Destiny 2’s Season of the Want is the final time Bungie will use its seasonal content material system, switching as an alternative to a brand new episodic story format between its main expansions. A part of that change is a response to suggestions from gamers that, after 4 years, the seasonal method of weekly quick story missions had turn out to be stale. Every season’s story adopted a mannequin that Destiny followers began to anticipate and anticipate, and whereas Destiny 2’s seasonal tales have largely been considerate and fascinating, they have been additionally getting repetitive of their construction.
“Talking for the narrative workforce, we hear our viewers loud and clear that the construction of our story could have turn out to be predictable, even when the story high quality remains to be excessive,” mentioned lead narrative designer Jonathan To throughout a roundtable dialogue of the Season of the Want. “We’re engaged on quite a lot of issues proper now that we will not explicitly share, however that entails altering up the construction in order that we are able to pleasantly shock you guys extra steadily sooner or later.”
As an alternative of 4 seasons per yr, every overlaying about 10 weeks (though typically extra when expansions are delayed), the yr after Destiny 2’s subsequent enlargement, The Remaining Form, will see the periodic launch of three episodes. Every episode will likely be damaged into three acts, with bigger chunks of story to go along with new weapons and armor, actions, and the opposite content material that seasons have included.
However whereas Bungie has offered some details about the episode format, it nonetheless is not spilling too many particulars as to how they will work. The builders did word that they are looking for methods to maintain issues recent, although.
Senior narrative designer Nikko Stevens defined that a part of the issue with the predictability of latest seasons is because of coping with live-game improvement. A repeated construction offers Bungie a baseline to observe, permitting the studio to create content material extra effectively over time and get it out to gamers at a constant clip. You get higher at a sample the extra typically you do it. However that may have unintended unwanted side effects, like making the content material really feel predictable.
“While you create a framework for the way content material needs to be made, it makes it simpler to provide that content material rapidly as a result of everybody’s on the identical web page, however it may also be predictable as a result of everybody’s on the identical web page,” he defined. “So injecting extra variability into these frameworks is one thing that we have been speaking about and studying about.”
The steadiness between constructing frameworks that velocity up improvement, however ensuring the sport would not turn out to be too predictable, is not only a story drawback, both, design lead Brian Frank added.
“These frameworks that we’re speaking about are a survival talent for us, as builders who’re on tight timelines….” Frank mentioned. “We have recognized that, and throughout disciplines, that that is the principle hazard of them, that they turn out to be predictable. And we speak steadily about ‘surprises and delighters,’ it is one thing that comes up as terminology and discussions about what we’re planning for surprises and delighters, ensuring that we have coated that participant expectation.”
With the Season of the Want, Bungie had one other problem to take care of: The Remaining Form. The Season of the Want’s story issues the Destiny characters’ efforts to discover a method via a large, spooky portal created by the sport’s main antagonist, the Witness. However trailers for The Remaining Form have made it clear that gamers will get via the portal, making the season’s story a foregone conclusion.
Since Bungie reveals details about the expansions nicely forward of their launch, this is not the primary season the narrative workforce has labored on with an ending gamers can see coming. Writing a satisfying story with its ending already recognized meant recalibrating its focus to be on the characters and their relationships, Stevens mentioned.
“I’ve had the pleasure of engaged on all of these seasons which have the ending revealed for the DLC. It’s troublesome to not have that climactic second at your disposal,” he mentioned. “However it’s important to change your perspective slightly bit on the way you’re telling that story. I feel in case you do not view that remaining season, regardless of it being the ultimate season of a yr, as an ending, and extra as like a ramp into the DLC, it structurally begins to make extra sense as you are creating it, as a result of actually you are treating that DLC, Witch Queen or Lightfall or Remaining Form, as that climactic second that every one of this has been resulting in.
