Destiny 2’s Season of the Haunted lives as much as its identify. Set largely in a brand new location, the Derelict Leviathan, the season has given the sport a particular, sci-fi-horror ambiance as a part of each its gameplay and its story. What gamers skilled aboard the Leviathan is an even bigger, extra concerned model of what Bungie first created in certainly one of its best ranges. The Exotic mission Presage despatched gamers to a ghost ship and instructed a narrative of insanity and murder–and now we have seen what it prophesied.The concepts that may grow to be Presage and, later, Season of the Haunted have been born when Bungie was determining what story it wished to inform with an Exotic mission in 2021’s Season of the Chosen. The crew had been throwing across the concept of revisiting the idea of Nightmares–manifestations of reminiscences and trauma, first launched within the Shadowkeep growth, that coalesce into highly effective enemies gamers truly should struggle.During a bunch interview close to the beginning of the season that included a number of Bungie builders who labored on Season of the Haunted, senior narrative designer Robert Brookes defined that because the writing crew was riffing on potential concepts, one derived from a specific horror film broke free.”Back when we were concepting Season of the Chosen, there was an Exotic mission, and the idea was for a derelict ship, just a ghost ship, a ship that was lost,” Brookes stated. “And we started tossing around ideas. At one point, I was writing down my notes and someone mentioned Nightmares, it might have been [senior narrative designer Nikko Stevens]. He was like, ‘What if the ship’s literally haunted,’ and I was starting to write it down, and I go down this rabbit hole, like ‘Nightmares, Calus, Calus’s trauma, Calus’s trauma with Nightmares, oh my god, Event Horizon!’ And I just held the notebook up and I’m like, ‘Who has seen Event Horizon? We need to do that with this ship.’ Nikko took that and made Presage and just this beautiful, horrible mess.”Presage passed off aboard the ghost ship Glykon Volatis, the place a horrible destiny has befallen the crew.Event Horizon is a 1997 sci-fi horror movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) and staring Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) and Sam Neill (Jurassic Park). Set in a future full of house journey, it facilities on Fishburne and his crew, a rescue crew despatched to analyze a derelict ship known as the Event Horizon. Neill performs the scientist who invented the Event Horizon’s “gravity drive” engine system, which opens a black gap to permit the ship to journey immediately from one level in house to a different. The crew discovers not solely that the Event Horizon’s crew is lacking, however that the ship is seemingly haunted. It quickly turns into obvious that the ship’s enterprise by way of the black gap took it into one other dimension, which modified the Event Horizon and drove its crew mad.Players accustomed to Presage will instantly see the similarities–it takes place on a ship known as the Glykon Volatus and is seemingly empty when the participant finds it. The story they uncover there may be about twisted experiments by the exiled Cabal emperor, Calus, and a few of his loyalist forces. Calus wished to commune with the Witness, Destiny’s final villain. Just earlier than the discharge of the Beyond Light growth, the Witness used its unusual energy, the Darkness, to make a number of of Destiny 2’s planets disappear, leaving solely void-like anomalies behind. Calus despatched the Glykon into the anomaly left after Mars disappeared, however when the ship emerged, because the builders defined, it got here again wrong–and so did the folks aboard.The seeds of the seasonThe gist of the Event Horizon story made it into Presage, however there wasn’t room within the mission for all of Brookes and Stevens’ concepts. That modified, nevertheless, when builders began engaged on ideas for Season of the Haunted.”We didn’t get to do the Nightmares stuff and the Calus stuff that we were originally spitballing because it was just too much. It was just too many things all at once…” Brookes stated. “That’s been in the back of both Nikko’s and my mind for this whole time between, and once we heard that we were going to bring back the Leviathan, I immediately lept on [Season of the Hunt creative lead Tom Farnsworth] like a screaming monkey and was like ‘Nightmares!'”Nightmares have not actually been a factor because the Shadowkeep growth, however in Season of the Haunted, they return to torment a number of main Destiny 2 characters.Brookes stated that, as quickly as the thought of the Leviathan was floated, he and Stevens instantly considered the Event Horizon-inspired concepts they’d been enjoying with for Presage.”Sometimes in game dev, you have an idea that you want to execute on and you can’t quite get all the way there, whether it be scope or resources or, you know, whatever,” Stevens stated. “But you still build something wonderful out of what you can make. And all the leftover scraps that you couldn’t fully realize before, we hold onto those things like squirrels packing them away in our trees. And eventually, when there’s an opportunity to use them–like here, when Tom came to us and was like, ‘We’re thinking about maybe Calus, maybe the Leviathan, what do you guys think?’ Exactly like Robert said, we immediately leapt on this idea and took all those grains of things that we weren’t able to polish up before and worked them into the Leviathan. So a lot of those ideas carried over, for sure, or were inspired by things we’d done previously that we now were able to flesh out more.”In Event Horizon, the previous traumas of characters manifest as visions and hallucinations whereas aboard the derelict, tormenting and terrifying them. Season of the Haunted goes in a really comparable path, with a number of main characters are pressured to face their very own traumas within the type of Nightmares. When he and Stevens pitched the thought to Farnsworth and the opposite departments engaged on Season of the Hautned, he stated, “Every single one of us was a perfectly aligned machine. We all knew what we wanted and it was the exact same thing.”As Stevens and Brookes famous, the primary concept was that each the Glykon and the Leviathan entered these unusual anomalies and got here again flawed. Brookes talked about a number of different motion pictures with the identical type of vibe that additionally served as inspirations, together with the 1990 motion pictures Flatliners and Jacob’s Ladder. In