Activity Design Project - Destiny 2: Beyond Light

3 player cooperative Strike mission in Destiny 2

Remastered and reimagined beloved Strike mission from Destiny 1

Built 3 encounters, including a boss fight

Working on this strike was truly a labor of love, and to this day remains one of the pieces of content I am most proud of in my career. Towards the end of my time on the v500 porting team, I was assigned a special task, outside the original scope of my contract role: remaking the iconic Devil’s Lair Strike mission from Destiny 1 and updating it to fit into Destiny 2. This strike had a very special place in the destiny community’s heart as it was Destiny’s very first strike, the first one unlocked when playing vanilla D1, and the only strike featured in D1’s pre-release beta. For many of destiny’s hardcore fans, this strike was a major part of their very introduction to the game, the feel of its world, and what they could expect from its activities. The encounters and moments of wonder they experienced way back then were all completely fresh, and the memories of playing it for the first time in the early days were written into the game’s very spirit. I knew this for an absolute fact firsthand, as I was right beside all those fans myself in the D1 Beta playing the devils lair strike over and over. So I knew going in to this project, it wasn’t going to be a mere quick straight port. I needed to fully remaster it to recapture and reproduce those feelings in D2, a game with a very different sandbox than D1 where those feelings were born. Setting to work, I ported the strike into destiny 2 in its original form, and then quickly realized I was going to need to rip out the floorboards and build a larger and life version of the strike as it existed in players’ emotional memory. Here’s how I did it.

Encounter 1: Classic Ghost Defense

I started with the strike’s first major encounter. in the original strike, it consists of the player Fighting their way into a Fallen stronghold in the cosmodrome, which is also under attack by the Hive. They battle their way to a chamber where the Fallen have set up a reinforced defense along the path ahead and the players must deploy their ghost to hack the Fallen defensive tech, while defending him from three waves of enemy combatants. Right off the bat, this encounter confronted me with the fundamental challenges of porting D1 content into D2. D2 is simply a bigger game than D1. Its spaces are larger, and the number of combatants is way greater than was even possible in D1. The sandbox reflects this, in D2, individual combatants are less threatening, but they have much more diverse abilities and behaviors, and they press farther into the players’ space, and they are more numerous. The Player moves faster and outputs much more abilities and area damage. Going forward, I knew the main thing I was going to have to do to every encounter in this strike was plus them up: more enemies, more threatening enemies, more close to the player. Without doing this, the strike as it appeared in D1 would feel anemic and disappointing in D2. I also needed to latch onto the emotional themes for each encounter and plus them up too. The major theme I latched onto for refreshing this encounter was the three way conflict between the players, the Fallen, and the Hive. Having the player third party a battle between AI combatant factions is CLASSIC Bungie style, and the environment art around this encounter was already littered with built in evidence of this narrative, which gave me opportunities to take it even farther. In the chamber just before the main defense room, a Hive Seeder drop pod has crashed through the roof. in the original strike, this space was left empty and unused. I chose to add a little battle there between the Fallen and Hive, with a hive Wizard sending a swarm of thrall screaming out of the drop pod’s gate to attack some fallen defenders just as the players burst through the door. I loved adding encounters like this that made use of the environment in an immersive and natural way that advanced the themes of the mission. With every enemy I placed, I tried to think in terms of “What would this alien soldier logically do if they were in this battle? What are their goals?” With this I hoped to make the encounters feel alive as opposed to just a game-ey obstacle for the player to smash through

Encounter 2: ‘Fallen World War 1’

The second encounter definitely provided the greatest challenge in recapturing the spirit of the original. The encounter originally centered around a battle with a Fallen Spider Tank, a super sized, immobile combatant of monstrous size that dominates a platform in the back of the encounter arena. This thing was one hell of an action set piece back in the day. It featured an awesome bespoke spawn animation where it would cling to the belly of a dropship with its many legs and drop into action, and a massive canon that made a terrifying noise and was capable of killing the player character in 1 shot. In destiny 1, this level of threat and novelty was all it took to create an unforgetable encounter, especially since originally this encounter was the first time the enemy appeared. The challenge was that the Fallen Spider Tank was simply not as threatening in D2, they were old news. Though they still had their massive canon, they were able to be destroyed so much quicker. While in D1 a walker was enough of a challenge