Titan Concept – Tyrant

Posted by mhumbolt on April 17, 2017
Posted in: Class, Destiny. Leave a comment

Tyrant – Void Titan Concept

Fantasy: Harness the essence of your enemy and use it against them. Command the battlefield from within your puppet, projecting power from a vehicle of dark energy. Grant Titan a strong roaming super with low immediate kill potential but much stronger pushing power. Force players and AI to commit to focusing you down or risk being pushed out of entrenchments.

Abilities

Enthrall Essence: Super ability, signature ability

  • The Titan wraps themselves in the Void, drawing from the essence of the last enemy they vanquished or from the environment around them. The Titan is consumed by and controls a puppet in the form of a major combatant of the race last defeated, or whatever fits the theme of a competitive map.
    • Captain Essence: Take the form of a Fallen Captain and rush your enemies with a rapid-fire Shrapnel Launcher. Lateral dodge can be performed by pressing LT.
    • Minotaur Essence: Take the form of a Vex Minotaur and bombard your enemies with a long-range Torch Hammer. Rapid forward blinks, ending in a strong melee, can be performed by double tapping LT.
    • Wizard Essence: Take the form of a Hive Wizard and assault your enemies with Darkness Blasts. A zoning field that deals damage over time can be placed at target location by pressing LT.
    • Colossus Essence: Take the form of a Cabal Colossus and suppress your enemies with a rapid-fire Slug Thrower. Release homing missiles by pressing LT.
  • Taken would result in a form related to the origin race of the last individual combatant killed. Splicers count as Fallen for purposes of super.
  • Aesthetic notes: Larger, semi-transparent (ethereal feeling) model used for enthralled combatant super forms; supered titan is encased inside these larger models and can be seen by foes; supered titan’s skeleton is mapped to combatant’s animation rig and mimics actions of combatant shell.
  • Combatant shell has large health pool (base HP + shields) and requires focusing to bring down. Unlike other offensive Titan supers, rapid kills are not the goal. Instead, the player forces enemies to focus them down or run, or they will be fighting at a disadvantage due to the asymmetric nature of the health pools.
  • Upon depletion of shell health pool, the shell evaporates but the player does not die; instead they drop from their suspended state with shields depleted.

Detain Grenade: Grenade ability

  • Physics properties of a standard incendiary/suppressor grenade.
  • Detonates once fully at rest – Halo CE frag behavior
  • Upon detonation, all targets in area take minor Void damage (~70 HP) and a cage forms around the detonation area.
  • Targets can remove detonation by shooting the cage; focused primary fire results in target freedom in less than a second.
  • Cage cannot be entered from outside; allows forced restriction of movement paths even if targets are not caught in detonation by removing avenues of movement.

Mark of Command: Melee ability

  • Tyrant melee ability splashes on hit, dealing normal melee damage to all targets in an area. Targets in AOE also take increased damage from all sources.
  • Black tendrils emanate from targets with this effect.

Detain Grenade modifier tree

  • Prison of the Void: Targets detained by the Tyrant take damage over time until freed.
  • Eternal Imprisonment: The Detain cage lasts longer and has more HP.
  • General Population: The area of effect of the Detain grenade is significantly larger.

Mark of Command modifier tree

  • Servitude: Targets affected by the Mark take increased damage from all sources for a greater duration.
  • Conflict of Interest: Minor minions of the Darkness affected by the Mark are enthralled by the Tyrant and fight alongside them for a short duration. Minions are killed when the Mark expires.
  • Soul Siphon: The Tyrant gains bonus Armor and Agility for every target affectted by the Mark.

General class tree modifiers

  • The duration of your enthralled puppet increases significantly, but the puppet loses its shield.
  • Detained targets are also affected by the Mark of Command for the duration of their imprisonment.
  • If not destroyed by weapon fire, the Detain cage detonates with the force of the primary grenade detonation upon expiration.
  • Your puppet’s secondary abilities recharge significantly faster.
  • Upon destruction or expiration, the Detain cage briefly blinds its prisoners as they exit.
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Hunter Concept – Mechanist

Posted by mhumbolt on November 21, 2016
Posted in: Class, Destiny. Leave a comment

Mechanist – Solar Hunter Class

Fantasy: Even the lone wolf needs a companion; chaos and distraction empowers players to outsmart their enemy and burn them down. Ability to break entrenchments and allow unimpeded movement by shifting focus away from player. Actual force multiplication – increase the number of effective fronts your team is capable of fighting on. Allows Hunter to move away from direct damage and/or direct damage modification and towards a more timing-oriented tactical or support role.

