Destiny 2 ViDoc | Becoming Legend - Part 2: Shaping the Magic

This team

and Bungie in general,

is all about collaboration.

Testers, Designers, Effects Artists, Animation,

all these sources of input from everywhere

coming together, and like, that was

magic for me.

The Final Shape,

it felt a little like a love letter at times.

We really thought about bringing that forward

to the weapons.

Like Khvostov,

it's the first gun you get.

There has to be the narrative bookends

of the first gun I got in the game,

it's here in The Pale Heart.

It's like this old friend returned.

How do you make this thing really good

and really powerful

without making it

not what it is?

And that was really challenging.

What we ended up deciding on is

it is about your skill.

Oh, it's all in the wrist.

A little like,

it's gonna bounce several times down

this line of guys.

You're just really good at bouncing this bullet.

It's fate almost.

This thing's dope.

Help.

Yeah.

And we pepper in the number seven

as many places as we could.

So, it bounces seven times.

It's got a bunch of sevens in its stat.

You get seven bouncy bullets

when you pick up an orb of power.

Bungie has a long legacy

of loving the number seven

and this felt like the right place for it.

Cayde has this iconic

hand cannon and that in a lot of ways has

become a symbol.

We took Ace of Spades and we went,

where's the rest of the deck of cards?

We had this really cool

opportunity to theme all The Pale Heart weapons

after different suits.

It has this two-tone feel to it.

The opposite side of the gun

is the inverse of that idea.

They look freaking awesome.

It also has like these fantasies of characters

that have influenced Cayde.

These guns are part of his past.

We wanted something that you can't do

with any of your other weapons

and we came up with

No Hesitation.

It shoots these harmonic bullets

that if you're targeting an enemy,

it'll hurt them and burn them,

but if you're shooting an ally,

it'll heal them.

I love this thing.

Oh, I'm so glad.

We had to build a lot of the language

and with the new cool little Guardian health bars,

you can see that

the healing effect on it is very strong.

For a while we were calling it

the "just don't die" gun.

It has its own little energy bar

like the glaive does,

and that energy bar

is charged by any damage whatsoever.

It's like,

we know what we did.

Since you are returning to The Traveler,

we wanted to focus on

bringing new supers to the Light subclasses.

For Song of Flame, we wanted to

plus up Radiance from Destiny 1,

and have it be combat focused.

If you remember, Radiance from D1

has fire wings.

We kind of ate

that visual space with Dawn Blade

where you've got these like awesome flame wings.

In a split second,

if a player sees a character

Solar with wings,

they're gonna see that it's Dawn Blade.

We had to come up with something different.

Zach, our VFX artist

came up with the idea of this halo around you,

like a medieval painting.

Twilight Arsenal

is a one-off Super

that also creates these axes.

Coming up with visuals

for that axe,

it was an interesting challenge.

How do we want to root this in Destiny?

We took a lot of inspiration from

Titan's shield.

What would it feel like

if the axe was the shield broken up?

And when you look at it side by side,

you can definitely see that connection

between the two.

Storm's Edge.

We wanted to call back to

Arc Blade in Destiny 1,

throwing the dagger and zipping over there,

blowing up stuff.

How long do you have in the Super?

Initially you had,

you had a long time. You had-

24 seconds.

We did not earn any friends in those playtests

the first day. -No people were pretty-

but we toned it down

and now you only have 12 seconds

and it's a lot more reasonable.

We found a problem where

when I

grapple and then you cast Blink Dagger out of it,

I fall for the floor,

right?

Whereas,

if I'm in midair

and I Blink Dagger, I should be held in midair,

right?

And it sucks,

so I want to fix it.

It's the things like

the camera shake,

the way the rumble spikes

and then falls back off.

We need all of our abilities to feel awesome.

We wanna make it so that the controller

melts away.

You stop thinking about "What do I have to do?"

and instead you just inhabit your character

and you don't have to think about it.

The game just plays.

The great thing about Prismatic was

every playtest we did,

the feedback got better and better.

We have gone back and forth on what

starter builds that players will get

in mission one.

Okay, we're gonna start the Titans

with Drengr's Lash their Strand aspect

and Knockout.

One of the notes we got is players just weren't

understanding how those two things

comboed in a loop.

Well, we're gonna drop Drengr’s Lash,

and instead we're gonna put in Diamond Lance.

Now ability kill is making your Diamond Lances

your knockout punch.

Hey, that makes a Diamond Lance.

You throw your Diamond Lance at the floor,

everything's frozen,

Now you can punch stuff again

and get amplified with Knockout.

Once we made that switch,

all of a sudden it clicked in player's heads.

This loop becomes a lot more clear

and players were much more satisfied

with their starter loadouts.

At the end of the day like,

the chaos is the point.

Yeah.

If you aren't surprised and delighted

in a way that you didn't expect, like

we f***** up.

Yeah.

This strike is probably one of the coolest strikes

that we've ever released.

I started my destiny journey playing strikes.

I really wanted to push the expectations

of what a strike could potentially be.

This strike,

it's sort of a memory out of

The Witness's history, of it's race

and what its buildings may have looked like in the past.

A lot of the inspiration comes from

30's Pulp Novels,

adventure flicks, uncovering ancient, hidden cities

that have not seen a living soul in eons,

and then subsequently destroying those cities,

moments later.

Imagine you're

in a narrow hallway.

You need to escape it.

Lava is descending.

Obstacle is coming out of the walls.

You made this slide towards the closing door, and

you are dead.

The door just closed right in front of your face, so-

That happens a lot.

I have seven Gilded Conqueror titles.

I want this strike to be the hardest strike

we ever made.

I want people to

scream and cry over this strike.

Oh no.

And just say,

"How do I complete this strike on Grand Master difficulty?"

And I'll be like,

yes.

That's kinda one of the fun parts about making a strike.

There's so much freedom and creativity

to do wild things,

and then testing that is just a lot of fun

that back and forth.

We have a very tight relationship with test as designers,

and I couldn't do anything I do

gameplay wise without test there at my side,

but as soon as I can get fresh eyes on it,

I think that's where it really comes in.

We ran a lot of playtests

and every time I would invite people, I'm like,

this is final.

This is final playtest,

but it's never final.

We just can't stop.

It's really not just one department

creating something special.

When you see all those things combined

in the iteration and the back and forth,

and when you get to this end result where, it just

feels like it couldn't be any other way.

We hit on something amazing here.