Bungie on Kepler's obvious Metroid Inspiration and avoiding the Riis-Reborn problem in Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate
We sat down with Destiny 2's game director and assistant game director to talk about the game's new expansion, The Edge of Fate
The Edge of Fate is the first Destiny 2 expansion after Bungie finished off the "Light and Dark" saga with The Final Shape in 2024. In May, Bungie held previews for the upcoming expansion at its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, and invited BigFriendly.Guide to take a look and speak to the developers behind the game. You can read my full impressions on the new expansion over on PC Gamer, but I was also able to speak to Destiny 2's game director, Tyson Green, and its assistant game director, Robbie Stevens, while I was at Bungie HQ.
You'll find my interview below -- lightly edited to keep things on track -- where we discuss Bungie's clear homages to Metroid, how players will quickly be able to travel around the new planet, and the future of Prismatic.
The Edge of Fate interview with game director Tyson Green and assistant game director Robbie Stevens
Ed.: This conversation has edited for clarity.
Ryan Gilliam: I feel like in the past, you guys have tried to do stuff where you've said, "We want to be very fresh and very new." And I think a lot of times the consensus is that this is new and different for the hardcore person, but still feels very core Destiny. Which isn't bad, but it's definitely not necessarily always pushing it as far as I think people want it. This is one of the first times in recent memory that I can think of where roaming around Kepler feels genuinely new and different, and it feels like it's a different game until you pop out of the ball and then you're shooting fallen or whatever.
Tyson Green: I'm gonna let Robbie speak to Kepler, but, from a strategic, instructional perspective of Destiny, I think the biggest change that we've been trying to affect over the last year is to create this space for expansions to be more independent and more unique and more innovative. So with Edge of Fate — and then you'll see it again later this year with Renegades —they're really free to try really different formats in ways that we really couldn't afford to do previously when there's just one big block per year. So I'm really happy to see this first offering, having found such a like a novel feel and like different experience for players.
Robbie Stevens: What I love about the two statements you said was "this feels really different" and "sometimes the core of Destiny can kind of samey, kind of the same thing." But then, on Kepler, just traversing, going around the environment, is awesome. And what I love about your reaction to that as a player, is that that was us looking at, "Hey, how can we design these abilities in a way that leans into some of the core stuff that's fun about Destiny, which is traversal, it's combining your the elemental powers with other new things to express them in new ways — like dark matter and arc with matter spark?" The team's been working really hard and pushing really hard. It's just the joy of using matter spark to jump around the environment, dash around it, attack enemies, dash into enemies, right? Like that. That was first in the initial design spec, right? When we were talking about it, we were like, "Yes, it's going to do cool traversal, things like squeeze into tight spaces and make you see the world in different ways." And that was really intrinsic to how we thought we were going to develop the world and make you get through the world, through these obstacles, in ways we haven't before. But then, yeah, there's still some of that core Destiny there of just, "Man, it just feels good to move around the environment in this thing," because that's what playing as a Guardian is. That's what using a lot of our vehicles feels like. And so it's like, how do we take some of that stuff that we're so good at it, apply it in a new way?
RG: I don't want you to dog on anything you guys have made in the past, but what lessons do you think you have learned and what freedoms are you able to apply from things that felt fresh and new for for base players, but not in the larger scale of things? What do you think it is about Edge of Fate that has allowed you to expand, to really make it feel like … at times, you're roaming around, you're like, "This feels intentionally like more like Metroid Prime than like Destiny."
TG: I mean, deliberately accepting that our format is different, that our expectations are different … Actually, I don't think Edge of Fate is a more challenging offering for a player coming into Destiny. It's just different. Yeah, we expect everyone who wants to try playing this is going to have a good time, whether they're a core player or the new player coming in. But what we just accepted is that it's not going to follow the traditional format of seven or eight missions that you play back to back to back to back, and then you do some end game stuff. It's a much more organic experience that you played through. And there's a much more of an exploratory feel to the to the destination, to the environment. And we turn you loose into the space and say, "There's a mystery. There's a story to follow here. It's up to you to follow it."
RS: Find the tools, right? Find the tools of how to get past these obstacles and go deeper and solve these problems in this mystery.
TG: And I think we were taking a bit of a step into the unknown here. We're taking a little bit of a leap of faith and trying something really different. And I'm really happy with Edge of Fate. I'm really happy with what the team has created. I hope our players are too, because we're gonna get to make more of these.
