Destiny: The Taken King
Developer: High Moon Studios Co-Dev with Bungie
Genre: Shared World; First-Person; Shooter; RPG
Engine: Bungie Proprietary Tech
Platforms: Playstation 3; Playstation 4; Xbox 360; Xbox One
Released: September 2015
Gameplay Overview: The Taken King was the third and largest expansion for Destiny 1 that included a new campaign, new strikes, a new raid, new PvP maps, a new combatant faction, and a bundle of other additions and mechanics changes.
My Role: Senior Game Designer (generalist)
Duties: Encounter Design
Responsibilities:
Remixing the Cerberus Vae III strike with a set of Taken encounters
After supporting Call of Duty for a few years, we moved over to supporting Bungie on Destiny, a move made possible by their partnership with Activision. We were one of the first studios that Bungie trusted with co-development responsibilities on their flagship IP.
Our relationship began with a thorough onboarding period, including lengthy visits and training sessions between our two studios.
Eventually, we settled on doing remixes of a few strikes featuring the new Taken combatants as our primary first contribution from the design side.
Highlights for me were:
Learning all about Bungie’s approach to enemy and encounter design.
Tackling the challenge of creating all new experiences for an already established strike activity without changing the footprint or geometry of the level.
Strike: Cerberus Vae III - Taken Version
Cerberus Vae III was one of the original Destiny 1 strikes, pitting players against the Cabal on Mars. For the Taken King, Bungie decided to implement alternate Taken versions of several strikes. The idea was to increase fun and replayability by mixing up which version of the strike players would run each time they launched the activity.
I started the work by analyzing the flow and structure of the strike and each of its encounters and then deciding on an overall “combat story” to give the encounters some cohesion. The Taken would be invading and attempting to claim the Cabal Land Tank, which was the final location in the strike and the site of the boss fight at the end.
The trickiest encounter to design was right in the middle of the strike, the second phase of the second encounter. In the Cabal version, players fight a large tank and waves of adds in a big open space, which works great for the layout, but the Taken have no such large vehicles that can dominate big open spaces like that.
In the end, I decided to spawn a cloaked Taken minotaur amongst a field of Taken nullification spheres. Together with supporting adds, this created a very effective challenge and an appropriate middle beat for the strike with a very Taken feel to it.
Most of the other encounters featured different spins on faction fights between the Cabal and the Taken, to play up the story of the Taken invasion. Depending on the encounter, one side or the other would naturally dominate, leaving players to deal with their remaining forces.