Abilities

Field Constructor: Super ability, signature class ability

  • Summons a major minotaur at the player’s location that charges your enemies. Minotaur has torch hammer and standard void shield; prefers to charge and melee over firing – will only fire if pathing to target is blocked.
  • Minotaur expires after thirty seconds.
  • Dependent on navmesh working on all activity arenas; potential area for concern.

Command Beacon: Melee ability

  • Throw an explosive beacon, spending your melee charge. Beacon sticks to players and surfaces, with no magnetism.
  • If thrown while super is active, allied combatant will use beacon location as attack-move command, engaging enemies on its way to the location.
  • Beacon detonates in a small radius after (7) seconds with damage equal to standard melee attack.

Conduction Grenade: Grenade ability

  • Upon impact, grenade detonates (low detonation damage) and creates a small AOE with long duration on walkable surfaces that deals damage over time to enemies and slows movement slightly. Grenade will only detonate after coming to rest. Targets that are affected by AOE at any point take increased damage for (7) seconds.

Field Constructor modifier tree:

  • Mobile Destruction: Your Minotaur now fires its Torch Hammer while moving towards the target location.
  • Programmed Depravity: Your Minotaur is replaced by three major Goblin Fanatics that charge your target and explode when near or upon death, leaving a conduction grenade AOE behind and dealing minor damage.
  • Swarm of Steel: Your Minotaur is replaced by two major Harpies that split up and charge your target, firing while pathing.

Command Beacon modifier tree:

  • Mobile Construction: If a beacon is placed on the map prior to super activation, your summon will spawn at the beacon’s location.
  • Proximity: The beacon persists longer and detonates by proximity when a target is near.
  • Negation: Upon detonation, the beacon deals no damage but suppresses any target in its area of effect for 3 seconds.

General class modifier trees:

  • Your summons explode on death, dealing damage equal to a standard incendiary grenade (no DOT) in a slightly smaller area of effect.
  • Your summons reconstruct upon death, with a delay of ten seconds, at their death location. Their health is reduced upon reconstruction (non-major).
  • Damage your summons deal is returned to you as healing.
  • Your summons do not appear on radar.
  • Conduction grenade area of effect also suppresses enemies for the duration.

Exotic Concept Portfolio, Part Two

Posted by mhumbolt on November 18, 2016
Posted in: Destiny, Gear. Leave a comment

Heatsink

Fusion Rifle – Darkblade’s Spite/Midha’s Reckoning frame

Exotic Node – The Second Law: Each individual bolt from a shot that hits a target reduces the charge time of the next shot. This buff stacks with itself until the weapon is reloaded.

Sights:

  • Spark IS6
  • Torch HS2

Primary Perk:

  • Hip Fire – this weapon has increased accuracy when fired from the hip.

Minor Perk:

  • Injection Mold – Increased stability, faster handling; reduced range
  • Enhanced Battery – increases magazine size.

Secondary Perk:

  • Rangefinder – aiming this weapon increases its effective range.

The goal for Heatsink is to develop the fusion rifle into the PVE DPS monster that weapon class has never quite managed to reach – despite being solid performers, nothing has really become a staple for people to use against AI. When a player can stack up charge buffs using the exotic node, this would be a go-to for bosses and major-heavy encounters, and would allow players to play a little metagame where they decide how they want to build their gun – either building stability for more reliable “full” charge buffs, or going for a safe increase in overall damage with a larger magazine. By the end of the magazine, you end up with a Pocket Infinity that has standard fusion rifle range, but the damage is spread over a greater duration. The primary and secondary perks ensure that no matter what, you’ll be able to effectively hit your targets which can be an issue with some fusion rifle frames due to the long charge time. In this case, we choose the lowest charge rate fusion rifle frame as a balancing factor for PvP gameplay, and then further lower its base stability by 10 – the charge time and low initial stability makes a player less capable of reaching an enormous charge time buff in PVP gameplay because of the inherent dangers of using a fusion rifle in those modes with the increased lethality of your opponents.

