This quest had two main goals in mind, take players to cool places on the destination, and create a living gun. Inspired by a personal favorite tabletop RPG trope. I pushed hard to have a gun in Destiny that would talk to you, beyond whatever may happen in that weapon’s acquisition story. This would add variety and delight to the game, expanding the scope of what players considered possible in the wider universe. Enter ‘Parasite’, the exotic weapon that contains a sentient worm. You infuse the worm into a weapon in the final mission of the quest, and it will continue to speak to you while you have it equipped on the destination. Not very often, but when it did pipe up, it shocked players.

There was a lot of very cool things to see on the expansion’s destination. Our art and activities teams did amazing work throughout. So to make sure players had reasons to explore, and cause to go see what we had to show them, I led them into all manner of nooks and crannies. It let the destination shine, and made the quest feel like an adventure.

The wellspring is a daily rotating activity, with each day changing between ‘attacking’ a location and ‘defending’ that location. Attacking and defending each had an alternate version, for a total of 4 distinct versions of the activity.

Each version had a weapon reward to go with it. I slotted in the different rewards to the days with the hope that being able to target specific weapons to farm would be enjoyable. The player also had a small chance for ‘deepsight’ versions of each weapon to drop which were highly desirable as it then allowed you to manually craft that weapon at a weapon forge introduced in the expansion.

During development I had attempted to tie rewards into various things the player could or would do during the activity itself, giving them alternate/optional challenges they could attempt, in order to increase their rewards or allow for greater agency and determinism. This aspect however did not make it into the expansion and as a result I feel this reward scheme fell rather flat and uninteresting. But I took what I learned from it and applied it to the terminal overload reward system in the next expansion.

There are a lot of different pieces of content in a given Destiny 2 expansion past the campaign. A lot for the player to sink their teeth into, a lot to find, and a lot of rewards to earn. These things all should lead the player to an aspirational state, something they can see and set a goal to move towards. This usually takes the form of the expansion’s raid. The player has a lot to get ready in order to take on Destiny’s pinnacle challenge.

To make sure this preparation was smooth and thoughtful, I worked with our rewards team and expansion designers to allocate the various rewards, have the right experience curves, and activities into the right player journey timeframes. Adjusting the required or recommended level requirements takes a birds eye view of all the expansion’s offerings, and how players get from one band to another requires proper allocation of rewards. All with the added layer of creating exciting reward moments for players. Where they can feel spikes in their progress and power, get fun new tools and perks. Allocating any of that at the wrong point can lead to boredom, burnout, or just the game not feeling worth your time in general.

It took a lot of coordination and cooperation but we arrived at a plan that worked for everyone and delighted players in one of Destiny’s best expansions.