INTERVIEW Destiny 2 : La Forme Finale, conception du Cœur pâle et de l’Effroi, obsession des mains et accès des builds prismatiques... Bungie répond à nos questions

Context for English readers, we went to Bungie's HQ in May to test Destiny 2: The Final Shape and had the opportunity to interview the Project Lead, Catarina Macedo, and the Combat Area Lead in charge of Prismatic and the Dread, Benjamin Wommack, in presence of the Senior Communication Manager Carlos Ascencio and the Principal Communications Manager Cozmo. Our preview of the expansion (in French) is linked at the end of the page 1. Don't hesitate to contact us on Twitter / X if you have any question.

• First of all, can you introduce yourself to our readers?

Catarina to Ben — Do you want to speak about our role?

Ben — My role, sure. I'm the Combat Area Lead for Destiny 2 and so I oversee the teams that are making our combatants, bosses, gameplay archetypes and sandbox systems.

Catarina — And I'm the expansion's Project Lead. So if you don't like something about the expansion, you can be mad at me, that's like my role.

Ben — (Chuckles)

Catarina — No, but basically overseeing like hey, is this expansion thing that we really need to be, we really want to care about the player's experience when playing and that we're delivering the stuff that Destiny really wants to.

• I'll begin with a burning question many players and I had in mind. Since the gameplay reveal in April, we've seen a lot of people wondering if Prismatic and the Dread were planned since the beginning or if in some capacity they were added in 'last minute' after the reveal in August. Can you enlighten us about that, maybe with a time frame of their creation?

Ben — Yeah, so the thing about Prismatic is... the idea of what is happening in Prismatic is actually older than The Final Shape. I've seen proposals for melting ability and bring them back together for a while and the question that came up was always: "Is this the right time to do this kind of thing?" How we make it make sense? How are we doing it so it's not something that is completely going to misshape the game in some way? What we discovered while we were getting The Final Shape ready to go was that we had these themes of, oh yeah, Light and Dark mastery, of both. The Witness is trying to manipulate them for this final shape purpose, but you as a player, you're the one who's actually understanding and taking them both in and controlling them. And so that turned into us realizing for The Final Shape, this is actually the time for us to finally make that big innovation where you can have multiple/different kinds of abilities at once and that turned into Prismatic, of us saying: "Okay, you're having Light and Dark and you're having every single Light subclasses, every single Dark subclasses."

And at the beginning, it was us kind of experimenting with things and figuring out what was going to work. And it was us literally taking abilities and like: "Here's an idea. Let's try it. Let's play test. Let's see how it goes." Because the thing is, in debug, we can always give ourselves whatever ability mix we want. It's not a big deal, right? It's just testing. But we never thought of having it a real way. But once we started to do it the real way for the first time, we discovered that, oh, this is actually way more fun than we thought it was going to be. And potentially also not as broken as people thought it would be either. It turned into something that we discovered. Oh, well, actually, it lets us do these cool things with these abilities that we want to shine more. Or let's just have these two interact that normally have nothing to do with each other. And so every playtest would come out with some ideas like: "We take this Aspect and we can then work with these other abilities." And it's really fun. The turning point for me was when we were playtesting some Prismatic options and people that were in the middle of the playtest were like: "Wait, what can I do? Can I do that?" And they would stop and immediately then go, tweak their build in the middle of a Crucible match again to try something different. And I was doing that. I was in the middle of Crucible matches to push that out my docs. I would like, I play for a little bit and I want to try something else out, because we would just have everything available in the playtest. And it being this part of the game that melted so well with The Final Shape overall message and theme was something that just made a lot of sense right away.

Catarina — Yeah, and it was a really exciting design space for us to explore, expand on and bring to Destiny, so we were pretty excited about having it in the function.

Ben — It was the right time.

Catarina — Totally.

• And about the Dread?

Ben — Yeah, the Dread are also interesting because making a new faction in Destiny is a big deal, cause just like with something like Prismatic, if we make a new faction, we want that faction to be something that lives inside the game forever in some way. And so like that, we wanted to make the ultimate kind of like Witness enemy faction for a long time, but the question was always: "How do we do it? When do we do it?" Not that's different from Prismatic in some ways, but we actually took an interesting approach that I think worked out really well. We decided long ago that we would try to start to make the most challenging members of the faction first, and this led us to make the Tormentor for Lightfall, actually.

