destiny 2: The Pyramidion

For Destiny 2, High Moon developed a new destination: the Jupiter moon, Io. We designed and built all the environments and activities for Io, and I was tasked with building the one new strike: The Pyramidion. We inherited some assets from Bungie as a starting point, but everything except the boss fight arena had to be almost completely redone. I wanted to deliver on the fantasy of delving in to the depths of an inscrutable, booby-trapped tomb of impossible mystery. After prototyping a number of layout, combat, and traversal challenges, I settled on a core set of ideas to thread the experience together: teleporters, combat islands, and laser trap challenges.

All the gameplay for the strike had to fit within a steep shaft connecting the surface of Io with the boss fight at the bottom. Destiny strikes are intended to be completed within 15 minutes so this presented a major challenge. The distance that needed to be covered was vast, so conventional on-foot navigation wasn't going to work. I proposed using teleporters as a way to cut the distance down. This mitigated the issue in two important ways: 1) It allowed me to hand-craft the amount of gameplay in the shaft regardless of the actual distance covered; 2) It provided clear and consistent exits for each gameplay space. Even though the ultimate goal was straight below the player, they could always count on a conventionally lateral traversal vector to a recognizable exit gate.

The idea of "combat islands" is one that we developed when working on the Transformers games. When dealing with characters that could transform between flying and walking modes at-will, we found it very useful to discretely divide gameplay between pure flying traversal and pure boots-on-the-ground combat. This idea again became useful in the Pyramidion. In the vastness of the shaft, I built only three islands of actual gameplay that deconstructed the Destiny strike experience into its core elements: 1) a light intro encounter that sets the stage; 2) Three major combat encounters, some that can be rushed, others that are gated by objectives, and; 3) Interesting downtime navigation challenges between encounters.

Inspired by third-person platformer games like Ratchet and Clank, I prototyped a number of traversal challenges that I thought would work well with Destiny 2's first-person shooter mechanics, like mashers, lasers, and floor traps. Because accessibility is a core feature of the Destiny franchise, we eventually decided on just one feature that we could introduce, teach, and evolve over the course of the strike: lasers. I developed a number of different laser patterns, from static, toggling, moving, and spinning and spread them out between each combat island with increasing difficulty. The result sparked a lot of controversy. Some people loved the challenge while other people were frustrated by it.

Here's a video playthrough of the strike, The Pyramidion, from Destiny 2