Destiny 2: Season of the Chosen (season 13)

Skills

Systems Design

Progressions

Economy

Rewards

Quests

Senior Systems Designer – Bungie

Features

• Ritual Loop (game loop, rewards, progressions, vendors, quests, bounties)
• Player Journey (season’s main quest)
• Seasonal Reward System (reward agency, high value gear)
• Seasonal Challenges (weekly rollout of objectives)

Ritual Loop

Role: Senior Systems (investment) Designer – feature owner

A ritual loop is a season’s game loop. It unifies the season’s theme, activities, and rewards through a multi-layered set of systems and content. Ritual loops drive player engagement through a suite of quests, progressions, upgrades, reward stories, and more.

Responsibilities

• Created novel game loop which became the framework for ritual loops for 2 years
• Architected game loop through the Hammer of Proving, an item that embodied the season’s themes of gladiators, ritualistic combat, glory, and, honor
• Made 21 upgrades for the seasonal vendor allowing players to choose how they fulfill the fantasy of being “chosen”
• Designed and balanced new seasonal economy which stayed active in the game for a year
• Established standards for the rate at which many rewards could be given out over a duration of play and of what saliency
• Built six craftable unlocks for what intermediary and immediate rewards players could get by using the Hammer within the new seasonal activities
• Set up vendor reputation, progressions, and rewards
• Drove vision for first destructible chests in Destiny, collaborating across all disciplines to ensure a technically sound, visually impeccable, and fulfilling experience
• Designed and implemented all of the weekly, daily, and repeatable bounties
• Created challenges, which reward power and gear, for seasonal vendor and seasonal activities objectives
• Assisted activity designers with various integrations

Player Journey (main story quest)

Role: Senior Systems (investment) Designer – feature owner

Player Journey is the main story quest for a release. It provides story beats through vendor performances (text and VO), character vignettes, and cinematics. Quest steps guide players through the release’s game loop, introduces and tutorializes new mechanics & rewards, and gates activities & sequences.

Responsibilities

• Introduced the H.E.L.M.: a new semi-social destination used for housing the vendors and essentials of each seasonal release
• Built onramp quest to teach players the Season of the Chosen loop and introduce them to new mechanics, the seasonal vendor, reward structures, and more
• Designed quest flow for seven weeks of content that rolled out on a time-gated basis
• Developed framework for weekly quests that remind players of the season’s game loop
• Collaborated extensively with Narrative team to ensure the story beats they wanted were executed with the best tools
• Built new types of dialog filters which allowed Narrative Designers to have rotating pairs of speakers each time players entered activities
• Came up with story beats for vengeance after a failed assassination attempt delivered through gameplay and text-based vendor performances
• Mentored a designer from another team on how the live team builds quest content
• Set up complex gating behavior allowing free-players to play paid activities once and have online access on PSN and XBOX Live to do so
• Made director dialogs (interstitials) to inform players of weekly content newly released
• Established standardized reward set to use for player journeys and weekly quests

Seasonal Reward System

Role: Senior Systems (investment) Designer – feature owner

The Seasonal Reward System was a method for players to focus umbral engrams into more specific rewards from a larger reward pool. It gave players a path to acquiring specific gear such as submachineguns or helmets. Each focusing option was unlocked through completing a unique objective.

Responsibilities

• Designed a major update to gear focusing, bringing back umbral engrams from Season of Arrivals (season 11), and improving on focusing options
• Created framework for how each season would handle gear focusing moving forward, saving considerable design time over the years
• Prototyped and introduced first-ever weapon drops able to drop as quad-perk, double-perk or single-perk for final two columns (previously a weapon could drop with perk selection for last column, it would only ever drop with perk selection and thus had limited reward sources)
• Built objectives for players unlock tier II and tier III focusing options
• Integrated ritual loop with seasonal reward system to better integrate the overall loop and reward story
• Implemented quest to introduce players to gear focusing

Seasonal Challenges

Role: Senior Systems (investment) Designer – feature support

Seasonal Challenges are objectives that rollout each week of a season. They highlight what content players should engage with, give large amounts of xp for progress on the season pass, and grant rewards for accomplishments within a season.

Responsibilities

• Collaborated across live team, expansions team, and systems team to gather alignment and ensure synergy of content and use of new system
• Acted as key stakeholder from the live team to help shepherd Destiny’s first seasonal challenges
• Worked with Systems team to determine how seasonal challenges should function
• Built challenges specific to the paid content for Season of the Chosen (new activities, gear, quests, ritual loop)
• Designed reward story for paid seasonal challenges