That was our, great consciously, first Dread we're gonna put out, before all the other ones. And it was kind of like, this is the top end, this is the most dangerous, it kind of sets the stage for the whole rest of the faction. And so what happened then is, we would move down the list, we would go down to Subjugators and move into the soldiers, like the Grim; the lieutenant, the Weaver and the Husk. And every single time that we were working on the next one, we could look at kind of the space that we had defined for the high level, and fit what's missing amongst this. "Now that led to us... oh the Grim, we want a really mobile kind of shooter fodder." And then the idea was like, we've had this idea for doing bat wings forever, we really want to do bat wings. "Can we finally do that?" And the team has really rallied around that and made it happen.

So that's kind of, the Dread overall was the team fighting these cool ideas, excited about them and putting them together. And The Final Shape was the right time to do that, because we're finally confronting with this.

• So, flying enemies is new for Destiny. Was their implementation a relatively easy thing or a hard challenge?

Ben — Interesting question. So they, we tried really hard to make them feel very natural. Very natural as like an enemy that has wings, that looks like it's really mobile, because it is, and has a gun. It's a bat with a gun. It's shooting, it's very challenging. And we had a lot of ideas.

Catarina — Also, there's a screech.

Ben — Yeah, the screech, the screech will get you. And the challenge with them was trying to say, how can we make this flying fantasy work without it being like hard to hit or like impossible to fight over too much, or so mobile it's annoying. And we did do special tech to have it move around, evade and do glide stuff so it could feel more like that. I think the biggest part though is actually the flapping wings. We did a lot of work to make the flapping wings feel natural, to make a blend with all the other animations really well and make it something that kind of gives the identity while it moves around, whether it's high up or it's like at your level and feel convincing. A lot of that actually is in the animation performance, I think, that really made it feel so cool at this point.

Catarina — Yeah, and it's something that, for someone who was not like super deep into this but was playtesting very regularly, I still very clearly remember the moment where Grims started showing up in all these encounters throughout the campaign. And it was like: "Oh, this is different." We haven't seen something like this in Destiny. It was very exciting in that sense, because a lot of these new Dread units and everything, they're part of our encounters. They're working with all the other factions. They are in the Pale Heart. And they just bring this really fresh take on how you go about fighting, each one of the encounters where they are at. It was a big difference from going from no Dread to Dread when we are including them all, like when we had a bunch of thinking, then let's add Dread and see what happens. It was really exciting to see them.

Ben — Yeah, standing up the encounters and the spaces.

Catarina — Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben — This establishes how we know units are, and having a new ones. As I started to like, then reach a complete state, it was actually really important for making the feel of those spaces really matter.

[LITTLE SPOILERS]

Ben — M3 is with the tree, right?

Catarina — The Silver Wings Tree, yeah.

Ben — Yeah, so you played with the big Silver Wings Tree and the Grim all circling around it. That really helped sell the whole environment. I mean, it's just really awesome.

[END OF SPOILERS]

• The Pale Heart is a very unique and twisted location inside the Traveler, reflecting the journey so far. What were the main sources of inspiration in its design?

Catarina — Yeah, I can talk a little about that. So, in the beginning, when we started doing the concept for The Final Shape, we had this like, okay, this is the culmination and kind of the finale of this fate enacted saga, the story and Light versus Dark. So we wanted to reflect that journey as much as we possibly could, both in the story and the arc the characters are going through in the story that we're telling, but also in the actual environment. We have this idea of: "Hey, we want to go from point A to point B. We know exactly what we're doing. We're going to go into the Traveler and we need to get to the Witness. That's our main goal." And so, we wanted the art and the environment to kind of tell that story as well. So, we start from a very, more familiar, a little weird – there's giant ghost there –space that is kind of shaped by the memories of the Guardian and the Vanguard. That's what's shaping around you. That's why you see the D1 Tower and a lot of other locales that are part of your past. And then as you get closer and closer to the Witness, you actually see more of the environment being shaped by the memories of the Witness. You start seeing all these weird things that we've seen in the past when you're going through the pyramids and whatever, you see some of these statues that are weird and, yeah, all the buds of the forest.

(Everyone laughs at that moment.)

Catarina — I love the horse. And so, we were like, okay. So with that in mind, that's kind of what The Final Shape is. It's the Witness trying to have everything in perfect stillness. I mean, in doing that there are all these twisted ways and so it was really fun, and I think the art team honestly kind of absolutely nailed it.

Ben — Absolutely.

