you’re rewarded.
And if you don’t want to do that and just want to cruise and relax with a few runs, you can in Riven’s Den with this more concise and relaxed experience.
Allow something in the game that you can take part in and succeed at at a low level or perform and succeed at a high level, and be rewarded no matter your entry point. Make sure your time is appreciated. I think it’s a really difficult thing to do to hit all these points for all these different types of players in one activity. I think the Spire has done a great job of solving this problem.
Speaking of rewards, it’s an abundance of loot who awaits us in the Room of Wishes if we finish with a score of Platinum, which is clearly not unpleasant. It was therefore asked what is the opinion regarding the balance between the difficulty of an activity and the rewards and it was again Clayton Kisko who responded at length:
We put respect for players’ time first and you can see that the Spire pays off after each boss. As things get harder and take a little longer, your rewards grow to match and scale at that difficulty level. After an hour of play, we all thought it was natural to have this special room where we could reward players who mastered this content for that entire period of time and make it rain [du loot].
I remember implementing the chests and working with the audio to offset some of them so you didn’t just hear a loud bang all at once. And that feeling of seeing these chests load for the first time and reveal all the engramswhich we call bubbles, was really great.
We have internal metrics on the difficulty level and what we would like, what players deserve to have and what we want to give them in that regard. You will therefore see, especially in the Speyer, that you will get double rewards at some point because you reach a difficulty level that warrants it. For example, and this again comes back to the time you spent, we want to make sure you get paid for that time.
You’re here to go hunting for rewards, right? Have a great experience and enjoy the content, but you know you don’t want to spend half an hour and then only get maybe one arme. Again, we play the game probably as much as anyone. And it’s easily a return when you play someone else’s content.
This is something we try to address early on because it’s extremely important. The rewards are so important to the activity that we want to see what it looks like. A lot of people will look at what they got and be like, “I got two Blues” or “I still have that grenade launcher.” It doesn’t seem satisfactory and so we’ll definitely iterate from that.
Yes, if you were there during The Curse of Osirisyou will have noticed the reference to his public event and Carlos Ascencio then had fun saying that this is a clear break with the Passage of the chasma reward that quickly became a meme at the time of Renegades.
And if like some players, you are disappointed that there is no Spire a possibility of endless play with a difficulty reaching a level qualified as end gamethe latter recalled that THE Altars of Summoning of the Season of the Witch offered just this kind of experience, adding that if the demand is there, developers could explore these kinds of ideas. Moreover, speaking of the Season 22a system like THE Whispering game was also well seen and really brought freshness to the rhythm of obtaining rewards and delivering content. So he thinks they can continue to iterate on this side. And clearly, we would like that to be the case, because going back to simple challenges granting bonuses with the current season, which are as little different from the old system as the improvement of the War Councilfelt like a regression to us even though we had loved the Whispering game.
Expect other articles in the coming days on elements that seem interesting to us and were mentioned during this round table.
The different extensions of Destiny 2 can be purchased at the house of Gamesplanet if you play on PC.
Read also: Destiny 2: a major change at the helm of the game, should players fear the worst?
| Alexandre SAMSON (Omega Law) Responsible Proofreader – Editor | ||
| Addicted to Assassin’s Creed and Destiny, big fan of RPGs and passionate about video game experiences in general. Reader of comics (DC) and various mangas (One Piece!). Chemist by training and Whovian at heart. | ||
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