RS: The intentional thing here is genre statements, things we're pulling inspiration from. If you're like, "Oh, it feels like this in some ways," it's cool, right? Some of that is us. You know, when you're trying something new and putting it through that Destiny lens, you kind of need a baseline, right? You need a baseline for how you can work together with the team to build up the toolkit of the abilities, the obstacles, the type of puzzles. And I think what's cool about the Edge of Fate is a lot of our expansions over the last couple of years have actually started to have some more intricate puzzle moments and obstacles and things you have to solve for. A lot of the people working on the Edge of Fate had been working on The Final Shape before this, and then them coming to this and going, "Hey, you all are already really good at doing a lot of this kind of gameplay, but we're going to do it through this new lens. We're gonna do it through this new inspiration for the Destiny game itself, specifically." And so it's trying to be this recipe, right? Where we're like, "We want to do this new thing. We also want to build on the strengths of the sandbox. We want to build on the strengths of the things that the people who build our worlds and missions are already good at, and then work with them to apply that in a different way."
TG: You're also seeing a little bit of the joy of game development in something like Matterspark [the Morph Ball]. That is a thing that, when the team put it together, the joy was just infectious. It captured their imagination, and they wanted to find ways to get it into the environment. And tunnels started appearing, ramps to launch yourself off of. People start to pour their skill and the passion into how it just feels and plays. And anytime that you see that when you're developing — when the team really starts to feel the energy and passion — you lean into it. That's when the best stuff happens. And there's definitely some fun expressions of that in The Final Shape and the Edge of Fate.
RG: I definitely appreciate, as a player, and former journalist, when studios are honest with their inspiration on something. Matterspark feels like something that you guys could have very easily designed a different shape or designed around an idea that didn't make it feel so clearly inspired by Metroid. I think it helps showcase it better. It's a love letter. I think people appreciate that.
TG: We're not trying to hide the inspiration. I want people see it and smile.
RG: Something that's interesting about it is, when you look at something like Metroid or a typical metroidvania, part of it is going through this campaign and growing your various different abilities, getting a lot of things, getting 20% of stuff that you don't even use other than for one or two puzzles. Edge of Fate feels very clearly focused on these three big abilities, with the fourth technically being the translation. But three major abilities that all kind of tie in together. When you're trying to do something leaner like that while still keeping the depth of the inspiration, how do you guys land on those three big ones?
RS: I'm gonna talk about something, and this is not exactly what's in the post game, but again, it's inspiration. The initial inspiration for the post game was New Game Plus, this idea that you're going to build up all these abilities, you're going to unlock higher tiers of them, and then you're set back loose on the world. And you're going to go back through it in new ways, right? Because now you can shortcut things, do puzzles in new ways. You can break the puzzles. During the campaign, you have to find these pads — we call them Matterspark pads — that you have to activate in order to use the ability. And it's fun because it does a lot of intricate puzzle solving you have to do. And there's this combination of, like, you gotta get a relocator cannon to open a portal and you've got to find the pad to get into Matterspark, and maybe the enemy's defending it. And then you have to get through the environment and teleport. But when you complete the campaign, you're going to unlock Matterspark anywhere. And basically what it allows you to do is it allows you to summon Matterspark without any kind of timer, without any restrictions other than you being damaged and being forced out of it in that way. And it basically just unlocks a whole lot more potential of how you can go back and play the missions on harder difficulties. You can do some post game quests and pursuits to earn some really high-tier loot. There's also a bunch of additional mysteries that unlock, which are like secret rooms that have collectibles and other stuff inside of them. And so that inspiration of New Game Plus is both from that reason to go back and play a lot of the mission content at a higher difficulty with some additional modifiers and Banes on them — the whole Bane system that we're applying across the game, we're also applying here in some new ways — but then also the free roam experience also expands as well, with more mysteries to solve. It's not the upside down castle, necessarily, but it's taking that thought of, "What does it mean to build up all your abilities?" Let's talk about Super Metroid for a second. You get to the end of it, and you're super charged, and you kill Mother Brain. You're kind of done at that point. But what if you could go back and there's a bunch of other stuff that unlocks in the world? This is just like that, a Guardian building up this new power set in a fun way. And something else I don't think we've really talked about yet, which is cool to talk about here, is: there's also some more Matterspark stuff to unlock in the post-game, too.
TG: Destiny still has an incredibly rich and fleshed-out customization space and buildcraft space. So we weren't trying to replace all of that. There's no world in which we could have replaced all of that. So we we identified a couple key ability experiences that we thought we could execute inside and build some interesting puzzles with. And then we just focused on making sure that those were well done. And we weren't looking for that breadth of what you might find in a traditional metroidvania, where it's like, "I found the red key for the red door, and now find the other 16 keys."
RG: I know there are some gates around, obviously that you hit coming back, or that you hit after a puzzle. When you look at creating something like this — a more intricate world that is more interesting to progress through — but then also consider that this is something that, unlike a more traditional Metroid or like metroidvania game, it's not like you fully collect this area and then you never see it again, it's Destiny. You're still gonna be going through it. You're gonna be doing stuff. You're gonna be repeating missions. How then, when you're looking at designing these things, do you avoid issues that, say, Europa had in the original release? Where there was one transmat spot and everyone was mad about it, and all everyone talked about was driving up to Riis-Reborn. How do you build this world without making it tedious to play 20 hours from now?
