The Witch Queen enlargement, Destiny 2’s newest chapter, is the fruits of an method to the sport’s story that developer Bungie has been honing for a while. Between the enlargement and Destiny 2’s current seasonal choices, the sport’s storytelling is one of the best it is ever been. But the seven-year historical past of Destiny and Destiny 2 additionally has its share of storytelling failures–and Bungie wanted these failures to get so far, the studio says.In the previous, Destiny 2 has seen its sprawling narrative of immortal heroes preventing god-like aliens divided into discrete chapters and largely unrelated chunks. The Witch Queen, nevertheless, is one thing else–a conclusion of threads the developer has weaved all through the sport for years, and a narrative that was constructed up by means of developments in seasonal content material episodes which were coming to the sport since Fall 2020.

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Now Playing: Opinion: The Witch Queen Is Destiny 2’s Best Campaign Yet

Now coming into its fifth 12 months, the present Destiny 2 story feels strikingly totally different from what was on provide only one enlargement earlier. Year 4’s seasons had been thematically linked, spinning tales that checked out distinct elements and characters within the recreation world, however which had been all finally items of a puzzle that was constructing towards The Witch Queen. Its story seems like one which’s solely doable as a live-service recreation or MMO, the place the sport world modifications and evolves over time, and the story evolves together with it.That wasn’t all the time the case, although, and regardless of having huge, fascinating, and well-written lore choices inside and outdoors the sport, narrative was lengthy one of many Destiny collection’ weakest parts. The enchancment within the collection’ storytelling has are available in increments over time–notably with The Taken King enlargement within the unique Destiny, which introduced extra lore to the forefront; with Destiny 2’s Forsaken enlargement, which put a giant deal with characters’ ideas and emotions by telling a revenge story; and with the shift to seasonal storytelling, which introduced unfolding, week-to-week narratives to the sport. The most dramatic enchancment has come within the final 12 months, with seasonal tales that had been constantly robust and an enlargement in Beyond Light that targeted on ideological conflicts as a lot as navy ones.”It took time for Destiny to understand what Destiny needed to be, and then it took time to make Destiny what we knew it needed to be,” Guillaume Colomb, senior narrative lead at Bungie, stated in a current roundtable interview attended by GameSpot and different retailers. “At first, the game was pulling in different directions and I think the team in their heart knew what it needed to be, but there weren’t a lot of other games out there that were similar, so it just took time to get there. And I think that’s why Destiny is so unique and special, because it’s not like we can have that idea and make the game right away. It took seven years, because it takes seven years to do something that good–because we had to fail several times to understand what was the right way to do things.”According to Colomb, what Destiny 2 gamers are seeing now could be the picture Bungie builders had of their heads once they initially conceived the sport almost a decade in the past. There had been successes alongside the way in which, he stated, and people helped Bungie chart a course in what was largely an unexplored format for telling tales in a online game.There’s additionally extra happening than Destiny 2’s builders and writers attempting totally different storytelling approaches, as The Witch Queen undertaking lead Blake Battle defined. The story, as with all elements of Destiny, is refined by means of developer intention, in addition to suggestions from the participant group.”I definitely don’t think the story of Destiny [as a game] is a best-laid plan, I think it’s a story of an ongoing relationship with our players and that’s been one of the key components of a live game,” he stated. “Starting way back from D1, we’ve continued to respond to feedback and see the game that players want it to be.”There are different parts which can be working in Bungie’s favor, as nicely. The studio has discovered higher methods to inform Destiny 2’s story over time, particularly with its episodic seasonal method. Those permit the writers to inform extra private tales to the sport’s characters, specializing in a couple of at a time. Narrative director Adam Grantham additionally stated that setting an finish date for Destiny 2’s present story–Bungie has introduced two extra expansions for the sport, Lightfall and The Final Shape–has allowed the studio to be very deliberate about the place the story is headed. Part of what makes The Witch Queen really feel impactful and essential to the general Destiny 2 narrative is that Bungie has been capable of arrange the eventual confrontation with Savathun over the course of greater than a 12 months.Bungie has been engaged on creating Savathun’s story for about 18 months, Grantham stated, and that diploma of planning supplied lots of alternatives to put the enlargement’s groundwork within the recreation earlier than it really launched. But one other essential side of The Witch Queen’s story, which is considerably totally different from what Bungie has completed previously, is its skill to tug from story parts that had been beforehand reserved for lore and produce them to the forefront. The Witch Queen’s marketing campaign closely references the origins of the Hive, that are lore parts that had been launched way back to The Taken King in 2015, however largely existed in optionally available textual content gamers needed to search out and browse. The story marketing campaign makes these parts a part of the principle narrative, enlarging the universe for gamers who aren’t acquainted with the lore and drawing connections to the current story for individuals who are. That’s a giant a part of what made The Witch Queen’s story significant for long-time gamers, Battle stated.”We’re fortunate enough to be in a time in Destiny right now where we’re able to reap a lot of what’s been sewn over the course of seven years,” Grantham stated.Pulling these lore threads has made the world of Destiny 2 really feel just a little extra cohesive, however whereas setup for Savathun goes all the way in which again to The Taken King, and tidbits that might change into related had been peppered all through Destiny 2’s vanilla launch, it doesn’t suggest that lore was written with a future enlargement in thoughts.”Destiny being a live game, we always have to think about feeding the lore, and we don’t necessarily create new lore thinking, ‘Oh, that thing in three years, that’ll become a big release,'” Colomb stated. “We’d hope that it’s a pretty good piece of lore, I hope we’re going to use it, and sometimes we think that and we’re wrong. And sometimes there’s something that doesn’t feel as important at the time, but suddenly takes on a lot of relevance with the release we’re working on as a theme that matches that. So we’re always looking into lore that we have, and we always try to create new lore and feed it in a way that expands the universe and that other people maybe, in the future, can grab for stories.”Grantham likened Bungie’s method to Destiny 2 to a quote from novelist George R. R. Martin, who stated he considered writers as falling into two camps: gardeners and designers. Gardeners plant concepts and see what turns into of them; architects assemble their tales in keeping with extra inflexible specs. For Destiny, either side are true–The Witch Queen was an architected story, arrange by season after season of tales that lastly culminated within the enlargement. But it was additionally the product of seeds planted years earlier that turned one thing the workforce may not have anticipated on the time.And that is likely to be why it has taken Destiny 2’s story a lot time to essentially come into its own–and why the end result has felt like nothing else in video video games. Every previous failure was a studying expertise, and the concepts from Destiny’s previous have served to feed its future.”It takes time for us, also, to understand the story we want to tell, and the world of Destiny is a place that we are discovering, in a way–a little bit before the players, but still, it’s not like we understand everything,” Colomb stated. “We still discover, and there is a lot to discover still.”