Kicking off a new Twitter thread, Bungie’s senior game designer, Brendan Thorne went about answering that common Destiny 2 question. In his example, the lead developer reveals that the team has 6 months to design a new boss for the game. The first concept is a giant squirrel-eagle cyborg that flies around the raid, breathing fire. While cool on paper, the artists and effects team is less than excited due to the massive amount of added work creating a new model, character rig, lighting, and everything else. Not only that, the tech designer explains that there isn’t a system set up to handle that and the world team isn’t sure if the space will allow for that. Not only that, the 6 months of development time is actually half of that due to the team needing to work on other features for the game as well.
Long story short, the team typically comes up with exciting new ideas during the planning phase, but the cost and time to make new technology to support these ideas don’t always line up. As Brendan puts it, just to design a brand new character is both time consuming and expensive due to the fact that the team also needs to build the stuff behind the scenes to support it. As it stands, developers can create a lot more content much faster when existing assets are used and customized slightly to look a little different.
For many studios, Bungie included, the answer for many seems to be using downloadable content as a way to add new content. While still costing money, the team at least has more time to work on creating the support structure for these new assets. In terms of Destiny 2, the expansions have brought fans plenty of new characters and enemies to fight from Xol the Worm God, Argos, and even Panoptes the Infinite Mind. Nearly a year after release, Destiny 2: Forsaken gave players the most unique content they’ve seen so far including a lot of odd-looking character types like the Taken Chimera and a unique enemy faction called The Scorn.
Destiny 2: Black Armory is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: Brendan Thorne Twitter