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The Trinity

Rocket Launcher – The Hothead frame

Exotic Node – In Triplicate: This weapon fires three homing warheads in a tightly grouped spiral pattern, one of each element type. Each warhead does slightly less damage than a standard rocket.

Barrels:

  • Soft Launch – increased velocity, more recoil.
  • Warhead Verniers – increased velocity and blast radius, more recoil.
  • Aggressive Launch – more predictable but increased recoil, increased blast radius, lower velocity.

Primary Perk:

  • Clown Cartridge – reloading this weapon has a chance to grant a larger than normal magazine.

Stat Perks:

  • Javelin – greater warhead velocity
  • Quickdraw – faster weapon swap time.
  • Flared Magwell – faster reload time.

Secondary Perk:

  • Cluster Bomb – rockets create cluster bombs as they detonate.

This weapon serves a point-and-click purpose: if it has a shield and it needs to go away, this will do the job. Potential concerns are an overall lack of shielded enemies in content – when Ironclad or Match Game are present, this feels like a solid loadout choice. However, in cases where that isn’t the case, unless missions are more prominently multi-faction, it would be a hard sell. However, with three smaller rockets you would also be getting increased damage over a normal rocket launcher overall, increasing general effectiveness and making it a more attractive choice. This is part of a larger concern over rocket launchers – in PVE content they do not deal enough damage to make them worthy of a loadout choice, especially not with their heavily restricted inventory sizes. As HMGs have become more and more lethal and have maintained (largely) their sustainability with very large ammo capacities and increasing prevalence of low fire rate/high impact frames, rockets have been edged out of the picture entirely ( ed: this was written prior to the launch of Rise of Iron; Gjallarhorn was not considered).

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The Packrat

Sidearm – Havoc Pigeon frame

Exotic Node – Giveth/Taketh: Scoring kills on minions of the Darkness with this weapon grants reserve ammunition for your other weapons. Scoring kills on minions of the Darkness with your other weapons grants reserve ammunition for this weapon.

Sights:

  • Quickdraw IS – Agile sight. Lightning fast handling
  • Steadyhand IS – Stable sight, optimized for excellent recoil control.

Primary Perk:

  • Crowd Control – Kills with this weapon grant bonus damage for a short time.

Stat Perks:

  • Quickdraw – this weapon can be drawn unbelievably fast
  • Snapshot – aiming this weapon is incredibly fast
  • Appended Magazine – larger magazine, slower reload

Secondary Perk:

  • Reactive Reload – Reloading after a kill grants bonus damage for a short time.

Sidearms have never really found their place against AI. Individual rounds don’t hit very hard so they sometimes fail to meet the stagger threshold, something that’s crucial in helping the player feel powerful. They chew through ammo at an extreme rate and players aren’t willing to devote an armor talent to increasing that pool – combined with their limited range, they’re a niche pick at best, and are most often ignored in favor of high DPS range-specific utility.

As a whole, sidearms can’t be treated like other weapons in the special slot – they don’t offer the same things and aren’t intended to be used like that. Instead, we can offer a more attractive tertiary character-wide playstyle shift, and make a weapon that isn’t just panicked backup pick or a grimoire grind, but something you want to tactically and mindfully switch to, and something that opens up how you play the game. With ammo being such a concern for so many weapon archetypes, offering the player the ability to, in some small way, bypass the problem and just play the game might make some space for an underutilized special weapon choice. It’s a really attractive offer, and it has to be borderline broken in terms of power because you’re sacrificing so much utility by giving up one of your range-extreme options. Fundamentally, sidearm play is more aggressive and instinctual than a player with a sniper rifle perpetually equipped is used to – offering a strong choice in that archetype introduces people to what might be a new way of playing.