RS: A couple things here. I talk about Matterspark anywhere, because that unlocks the ability to shortcut things in different ways. There's also teleporters that unlock that you can only use after the campaign as well that let you shortcut --
RG: The trains?
RS: The trains are actually a completely different thing. When you complete the campaign, you can use Matterspark anywhere. And also there's these little Matterspark teleport things that show up that allow you to also do something. So that's one way that we're like, intentionally asking, "How can players move through the world faster, period? How can they get to stuff faster?" I think the other thing at the heart of what you're asking right now is, the pursuit and why you're going to these places, and what you're doing. And so there's a few things that we're doing. One of them is we're having this concept of a daily feature region within the game. So, during the post game experience, there's going to be a featured region where the materials you collect from that specific region is a place to go and buy loot at the Altar of Relativity. And so this is something where, every day, that's going to change. And so it avoids some of the Riis-Reborn problem. It's like, "I only ever go here to this LZ this one time to do this route, to loot all the time." So that's also one really big mechanism for engaging in free roam and some of the mission content and stuff in order to get more rewards. The other thing that we're doing in the post game experience is — I don't remember exactly what the unlock is, because we're still iterating and doing some final tweaks and changes — but I believe, after you complete all the core mysteries of the release, a thing I know we're doing is we're going to allow you to also reset the mysteries in a specific region and stuff in order to get extra loot out of it. And so this whole new game plus idea, which is not exactly what we're doing, but it's the inspiration, again, for the world. What does it mean to go back and give you reasons to do those geared pursuits after you climb your power in the core game and the portal and stuff, and you're starting to earn tier threes and tier fours and stuff. Like, "Oh, I want to go back to Kepler, and now I want to go get some of that amazing loot that I used during the campaign and get a higher version of it." It's like trying to think about what that formula looks like, to encourage you to move around the environment in different ways, with the shortcuts, to change your focus day to day. We have a handful of capstone missions and a final mission that are closer to the campaign-style missions you saw in the past, but we also have a bunch of story missions — and those are also all in a playlist as well as a hopper, basically — that give you some of the currencies you need to buy some targeted loot, too. So there's a lot here.
TG: Especially as a person who's played a lot of Destiny, it's important to remember the gear teiring system applies to all of the new loot that's introduced in the game. So you can get tier five versions of the gear that's introduced on Kepler. And if you really like the auto rifle, which it's a pretty good auto rifle, you might come back later and say, "Oh, I want that auto rifle at tier five with a good roll on it." So there's actually stuff that's worth chasing in Kepler as a destination, at even a late stage as a late stage player. That just wasn't true in the past the expansions. There was just very little reason to go back to a destination and do it again, unless there was some bespoke pursuit like bringing you there. So I think there's gonna be a lot of very deep play.
RS: And a lot of this is what you're most excited about doing. I think that's at the heart. A lot of this is like, "Oh, that auto rifle was really awesome. All right, I'm gonna come back here later and get another version."
RG: You talked a little bit about power set stuff, and adding to the abilities on the planet versus the abilities that the Guardians bring with them, that kind of counts towards creating this full power set. One thing I talked to Ben Womack about last year, with The Final Shape release, was about building prismatic into the game. And now we've seen buildcrafting increase with that, like the new Graviton Spike hand cannon. But the message back then was, "This is the beginning. It's working. It's growing. It's increasing. This is just the beginning of Prismatic." So, when you think about growing ability sets, both planetarily and outside of the scope, should players still expect that in the future? Not necessarily in Edge of Fate — unless there's something you guys are holding back.
TG: Absolutely. I mean, we're never going to stop developing the subclasses. They're going to create new atoms. You know, there's a lot of desire for some subclasses to gain some new atoms that they're lacking in. So, definitely on our radar. Prismatic in particular. It has its own unique identity within our space of being a place where we can do these really interesting combinations that aren't possible elsewhere. No concrete plans to talk about right now, but you're absolutely going to see, over time, that we are continuing to evolve the the classic subclasses. And prismatic is part of that now. Certainly, it'll get attention as we go. It's hard for me to imagine us not continuing to develop and play with the sandbox.
Transparency note: Bungie provided travel accommodations for the visit to their headquarters. However, there are no restrictions from Bungie on how critical we could be of the content we saw at the event or Destiny 2's new direction. The questions and thoughts above are my own, and Bungie did not review or edit this interview before it was published.
This post originally appeared on BigFriendly.Guide
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