destiny: the taken king

One of the coolest new features in The Taken King was the ability to randomize the encounters in the strikes. For players who had already run the strikes dozens of times, it was a welcome injection of variety. Our mandate was to randomize all the strikes on Mars with Taken encounters. These new encounters could then be randomly selected to appear when players run the strikes, or, in the case of nightfalls, the entire strike could be replaced by the new version.

I worked on Cerberus Vae III, one of the longest strikes in the game. One of my biggest challenges was memory constraints. Since we were layering additional content on to existing gameplay and all previous content had to remain, it was tough to find the memory space to accommodate the additions. I had played the strike numerous times myself, so I knew its strengths and weaknesses, and I wanted to create encounters that would twist the way players were used to playing the strike. The challenge was how to achieve this goal without busting the memory budget.

I began with the first real combat encounter in the strike, which I knew from my own experience most people just bypassed. I set up a rowdy faction fight between the Vex and the Taken. This drastically set it apart from what players were familiar with, which was normally a fight against the Cabal that starts very quietly and can be easily skipped. Instead, in the new encounter, as soon as players open the door they are greeted by a group of Goblins engaged with the Taken. The Vex are outnumbered and quickly vanquished, leaving a major Taken presence occupying the room. In this new encounter the exit door to the room doesn't unlock until players have defeated the Taken Captain, further distinguishing this encounter from its previous iteration as a combat that players can easily skip.

My next challenge was deciding what to do with the huge outdoor arenas that make up the middle sections of the strike. In the original version, this space is punctuated by a fight against a huge Cabal tank, but the Taken have no such large, heavily armored units. I wanted to create an encounter that encouraged players to use the whole space, instead of just hiding in the back half of the level. To that end, I set up an objective for players to investigate a Taken anomaly in the center of the open plain. Once players approach it, a number of Taken blights appear and Taken forces begin to warp in. In order to make maximum use of the space, I spawn an Ultra Taken Minotaur that must be defeated before players can progress, thereby shadowing the gameplay beat once occupied by the Cabal tank but still significantly twisting the nature of the challenge we're presenting to the players.

Here's a video playthrough of the strike, Cerberus Vae III, from Destiny: The Taken King