Warlock Concept – Arcweaver

Posted by mhumbolt on November 18, 2016
Posted in: Class, Destiny. Leave a comment

Arcweaver – Arc Warlock Class

Fantasy: A bender of time and space; extreme mobility and high skill cap; capture the feeling of guerilla tactics in context of direct combat – the illusion of force multiplication through smart application of abilities and movement. Innate ability to forcefully break entrenchments and setups by enabling rapid movement past defenses.

Abilities

Translocate: Signature class ability, replaces melee charge.

  • Pressing melee button throws a translocation beacon with the physics properties of an incendiary/suppression grenade (can be skillfully bounced).
  • Pressing melee button while melee is on cooldown (and no player in melee lunge cone) teleports player (with full inertia and directional vector) to beacon location. May be used while beacon is in flight.
  • Player leaves trail of blue energy in direction of beacon upon successful teleport.

Depth Charge: Grenade ability, primarily zoning utility against entrenched enemies.

  • Rapidly expanding sphere (1m radius) of blue/white energy that deals (190) damage across 3 ticks, one tick per (0.25) seconds. Can kill very low armor players if no damage instances are avoided.

Overcharge: Super ability

  • Grants large bonus agility and moderate bonus armor and rapidly recharges melee ability. Kills while super is active immediately regenerates grenade and melee energy.
  • Holding super buttons while super and beacon active creates expanding ring around player. Any allied player within ring at time of button release will be teleported alongside warlock.

Overcharge modifier tree

  • Arc Lure: Activating super instantly recharges grenade ability. Holding grenade button causes a depth charge to spawn at beacon location. Beacon is not consumed by detonation
  • Null Field: Translocating while supered causes enemies around the beacon point to be suppressed for three seconds.
  • Force Multiplier: Allies translocated during super gain smaller agility buff for three seconds (Pulsewave tier boost).

Translocate modifier tree:

  • Course Correction: Player can hold melee button for 3 seconds after translocation to return to point of origin.
  • Spatial Friction: Large Agility bonus for 6 seconds after successful translocation.
  • Residual Energy: Allied players near origin point of translocating player gain +2 recovery for 5 seconds.

Possible general class or exotic modifiers:

  • Translocations are always preceded by a burst of damaging energy around the beacon.
  • Depth Charge is spawned at origin point of successful translocation.
  • If no players are damaged by Depth Charge instances, Depth Charge re-detonates with a single blast of 2x original radius, dealing 120 damage.

Arms Race – Re-capturing Lost to Light

Posted by mhumbolt on February 10, 2016
Posted in: Activity, Destiny. Leave a comment

Below is a concept for a Destiny activity to shore up some of the game’s continuing weaknesses – replayable, dynamic combat encounters with additional pressure and competitive elements, inspired from the success of the Lost to Light secret mission.

Arms Race

Hybrid Vanguard/Crucible Activity

  • Frenzied cooperative-competitive activity
  • A fast-paced, high-energy skill test for:
    • PVE wave clear efficiency
    • boss efficiency
    • rapid cost-benefit decision-making
    • PVP skill

Something that was shown in The Taken King was the value of high end PVE content for smaller groups of players – the Black Spindle Lost to Light secret daily mission addendum was met extremely positively by the community and at least for the first couple of appearances, provided an answer to a question that had been present since Destiny’s launch – I like PVE, but my whole team isn’t on. Now what can I do to keep going? It was an extremely challenging set of encounters, but the most effective way to keep the tempo up was the timer. Even in a historic run that ended with 4 minutes left on the clock, it’s a breathless sprint through the fights where it feels like you never have time to pause for even a second. There is nothing else like it in the game – there are hard fights, but the timer means something. It brings value that just isn’t present otherwise.

But the Spindle mission wasn’t evergreen. It was a static challenge that offered no reward, no reason to return once you had cleared your three loot runs. Its shelf life was limited by the static encounters, by the standard formula for success that teams eventually arrived at and clung to. Gotta have a titan, gotta have Raze-Lighter. Clear these rooms in this way because it’s our time-tested best way to do it. And then it becomes rote, as static PVE does when you’ve exhausted it. Maybe that’s inescapable, but maybe it isn’t.