Catarina - Where we want to sail, hey this is a bad thing and we want you to feel uncomfortable and uneasy like: "Oh that's wrong, I don't want this to happen to my friends, I don't want people to be sliced in half and all this other stuff." And so they started playing around a lot with what happens if we change the trees into something else, if instead of pillars holding up the highway we have hands, if there's a screaming face that it's actually ten faces instead of one face. And when we started seeing those things in game, it likes really clicked for us. It's like, this is the exact feeling that we're trying to get, it's weird and exciting. And another thing that was important for that – it's the last thing I'll say about – it is that we wanted to hit a lot of the nostalgia feeling, we have a lot of the same locales that you've seen in Destiny. But another thing that we wanted to do is, we want them to still feel fresh and new, and we want players to be excited about seeing them, not because it's exactly what they expect, but it's because there are some twists to it. And so that's another thing where we spent a lot of time in trying to get the Pale Heart to feel exactly how we wanted to. It's not just about revisiting places, it's about seeing them in a new light... more disturbing light.

• No spoilers, but the opening cinematic of the expansion gives me chills of terror. Was it difficult to make the Witness so dangerous in such a short time since their introduction at the end of The Witch Queen?

Catarina — It was hard. It is very hard to answer that question without spoilers. But yeah, I mean, the Witness is the biggest bad we've had in Destiny, so we took that a lot into account when trying to set up this moment and, one, making sure that you feel as you're progressing through the campaign that the Witness is pushing back and doesn't want you to advance. It's trying to even recruit you, to be like: "Do you want to be a Disciple of the Witness?" And at the same time, this is one of the reasons why the Witness is in the Raid, it just warrants that big challenge, big moment, it's hard, it's a big guy.

Ben — Yeah, from the very beginning we knew that the Witness is kind of the biggest deal that we've ever fought. That's the 10-year saga, this is the being that started the whole Dark Age through its machinations, from the very beginning of the history of the game. So it's just that big of a deal, trying to meet that expectation is very challenging and we can't tell you anything about it because it's spoilers.

(Laughs from everyone from Bungie.)

Ben — But I can tell you that we spend a lot of care trying to get it right. I feel like we did a good job.

• A funny question. What about the Witness obsession with hands? Does it have a lore justification?

Catarina — I really don't want to answer.

Ben — Sorry, could you say the question again, please?

Catarina — It's the hands, what's the obsession with the hands?

Ben — Oh, it's the obsession with the hands. There is reasoning for that, but we are not narrative people and we get it wrong.

Catarina — There was a meme ongoing internally, where it's like we would just say more hands. More hands. There was the direction, it's like more hands, always more hands.

Ben — Yeah, the feedback for anything is like...

Both of them — More hands.

• Yes

(laughs)

• Since the Pale Heart use the Guardian's memories to bring back old locations, do you envision to expand it in the future? It would be a fantastic use to bring back old vaulted content in a fresh way inside the Traveler and make it relevant again.

Catarina — It's a very smart way of asking the question about vaulted content. I'll give you that.

Ben — I think the thing we'll say is, cause we’re only going to talk about The Final Shape, but the future of Destiny is bright. There is still so much for us to explore, and with Into the Light we just brought back Outbreak Perfected's mission – Zero Hour – and Whisper. And so we brought those back at a great time where people would enjoy them a lot. I just see it as there's so much opportunity and potential for the future, so that's how I see the thing that you've exposed with your question.

• I felt that even without taking a lot of time into building, Prismatic is very cool to use and the new weapons and exotics synergized a lot with it. Was it a will to make more accessible the build creation for new players?

Ben — Yeah, accessibility of the build with new players is actually a very good question. Cat, you actually had a really good way of putting this, and I give you credit for that.

Catarina — Yeah, I'll do my little spiel. One of the things that was really fun, and you touched on this before, Prismatic was something that we've wanted to do for a long time, a mix of Light and Darkness. So when you started exploring what's the representation, that you actually taking the game, which is like literally up to the moment of acquisition of Prismatic, and how we represent all these parts that make up for Prismatic in the actual screen of the subclass, it was really important to get it right. And one of the things that we found out when we started playtesting... I mean, first of all, I remember very distinctly the first playtest that we had with Prismatic and I was like able to do Strand and Solar at the same time on my Titan. I was like: "This is all I've ever wanted." It's my two favourite subclasses and so it was really fun, but another thing that we started doing when we did more of those it's for players who generally don't engage a ton with build crafting in the game.

(We raised our hand at that moment, because we generally go with other players’ build found on the Internet.)

