Destiny 2 ViDoc | Becoming Legend - Part 1: Confronting Oblivion

And Tyson, take one marker.

There's a line that emerged in Destiny 1,

that wasn't planned for

but is very deliberate by the person who put it in the game.

And is very resonant for

Destiny players and resonant for me as a person.

And that line is

"Guardians make their own fate."

That still gives me goosebumps.

For me, that has sort of become a-

a touch point for the Destiny story.

Again and again,

external forces come and try to impose

a fate upon you and humanity.

And again and again,

you show them that they can't do that.

We make our own fate.

That's not just a powerful theme of Destiny.

It's also a powerful theme

for us as people.

As both developers and as humanity.

We make our own fate.

When you're talking about 10 years of story,

there's a lot of stuff crammed in there.

And there's a lot of things that we could do

and could talk about.

But as storytellers,

the hardest part isn't coming up with the ideas,

it's knowing which ones are the important ones.

We wanna tell a story

that makes you the player feel like

all of that time that you invested,

we saw you and we wanna give you the experience

that you've been waiting for.

We looked at everything we had.

We laid it all out like- Every single script-

whiteboards and like

everything. -Everywhere.

We were trying to look for

a theme that felt resonant,

not just for this story,

but for Destiny as a whole.

And the theme that we kept coming back to was

purpose and fate.

And that's what this story is about.

Not just for ourselves as the player,

but also for our characters.

I used to think

I'd give anything to bring you back.

I cried quite a few times

doing those scripts, because I-

I treated it with the love of a fan.

Every time I opened a script I was like,

"What would I want to see?

What would I want to hear?"

You get to see

their emotional journey.

The struggle of how do we defeat The Witness?

Let us bring an end

to your futile exertions.

The Witness sees itself

as the one true God.

So, it's come to The Traveler because it needs

the power of The Traveler's Light

to finish this vision.

Its goal is salvation,

"Why don't you want that?"

Be reborn.

Our mission is to make sure

that we can prevent it from getting the Light.

The thing that it needs in order to

make it all happen.

It's finally confronted The Traveler

and here we are, thorns in its side,

a blip on its radar,

trying to make a difference.

You're going to speak to The Witness,

and The Witness is going to

shine a light on some things.

And you wonder like, "What would it be like?

What would it be like to be a disciple of The Witness?"

Your Guardian's use has yet to be determined.

We're in need of a God killer.

Every time you hear The Witness,

you're not just hearing one voice,

you're hearing whispers in the background,

you're hearing all of these other textures.

You are still resisting.

You can feel a subtext sometimes

where the real Witness comes through,

or at least things that it doesn't want you to know

about it come through.

There is only suffering!

Putting characters into pressure cookers

is what storytellers do best.

And I can't imagine

a more intense pressure cooker

than it's the end of the world.

If we fail,

everything is frozen forever

and only we can do it.

It's just the handful of us

inside of a God.

There were a couple of themes

that we had when we started on The Pale Heart.

The two main ones that I remember

were surreal and shire-to-spire.

Seeing how they put a tiny little Guardian

at the beginning of this vast journey

that spreading out in front of you,

really put into perspective the scale

that we needed to hit

in order to make The Pale Heart

look and feel,

dangerous

and ambitious

and vast.

When we were thinking of surreal things,

it was a bit of a challenge.

Because how do you make something surreal?

For me, it is putting familiar things

out of context.

What is the thing

when you turn the corner

that you are not expecting?

So that's when we play with scale,

we play with unexpected things,

repetition.

There's this awesome

piece of concept art

that is like this massive Ghost in the horizon.

And you just like,

go over there and it's just like

broken down in the middle,

and it's just weird in a way that is

unsettling but at the same time

feels very visceral.

Another one that we used was

body parts.

And it sounds a bit strange,

because we didn't want to do body horror.

So I was taking screenshots from the game

and just trying to find silhouettes

and things that would look surreal.

And I start replacing all the trees with hands.

So all the limbs

we've made out of fingers coming out and

eyes were on the floor.

And I do remember

our direction was like that,

like more hands.

Are there hands holding up the freeway

in which we were born?

Yes.

You'll recognize it instantly

and then almost as quickly,

you'll realize you've never been here before.

I definitely feel like there's some aspects

of The Pale Heart where like,

this is freaking weird and scary.

I want to take that risk.

I want to push a little bit

of what expectations of what a destination can be.

And I hope that players love that.

As players progress,

they get to see more influence of The Witness,

not just on The Traveler,

but also on the races that it's interacted with

that we've seen so far.

The Dread are a result of The Witness

experimenting with the Light.

So while it's inside The Pale Heart,

it's able to access the Light

as it's trying to siphon it.

It is using that Light to create

and alter new and different combatants.

And so we've encountered

some of these members before.

Now we have an name for them.

The new Dread units are using a new language.

Collaborating with Narrative,

we went through and used this constructive language tool

to generate different phrases

to figure out like grammar structures and,

and other things.

The Pyramid language

that the new Dread units speak

is actually translatable.

So players, if they're really interested in

figuring out what the Pyramid units are saying,

could decipher these.

The Husks are an interesting addition to Destiny

because you've never fought anything like them before.

We talked about, oh yeah,

they need some big weapons like,

it needs to look like

this thing is serious business.

They wanted a bit of a secondary unit on it,

so like a, two in one.

As the sketches were progressing,

we were kind of like, oh,

this feels like it's sentient

And we just love the idea.

We had all these different sound effects in our library of

water bladders that make some really cool sounds

when you're shaking.

We use some sounds of slapping jello too.

So that was kind of the foundation for The Husk.

You have all these real physical sounds that

come together and feels like an alien

moving around in the stomach of this thing.

The collaboration between

the different disciplines

and the trust we have for each other.

At the end, it comes out better than

anybody could have made individually.

There's a moment where you realize

looking at The Final Shape,

that it's not just a story about the Guardian's journey.

It's also kind of the story of Destiny's journey.

It starts in place of uncertainty and challenge

and then it changes and evolves

and it proceeds forward into the unknown.

And as you get closer to The Final Shape,

those two experiences converge.

We know where we're going.

We know where we're aiming for.

I feel very confident about the love

and the work

and the thoughtfulness that everyone working

on this release put into it.

And I think it's inevitable

that when people start going in

and experiencing all these

different things that make up this expansion,

I think they're gonna see it.

I won't lose another soldier in this war.