Arms Race applies the core principles that made the Lost to Light daily successful in a more structured and varied context. This is a multi-fireteam activity with three distinct phases. While Lost to Light, as an activity designed for the very hardcore, was able to use a timer and be more punitive, here we would use soft time gates and a consistently-effective speed motivator — competition. It’s a race. 

Phase One – The Run

This phase of the activity is analogous to the Ketch progression in Lost to Light, with each fireteam spawning into their own wing of the level. The teams are instructed to race to the waypoint and must fight their way through difficult encounters towards a central arena. Crucible-style scoring UI is in effect, and each AI kill grants a certain number of points – this is important to the overall structure and ranking system of the activity. Throughout this phase, a clock counts up from 0, measuring the team’s current phase completion time. At various points in each wing, the teams will be able to gauge the other team’s progress and see them clearing their wing through windows, viewscreens, or some other indicator (a stylized progress bar like you would see in a racing game). Side chambers could hold minibosses that grant your team a stat buff that lasts through the rest of the activity, forcing players to make a decision between spending that time on the boss for the buff or moving forward more quickly. Once the team reaches their arena entrance, which serves as the final measuring point, their timer stops. Based on tiers of par times, a multiplier is applied to their PVE kill score and that is set in the Ghost menu as the Phase One Score.

Phase Two – The Arena

At this point, the two teams are at an entrance to a large, cavernous room – potentially similar in size to the Prison of Elders arena. The structure of the arena entrance can differ between each map. In some instances, it may be valuable to separate the two teams and have them enter through separate doors across from each other, but in other cases one large, monolithic door with the teams intermingling would make more sense.

The door opens and the activity’s AI boss is introduced, again in a similar fashion to those in the Prison of Elders. The scoring UI has updated, and now in addition to scoring points from kills, your team can score from boss damage. The two fireteams work in cooperation to down the boss and clear the room from waves of enemy fodder, each trying to maximize efficiency for scoring purposes. At specific points on the map, players can trigger traps that spawn additional enemies for the other fireteam to deal with, in hopes that they are overwhelmed and die – there is a score penalty for player death, but you also run the risk of feeding points to the opponent. At this point, you cannot directly engage the other team.

The boss will drop to combined fire (with the last hit getting a small number of bonus points), and the phase ends. The scores are tallied, and we move to the next phase.

Phase Three – The Trial

This phase is a digital win-or-lose situation – it prevents any possibility for ties at the highest possible level of play. Phase Three directly pits the two fireteams against one another in a single round Elimination match. It’s not just elimination, though – the traps from the previous phase are still active (assuming they were not used), letting you distract your enemy by throwing AI at them to deal with. Standard Elimination revive rules apply. Since the same arena is being used for both Phases Two and Three, it must be able to properly work for both.

The hope is that since so much of the activity is focused on PVE efficiency, the core set of optimal PVP weapons will not become the standard for this round – ideally, there would be very little time to pause and prepare for the competitive portion without risking a wipe to an early rush. Instead, you would see a greater variety of tactics and equipment as people try to meet both needs as best as they could.

The team that successfully eliminates the other gains a large points boost, and the final scores are tallied. Rewards would exist in three tiers – Gold, Silver, and Bronze, or their equivalents. Each of these tiers would be assigned a score gate (ex: 15000 for Gold, 12000 for Silver, 9000 for Bronze) The teams are then awarded based on their performance – it would be possible for both teams to receive the highest tier of reward, but the winning team would also be guaranteed an additional Silver tier package. This way, an extremely close games don’t feel like a bust for either team, but the winners are getting more for their victory.

Exotic Portfolio, Part One

Posted by mhumbolt on December 15, 2015
Posted in: Destiny, Gear. Leave a comment

The below are structured attempts at trying to plug up some holes in Destiny’s current exotic weapon stable – in some cases attempting to make valid examples of archetypes that currently do not see much use, in some cases attempting to shift gameplay to a less-seen path, and in some cases just attempting to put forth some new ideas.

