I had worked on several exotic weapon acquisition stories in previous releases. Those all typically centered on directed questlines that were presented to the player in their golden path, making them difficult to miss. This made sure they got exposed to awesome content that had strong narrative support. However when it came time to design the acquisition story for one of the exotics in this expansion, I wanted to lean more on elements of discovery and exploration.

Forgoing an actual quest, I turned it into a scavenger hunt for quest items. I hid many of the pieces in hard to reach or find areas, but balanced that with some more obvious reward points to remind the player to keep looking and give them reliable avenues for progress.

This exotic acquisition story takes players across the breadth of the destination. Only becoming available to be found after the campaign, and other quests. There is minimal overt direction on where to find the needed items, encouraging them to look far and wide, and encourage engagement with much of the content on the destination.

Being the end of the Light and Dark saga in Destiny. We wanted the destination to have numerous nods and odes to identifiable moments and items from Destiny’s history. The Khvostov is such an item, a weapon with history in the Destiny universe, dating all the way back to Destiny 1 as the very first weapon you acquire. We incorporated more nostalgia by having one of the items you need for the exotic acquisition also be something from Destiny 1, motes of light, a versatile currency players grinded for, some 10 years ago.

As a destination-wide event taking place in all public areas of the destination, it’s really important to encourage long-tail player engagement and player collisions. Without them it can easily become a solo activity in a multiplayer game, making the public areas feel empty and unwelcoming. To make sure these downsides don’t happen I created the long-tail engagement by bringing an activity looping and integration philosophy to the event’s reward plan.

I tied the activity to two other reward and quest plans. Lost ghosts are found throughout the destination but after being activated must be ‘charged’ by participating in overthrow. Once charged, players could progress quests given by an NPC in the arbor of light. I also tied in the exotic acquisition story for the khvostov weapon, requiring all 9 bosses be defeated in order to get quest items.

The rewards for the event itself were plentiful, with many chests given to the player and several different types of loot the player could farm for a long time by overcoming waves and defeating bosses.

The final mission for the end of the Destiny Light and Dark saga, the mission was designed to have narrative and mechanics with significant impact. This allowed rewards to similarly, have significant impact. We rewarded all players a guaranteed exotic engram, one of the most valuable rewards in the game. We also gave farming targets for repeat players, allowing them to get re-rolls on various destination-specific legendary weapons. A simple but impactful plan meant to support the impactful moment of completing the final mission.