Flatliners, a bunch of medical college students use their coaching to briefly cease their very own hearts to set off near-death experiences, and rapidly discover themselves haunted by venturing into the world past life. In Jacob’s Ladder, a Vietnam veteran has a near-death expertise through the struggle and finds himself beset by horrific visions within the aftermath.Playing a horror movieAn unkillable Cabal bather enemy acts like a slasher villain in a few of Season of the Haunted’s missions.With Presage, Bungie actually tapped right into a horror-movie feeling in Destiny 2. The mission was surprisingly creepy as gamers explored the empty, darkened ship, stumbling into the useless our bodies of the crew. That’s a sense that looks like it might be powerful to seize in a first-person shooter by which you play an immortal superhero who wields house magic.Season of the Haunted hits a few of those self same vibes as effectively, channeling each the texture of Presage and different horror video games. The spooky emotions are largely conveyed within the season’s many Sever missions, which symbolize its main story beats. In the primary few of those, gamers confronted an unkillable enemy that chases them round with a pair of axes like a slasher villain. The first time you encounter that enemy, you do not understand you’ll be able to’t kill it; discovering that it is proof against your assaults results in a determined scramble to flee.The encounter turns into one thing straight out of a sport like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Alien: Isolation–your weapons are ineffective and your solely possibility is to run. There are a number of tight locations the place you’ll be able to disguise from the creature, utilizing hidden pathways like vents to provide it the slip. The state of affairs turns into all of the extra harrowing as a result of you have to activate a sequence of management panels within the space as a way to open the door that can help you escape, requiring you to run for the goals with the monster dogging your heels.”It’s actually really hard to create an experience that’s gonna make players feel fear, because they’re already just playing a game, so you kind of have to go against that already,” artwork director Rob Adams stated. “It’s fantasy. They have all these powers, and… you’ve got to pull some of the power away from the player. But it usually comes down to trying to create a more confined space where the player feels like, if something happens, they’re not going to be able to get away very easily. Because that’s one of the things that makes you feel safe all the time, is thinking, ‘Oh, I can sprint. I can get on my sparrow. I can triple jump away from something. I can do my Super.’ But as soon as the player thinks, ‘If something happens, I might not be able to get away,’ then you have a big advantage in making them feel scared.”The tight, darkened corridors of the Glykon are punctuated by useless our bodies and indications of unusual experiments.”That also speaks to how many of our disciplines have to come together and make you feel scared,” he continued. “We really need audio and we need lighting and we need our tech design, and the narrative and the art and the encounter design. All these things, and like five other things I’m forgetting. They’ve all got to work together at the same time to do this. And so when we’re able to do it successfully, I think it works really well. But it just takes a lot of folks cooperating really carefully to pull it off.”Honing the scaresBoth Presage and the Sever missions really feel like steps ahead for Destiny’s makes use of of horror. But they don’t seem to be the primary, as Farnsworth mentioned–Bungie has created spooky moments previously, going again to the unique Destiny. Moments with the Hive that passed off on the moon usually took benefit of darkness, tight quarters, and screaming monsters to create scares. The Crota’s End raid relied closely on an environment of dread. And there was the slasher film second of the Zero Hour mission, by which gamers dropped right into a maze-like space within the Old Tower and have been chased by a ridiculously quick machine coated in blades known as TR3-VR (pronounced “Trevor”) that tore by way of its tight corridors to search out them.”I think it all goes back to, like, we’re a power fantasy–what are the ways in which we can kind of pull some of that power away from the players, and really constrain what they can do as a Guardian? The disempowerment is really where the fear comes from in our game,” he stated. “But we need to do it in ways that players still have a chance. So like with TR3-VR, you just had to know the pattern to be able to escape the giant murder death crawler that they had built. And I think in Season of the Haunted, what we’re doing is we’re trying to bring players up to the Power level [required] so they can engage with these activities, but still have them feel pretty challenging, kind of a sweet spot of challenge, and we don’t want these moments of disempowerment to take over the entirety of the activity; that would probably be tiring. So we’re just putting them in targeted locations where we know we can really support that. Because ultimately, we want you to go into Sever, and be able to use your powers and shoot your guns and experience a really cool story. And every once in a while, when you least expect, to interject a little bit of that tension and horror into the activities.”Farnsworth stated he thought that even the advertising and marketing is important to creating the horror expertise work, since it isn’t what Bungie often does with the sport. Trailers and even the introductory mission for the season prime the viewers to know the scares are coming and to just accept that type of expertise.The safety bot TR3-VR was each terrifying and hilarious within the Zero Hour mission.”You have to invite people in to be scared, you have to set people up for it, so they can be part of it as a player, which is another thing that we definitely set a path for,” he stated.Season of the Haunted ends on August 26, and whereas it put an enormous deal with its spookier elements, it additionally put a variety of time into exploring trauma, tragedy, and psychological well being amongst its characters. We do not but know the place the story of Destiny 2 is headed in Season 18, however with Bungie placing a higher emphasis on character improvement and exploring quite a lot of style trappings, there are a variety of potentialities for the way forward for the sport.
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