 

Mistrial

Weapon Class: Scout Rifle

Base Stat Frame: Treads Upon Stars

Exotic Node:

  • Of Your Peers: After three consecutive precision hits, your next shot will be a free lucky bullet (Triple Tap + reliable LITC).
  • Tier 1 Nodes:
  • Smooth Ballistics
  • Soft Ballistics
  • Linear Compensator

Tier 2 Node:

  • Zen Moment: Landing shots with this weapon increases stability.

Tier 3 Nodes:

  • Armor Piercing Rounds
  • Hand-Loaded
  • Injection Mold

Tier 4 Node:

  • Reactive Reload: Reloading after a kill grants a damage bonus for a short time.

Item Goals: Incorporate Triple Tap in a way that feels more transparent than current lackluster player experience. Create a zen-state feeling for players landing constant consecutive hits and being meaningfully rewarded without weapon DPS rising to the point of breaking encounters. Improve current boss fight precision monotony at endgame strike difficulty by adding minigame.

Aesthetic Notes: Four lights on outer side of weapon scope (facing player) with matching indicators in scoped view. Three yellow indicators light up as each corresponding precision hit is scored. Fourth light (green) indicates lucky bullet is ready.

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The Omnicide Event

Weapon Class: Heavy Machine Gun

Base Stat Frame: Corrective Measure

Exotic Node:

  • Pick Your Poison: This weapon changes its damage type to match the shield color of the last target hit.

Tier 1 Nodes:

  • Accurized Ballistics
  • CQB Ballistics
  • Linear Compensator

Tier 2 Node:

  • Counterbalance: This weapon has increased stability.

Tier 3 Nodes:

  • Skip Rounds
  • Reinforced Barrel
  • Braced Frame

Tier 4 Node:

  • Hip Fire: This weapon has bonus accuracy when fired from the hip.

Item Goals: A shielded-major solution. Not the highest damage output in class, but a good all-round solution when facing mixed-faction encounters or Ironclad strikes. In high level content, especially Match Game weeks, fulfills a fantasy of your heavy being able to chew through anything the game throws at it and not suffer damage reduction. Stability and hipfire bonuses with this HMG archetype creates Rambo moments as you throw a wall of fire at enemies. Trades damage output for versatility.

Aesthetic notes: Rounds must change color to match current weapon damage, along with indicator screen below scope.

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H-388 Omniscience Engine

Weapon Type: Sniper Rifle

Base Stat Frame: Praedyth’s Revenge

Exotic Node:

  • The Eye: Viewing a target in scope with this weapon marks them with a Keen Scout tag visible to your entire fireteam for 5 seconds. This weapon deals reduced damage (75% of normal impact-tier) and has no scope glint.

Tier 1 Nodes:

  • Aggressive Ballistics
  • Smart Drift Control
  • Field Choke

Tier 2 Node:

  • Hidden Hand: This weapon has greater aim assist.

Tier 3 Nodes:

  • Perfect Balance
  • Injection Mold
  • Casket Mag

Tier 4 Node:

  • Unflinching

Item Goals: Move sniping in high-level Crucible activities away from people passively scoping down hallways waiting for runners and towards a more active scouting-support role. Enables a “mission control” experience as players direct their team towards their target while remaining less visible than normal to enemies. Lower impact makes it a less offensively viable weapon with greater utility, but is still capable of rapid retaliation in action due to fire rate of weapon archetype.

Note: Current radar soft-detection radius makes this less viable due to map design (short average engage range when flanking) – potentially should also mask user on outer ring of radar to make it a more appealing option.