“So when it comes to, yeah, we all know we’re going via the portal, and we’re gonna go confront the Witness sooner or later, however we did not find out about Taranis, and we did not know that Mara was going to vary her thoughts about protecting her palms wrapped tightly round Crow as potential. And we did not know that Riven was going to be much more amenable than she in all probability beforehand might have been. So I feel to name again to telling these smaller tales regarding the characters, ensuring that that step into The Remaining Form feels significant as a result of all of those characters that you’ve got been combating in direction of that objective with are proper subsequent to you, I feel these are the issues we try to deal with extra.”
Regardless of not having a lot in the way in which of a climactic second in Season of the Want, Bungie did take the chance to tie off some plot threads which were dangling for years. A type of was the fifteenth Want–a story aspect the Destiny 2 group has been questioning about for the reason that Forsaken enlargement launched in 2018 with its raid, The Final Want.
The fifteenth Want is said to Riven, the ultimate boss of the raid and one of many Ahamkara, the unusual, highly effective, wish-granting creatures that populate some corners of Destiny 2’s lore. When the raid was launched, gamers found 14 totally different needs (primarily cheat codes) they may enter into the “Wall of Needs” hidden within the raid. However whereas Destiny 2 alluded to the fifteenth Want, it remained a thriller till the Season of the Witch lastly revealed it close to the top of 2023.
“The fifteenth Want is one thing that we have been speaking about for a very long time, and it has been a kind of issues that is on the again burner, the place there are plans for it–or concepts, I ought to say, moderately than plans,” Stevens mentioned. “And it is one thing that has been at the back of our minds for a very long time and we have been simply ready for the perfect alternative to convey that ahead.”
One of many struggles of live-game improvement, To mentioned, was that concepts typically have to attend.
“You do not all the time get to do the whole lot you wanna do straight away,” he mentioned. “It takes quite a lot of collaboration. It takes the correct timing, it takes the correct launch to have the correct temper for doing an thought that you’ve got had for a very long time.”
Bringing again the fifteenth Want wasn’t one thing Bungie did on a whim, although.
“There was quite a lot of warning there about what it could imply to revisit [the 15th Wish] and kind of how excessive the stakes have been to pay that off for gamers,” Frank mentioned. “And so yeah, I like how this got here collectively, and it was one thing that was given life by the group in quite a lot of methods and kind of fourth wall-breaking for us to weave it again in. There’s the instance of the Loot Collapse Grasp of Avarice, the place the group’s curiosity in that subject kind of drove us to convey it again into the story of Destiny in a method that I feel is absolutely satisfying for [the players] to really feel nearly like part of it.”
However whereas the Season of the Want introduced solutions to some long-standing Destiny 2 questions, it opened up new prospects as nicely. The Remaining Form will conclude the story Destiny began when it launched again in 2014–now referred to as the Mild and Darkness Saga–but there are plot threads that can carry it into the long run, like these that can feed into the sport’s upcoming episodes.
Although the Season of the Want took gamers again to the Dreaming Metropolis and handled characters associated to the time-looping curse that first befell the situation on the finish of the Final Want raid, the curse remains to be in place–even although Riven, the curse’s creator, is as soon as once more useless and gone. The Ahamkara’s want is so highly effective that nothing Destiny 2’s characters have but discovered can break it. However that is a narrative Bungie can nonetheless deal with sooner or later, To mentioned.
“There are two additional plot threads that Season 23 left us with, that are that Riven and Taranis have children–they are the obvious route for different Ahamkara tales, ought to we select to pursue them sooner or later,” he mentioned. “There are additionally a few characters in our forged, like Petra and Crow, who nonetheless care quite a bit in regards to the Corsairs which are caught within the Dreaming Metropolis curse, who would possibly in the future want one thing as highly effective as an Ahamkara to assist them.”
We’ve got some thought the place Destiny 2’s story is headed in The Remaining Form, however we all know quite a bit much less about the place that story is headed afterward, whether or not on this yr’s episodes or past. Season of the Want highlights that there are many tales Bungie has but to inform in Destiny 2, leaving quite a lot of prospects for the long run.