For this quest, I worked with our narrative team to explore the loss experienced by two prominent characters in the expansion, Nimbus and Osiris. Nimbus lost their mentor in the campaign, and Osiris had recently lost their partner, Sagira in a previous season.

I started the quest with some objectives that allowed a more freeform approach. Giving players a item to collect that could be found broadly, but most efficiently found in the new Terminal Overload event. I also wanted to work in some more bespoke encounters than previous exotic quests so the player is at one point ambushed when seeking another quest item.

The quest culminates in a return to an old raid space, The Garden of Salvation. Destiny 2’s raid spaces are some of the most interesting in the game. Made bespoke by the incredible raid team for their encounter designs, they also include traversal challenges and awesome art. Significant quests give us a chance to take players to cool spaces that they may not see otherwise. So we worked with activity designers to reuse this raid space, creating some new encounters and puzzles for the player to enjoy.

Ultimately, the player helps Nimbus come to terms with their loss of a friend a mentor, in return the player gets an awesome new weapon made by our weapons team. They get to use the weapon immediately and experience its full power in the climax of the mission.

The terminal overload public event, is an activity that takes place in one of the 3 public areas of the destination. It rotates which area it is in daily and gives rewards related to its location.

For this reward system I wanted to give players planned agency, tie the ritual to other systems in the expansion, and give players reasons to ‘prepare’ for the event instead of just grinding it to prevent burnout. The agency came in the form of tying specific weapon rewards to specific public areas in the rotation. These rewards were accessed via overload keys, which themselves were rewards for engaging with other content on the destination. Players could access the keys as rewards for progressing other quests in the destination, and increase their availability through further quests.

This resulted in an integrated reward system between different pieces of content that all then fed into each other. Players could really grow their reward access on the destination in meaningful ways, resulting in better access to loot they would enjoy.

The Hall of Heroes is a post-campaign space on the expansion’s new destination. It houses monuments to the fallen and is a jump off point for several important quests.

These quests were designed to narratively expose the player to the planet’s culture and history, as well as act as a ‘tour’ of the destination’s content. The player completes several small quests, each as a piece of the overall larger meta-questline, where each piece focuses on a different piece of content in the expansion. This exposes and teaches the player about said content, what they should do in it, and where to go. Completing one of these smaller quests is then celebrated through physical representation of their progress. On their last quest step of each, a broken monument re-assembles itself, standing as a testament to the player’s achievements.

The quests also open up the player to further expansions of that content, that the player can then invest further into. For example completing the quest focused on terminal overload, the player unlocks the terminal overload keys, an important part of the reward system. The quests act as tours but but also as jump off points to dive deeper into that given content.