Destiny: On Patrols: Repetition, Complexity, and Relevance

Posted by mhumbolt on April 10, 2015
Posted in: Activity, Destiny. Leave a comment
One of the interesting things about Destiny is the split of activity sets by their demand of levels of engagement. At the top end, you have raiding, which takes preparation in several areas – your character, in a social sense to gather a team, and in some cases preparation of tactics. Lower on the commitment gradient we have strikes and PVP, which can be jumped into without much preparation of any kind, but progression and success require a significant level of active effort on the part of the player.At the casual end of the gradient lies the Patrol activity. You load up an area and are presented with a series of micro missions that have no fail state and ask almost nothing of the player. The levels of the enemies in the public patrol spaces are eternally set at the “ideal” starting point in the player’s progression when they reach that area in the story. But rather than being a fun way to mess around without really committing to anything, Patrol is largely viewed as an activity with zero efficiency towards progressing your character, that is bland, and that is completely and unflinchingly static. Perhaps its strangest aspect is that for a very low-commitment activity, it asks the player to jump through a number of hoops in order to actively engage in what it offers.When you enter a Patrol bubble, you’re presented with three to four beacons that offer a variety of small miniature activities that are very easily compared to grindy MMO quests, the kind that are a constant source of derision for the genre. The missions can each be represented by a single verb – Kill, Gather, Explore, and Scan. There is very little else to it – you’re ostensibly aiding the factions of the Tower by performing tasks for them, but there is otherwise zero fictional context for the activity. The four activity types are the same across all areas on a planet, and across all four planets. Four types of extremely rudimentary action becomes a very tough sell after you’re asked to do the same thing for the thousandth time and the only thing that changes is the color of the ground you’re standing on. But designing something more interesting that maintains the activity’s intended low level of engagement, under this structure, is a big ask.So how do we make the patrol activities better? How do we make something that players can use to test out a weapon, or hang out with their friends without actually needing to commit to a thirty minute activity? I would propose, that the activities themselves become more complex, but commitment levels are evened out by removing the biggest engagement roadblock – don’t make players pick them up. As I mentioned before, you’re presented with a group of beacons when you enter a patrol bubble. If you see one that you like, you drive over and hold a button to activate it. You then wait for a generic blurb of dialogue to play and for the objective to appear on your HUD. There’s a lot of downtime that makes it all feel like a bit of a chore.

Instead, what if you were automatically assigned an objective the instant you loaded into an area? You drive out of the Steppes, “M O T H Y A R D S” appears in the corner, and a beacon pops up immediately: ELIMINATE – A group of Fallen bandits have taken up residence in a nearby grounded tanker. Eliminate the nest of elite enemies and recover what they’re guarding. Meanwhile, Lance Reddick gets on the horn and tells your guardian that this band of enemies is guarding a glimmer cache that the Vanguard could use. You, of course, will get a cut on top of earning the respect of the faction.

Other potential activity types might include:

  • SURVEY – A series of beacons reveals the location of enemy high command. You are given a trail of scan beacons that begin to spawn in enemies to deter you from the miniboss that lies at the end of the trail. The modular nature of the beacon trail gives this more wiggle room than other activities to switch up the progression of the mission even in a small zone.
  • SECURE – A tough nest of enemies is preventing Tower ships from landing in this area. The player is asked to clear a series of enemies that spawn in a clearing. Once the final enemy is destroyed, the player activates a beacon and a player ship comes in, spawning someone. The players wave at each other. Probably.
  • LURE – The Tower wants to eliminate a high-ranking enemy official. Three lieutenants hang out at different areas around the map. The player must kill these lieutenants and collect their radios. The players in the activity then gather at a specified point and activate the radios, luring out a reasonably tough world boss that they need to kill.

Not needing to seek out the start point of each mission, get off the sparrow, activate it, and then get back onto the sparrow is, in my eyes, the removal of a really big mental roadblock. Like it or not, players are lazy. I don’t think it’s the complexity of the missions that matters in engaging players, it’s the ease of jumping into them. By presenting them on a silver platter, you encourage players to engage with the activity, with other players in the activity, and with the world. It makes the world feel like an active place, with context for enemies being there. The VO at the beginning of each patrol activity is an opportunity to give factions story context. The Vanguard wants to hit the enemy from the top down, taking out the enemy command. Dead Orbit wants to secure landing points for their ships, as jumping off points when they leave the planet. FWC needs resources to fund its R&D into whatever crazy multiverse machine they had in that grimoire card. The New Monarchy wants to map out their kingdom and eliminate those that would prevent them from retaking the empire. It’s not earthshattering stuff, but it gives even the slightest hint of motivation that has been desperately missing from their presentation up to this point.