Catarina — So there you go. If there are players like you going on YouTube or Google, and you are like "What's the best Void Titan build? Please tell me" and you just copy whatever it is. It was actually really interesting for us to see that Prismatic unlocks this playful playground of: "Oh, I feel like I can just put shit together and everything kind of just works, and it's kind of great." And there's that sense of discovery that we kind of unlocked with. I think it's very much about the fantasy of Prismatic that really nails that. It's been really fun to see how players who have previously not engaged as much with buildcrafting kind of starting to dip their toes into that aspect of Destiny with Prismatic. Then that kind of leading into the rest of buildcrafting because players feel more confident about doing that. It was definitely something that we were really happy about finding out. Then, the other thing is like how deep it actually goes. When you first start, you can make really good builds, Prismatic is a very effective way of playing Destiny. But it also you can go super deep. Our initial kits that you have available to you are super effective, but as you get more and more and more of Prismatic, it's like the combinations that you can do with the exotic class items and a bunch of the Prismatic weapons, and how to get your Transcendence time uptime, for as long as you can and everything that you can do in there. It's really fun to figure out.

Ben — Yeah, I had a moment when I knew this, but I didn't think about it, when I was playtesting and I first testing Prismatic hunter. I had my Void aspect, the name escapes me, somewhat forgive me, but go invisible when you get an ability kill and I had incandescent scout rifle and they got an ignition and I popped invisible. It's like: "Oh, wait a minute, that's not supposed to do that." But that's the exact feeling that we want Prismatic to bring to players, like we're trying to take the whole spectrum of the game and expand it to break the paradigm. And that's gonna feel exciting, it's gonna feel different. Until it normalizes, it's like new to forever evergreen and we make the next updates, and we make the next balance patches, and so on so forth.

And the part that I am most excited about, in addition to the depth that Cat was talking about was the first part, which is that I think the players will be able to go into the subclass, try things out, have it works and be exciting. I think with the classic newer subclasses you can make some decisions to have abilities that don't really synergize together. They don't really work well together, a little bit, but not in a super exciting way. There's a lot you can do with Prismatic that is exciting no matter where you end up, and I'm really proud of the team for hitting that.

• I think you did a great job at it.

Ben — That's great to hear.

• What was the idea behind the Traveler's Blessing mods?

Ben — Talking about the Traveler's blessing mods are the... What was the bonus?

(Catarina whispers to Ben)

Ben — OK, not our area, so I don't know if we can give you a straight answer.

Ben to Catarina — But, I'm sure I'm wrong, because I think you were closer than I am.

Ben — It was the idea of having this cool sandbox thing that you can do on the Pale Heart. And once you're done with the campaign, the destination is unlocked and you're exploring it, there are also great things to do. You'll have another angle that you can explore as a sandbox, and put a lot of effort into those. Actually, they're pretty cool. They are definitely gonna be a surprise, just how fun it is to choose some of them to apply to yourself, and then go do different things in the Pale Heart and have some new abilities.

Catarina — Yeah, and we tried to do a few different things about the destination, and how we do activities in it. What kinds of twists can we do when you're playing in the Pale Heart that will make it exciting and rewarding for players to actually spend time there. And playing with your friends, so that's another layer of that. It's rewarding, the more you play here, the more you actually get powerful by playing here, and we just introduced new fun ways of... 'guardianing'.

(She struggled to find a good word)

Ben — Yeah, more fun ways of playing on the Pale Heart and spending time there.

• The Pathfinder rewards track in the Pale Heart and ritual activities looks like a very engaging idea. Do you think it could be implemented in other destinations in the future?

Catarina — So the plan right now is that the Pathfinder is gonna be available for you in the Pale Heart and in all the rituals playlists. And we're gonna see how it's received and it's like a big change. It's a big design principle for the team and everything. We're going to roll this out and see how players react. Do they like this? It's not like a one-to-one replacement of our bounty system, but it's intended to replace those rewards with a new system. And so how does that feel in terms of day-to-day and week-to-week engagement? Does it feel good? And then let's see what happens.

• Finally, in terms of the reception, what would you want the players to say about The Final Shape?

Ben — I want players to say that they're having a lot of fun. I want them to say that it meant something to them at the end, because it meant something to us internally when we got through the end.

Catarina — The biggest thing for me is that most of the comments are: "I am so happy with how Bungie and the Destiny 2 team paid homage to the legacy and the story of Destiny and all the experiences kind of contribute to that. It's really paid off to be a player for 10 years of Destiny and be here in this moment." There is no "I sure wish we had done this different thing" or "They would have explored more of this." I think that's what success really looks like for me personally, it's hard to give an answer for the entire team, but I'm really looking forward to that like: "I sure am glad like they care, they really do care about delivering an experience that's awesome."

• Thank you very much.

Catarina — Thank you so much.

Alexandre SAMSON (Omega Law) Rédacteur
Accro à Assassin's Creed et Destiny, grand amateur de RPG et passionné d'expériences vidéoludiques en général. Lecteur de comics (DC) et de divers mangas (One Piece !). Chimiste de formation et Whovian dans l'âme.
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