Apart from benefiting casual players who want to have five minute chunks of gameplay served up to them, you elevate the activity slightly for more serious players. It’s not a series of very repetitive tasks, it’s brief bursts of combat with logical rising action and an endpoint that doesn’t revolve around waiting for resource-dropping enemies to respawn – if they want something they can sink their teeth into but don’t have the time to dedicate to a strike, now there’s something for them. A side effect of increasing the complexity of the activities is that the rewards can be scaled up in response – this is in part because the cadence of the activity completion is now slower. There’s no rapid-fire completions since only one is presented to the player per zone entry. This also increases the apparent variety of the objectives. Rather than showing up four at a time and taking a few minutes each, they’re showing up one at a time at a greater intensity, and taking a little longer to complete. You’re not finishing twenty objectives per load, you’re finishing five but being rewarded at a greater level and having more fun doing it. However, keeping this fresh across a longer period of time is tough. Will this hold up when you’e done all of the missions five times? Are the zones big enough to support a variety of each mission per zone? Can matchmaking be aggressive enough to support evolving objective types while seamlessly matching players into shared zones? How do we handle shared zones in terms of objective completion (I guess the answer is by not giving the same objective to the same party at any point – players can opt in to another player’s mission in the same way they do public events, maybe)? I don’t really know, and there are a lot of edge cases to think about.

So it’s hard, but maybe that helps with a couple of the activity’s issues. What’s left?

  • The worlds are static – you’ve seen them once, you’ve seen them a thousand times.
  • There’s no meaningful endgame progression to be gained from the activity.

The first can be addressed, but part of it is an expensive solution. First, expand the number of areas the player can spawn in. In the center of the map, a single Patrol button. It then randomly picks a spawn point based on the Secure activity – the world now feels a little more alive, and less like you’re picking something out of a menu. Then, split the world into static zones (typically the starting zones) and progression zones. In these zones, the environment tells a story. On Mars, you spawn in the Barrens after a player clears a landing zone for you. You progress through to the Scablands. The Cabal have their looming shield wall and bunker system active, mowing down Vex as they spawn. The next time you come through, though, things are different. The bunkers are powered down, and confluxes are starting to spawn at one end of the map. The fight is a little more even now, and heavier Vex units are starting to show up. As you continue to Patrol, you return to find the place is overrun by Vex architecture – the bunkers are now covered in stone, and the Cabal are pinned down. The story reverses in a back-and-forth fashion, with the Cabal pushing back and mining equipment being active on your next trip. The state of the zone is constantly in flux – it’s just loading a different world state each time you visit the planet, but it doesn’t feel that way to the player. It feels like this is a place that exists when you’re not around, someplace that is alive. Like I said though, this is a very expensive proposition. I think it adds a lot to the activity, but it’s a huge hurdle for asset generation and design load. In reality, there wouldn’t be a ton of unique art requirements, but encounters would need to be shifted and redesigned for each world state.

So what about endgame progression? There is one zone on the map that is reserved – players progress through it normally for story missions and to get between other zones, but for some reason no patrol missions spawn there. You’re a level 15 player that’s just reached Mars. After having some good luck in the Exclusion Zone, you roll through the Valley of Giants and notice six level 30 players scattered through the area. They’ve cleared out the entire area and are perched at specific vantage points. Simultaneously, they activate a button at each point. An enemy lumbers out of a nearby bunker – a huge Cabal Centurion – to you its level shows as ??. You sit back and watch as these six players open up on the enemy. Eventually after wearing down the boss significantly, they fail as more and more minions spawn in from dropships rush down from the sky. If the team had succeeded, they would have been rewarded with one of this world boss’s unique drops; a heavy weapon that acts like the Cabal projection rifle, or maybe plate boots that create a non-damaging shockwave with a physics impulse knockback when the player lands.

World bosses in public zones provide a goal to players still in progression – much like watching a group of six players try to open the door to the Vault of Glass, it gives a mid-level player the sense that there’s something waiting for them. To the endgame player, it provides an alternate progression path beyond raiding and gives a greater variety of weekly activities that actively move their character forward. I didn’t get gloves from this week’s raid session, but maybe I’ll get the Archon Lord’s Bracers from the world boss in Venus’s Ember Caves this time.

I never know how to end these.