AusGamers: Are you able to talk about the new progression paths in the Dark Below? One of the problems I’ve noticed in Destiny is the gulf of progression -- there are gaps where post-level 20 you spend quite some time not really progressing… I think between level 24 to 26 and then again from 28 to 30.



Deej: Well we’ve actually done a lot of things to change the way the economy works in The Dark Below to make it a little bit more predictable about how Guardians can fulfil the invitation that we issued to them with the game itself -- which is to “become legend”. We are doing things that will enable them to obtain the materials that they need; to level up. They can now obtain the Relic Iron, the Spirit Bloom -- the destination planetary upgrade materials they need by purchasing them in The Tower by using upgrade marks -- Crucible Marks or Vanguard Marks. So if somebody spends a lot of time in the Crucible, or if somebody spends a lot of time completing Vanguard bounties and they don’t want to necessarily open chests so they don’t want to look for appearances of these materials in the wild; they don’t want to pick them out of the landscape, they can just invest in the missions, they can immerse themselves in the action and the reputation that they earn with Tower Vendors will enable them to acquire that stuff.

So we’re providing a more logical path toward buying the Legendary items that they need and making those items more powerful by unlocking the upgrade node in the skill-trees. At the same time, the new raid: Crota’s End is going to have a reward system that is designed to be a little bit more generous; to drop more loot, more often and to provide more gear with different types of talents, so we are hoping to not limit the amount of time that you need to play the game, but to make the time that you do spend in the game a little bit more rewarding, based on player feedback.

We’ve listened to players lament the fact they’ve played the raid 10 times and felt that they were coming away from it very much empty-handed -- these are of course [different] cases, there are many people who’ve played through the raid scoring the things that they need to upgrade themselves -- there are a lot of level 30s out there, even more than we ever would have imagined.

AusGamers: Was that always the design directive then? The idea that you wanted people coming back to the raid more and more, so the loot drops were designed to be relatively sparse?

DeeJ: I think we wanted people to have to invest deeply in the experience and for a long period of time. We wanted people to have reasons to come back and play the game again and again and again and again. A lot of the randomised strategies for how the loot systems would work, how the raid systems would work would induce an element of chance so that on those occasions when you do win that coveted item it’s a ‘red letter day’ for your digital warrior.

I was actually very surprised as a player by the raids because traditionally I have been a competitive player -- I enjoy things like the Crucible; competitive matchmaking -- playing games with my clan where we were engaging other live, sentient gamers as opponents and enjoying those competitive match-ups [and] I, prior to the launch of Destiny, envisioned myself as going through the raid once so that I could say that I did but I find myself coming back to it time and time again just because it’s thrilling to experience it with different players. It’s a great way to get to know some of the different teams and some of the different communities that exist inside the overall Destiny community. So, obviously the main reward of playing Destiny -- we hope -- is the fun of the gameplay, you know, the thrill of the sandbox; the interesting interactions you can have with some of the other players, but on top of that we want to make sure that our players invest deeply in these activities and that they’re given the things that make them feel truly powerful and truly special.

AusGamers: Can you tell us a little bit about changing the material economy, because it used to be that you could send destination materials to Earth marks, or faction reputation at least, but if you’ve reversed that… is the destination material economy in Destiny, is that something that you see will continue to be changed? I mean, as economies go reversing the buy/sell mechanic as you have is a pretty drastic change -- is that something you can see happening again in the future, or… ?



DeeJ: I think every player in Destiny should assume that everything in Destiny is a work in progress. We’re going to be continually looking at the balance of the sandbox -- we’re going to have all the exotic weapons under a microscope, we’re going to evaluate player behaviour, we’re going to take into account the needs as expressed by the majority of the players -- we will match those perceptions and those curves of feedback against our own and fortunately we have a very large team here at Bungie and many, many of those developers are active and invested players of this game and sometimes it’s a buyer’s market and sometimes it’s a seller’s market -- these things can always change [and] as we come into The Dark Below we found that a lot of people were lamenting that they had to spend farming. So the obvious solution is to take the materials they were extremely anxious to get their hands on and to provide them with an easier path, to allow them to take the surplus Vanguard Marks and to spend them on the things that they really needed the most in order to get their characters upgraded and ready to go, so that on the day when The Dark Below launches they’ve had a week or so to prepare themselves and to convert the things that they had in their store-houses into the things that they really needed to be able to hit that new raid running, on the ground, on day one.

This is a very different game for Bungie. In the past we used to press discs and send it out into the wild and hope that every gamer had a good time, you know, we were always conscious of the fact that there were many people who played previous Bungie games that never connected their gameplay device to the Internet be it a Macintosh or PC or console. With Destiny we very purposefully envisioned for ourselves a living, social world where we could adapt to player’s certain standards, where we could have a relationship with the player, where we could do new and exciting things to enhance their experience, so we are experimenting with how heavy-handed we should be in managing that experience and how much we should just sit back and let them make this, you know, their own place. But there are situations that our user-research team can identify areas in which there’s an imbalance and those are things that you’re experimenting and we’re correcting.

AusGamers: I noticed earlier, and this is anecdotal (I haven’t really tested it fully yet), but I’ve noticed fewer drops of destination material from chests -- is that a change you guys made in the latest patch?

DeeJ: [No] that is completely random. You’re talking about you’re out in the world, you open a chest and you get Spirit Bloom or Relic Iron or… I don’t believe that’s been impacted -- I know sometimes you’ll open those chest and get one, sometimes you’ll get two -- there are rare occasions where you can get as many as nine to 12… I don’t think we’ve changed the way the chests themselves work. What we have done with the new economy on The Tower is we have given you an alternate path so that if you’re a stone-cold killer you go and enjoy playing in the Crucible or if you’re a Hunter who enjoys completing missions and completing Tower bounties, you don’t have to farm -- there’s a hunter instinct and a gatherer instinct -- and we hope that destiny appeals to both of them.

What we wanted to do is make sure the Hunters felt like they had their own path that they could travel towards and not force them to go and ‘pick flowers’ as one person on our forum referred to it as, so poetically.

AusGamers: DeeJ, is there any movement on player-to-player trading?



DeeJ: I honestly don’t have any official statements to make… it’s difficult for me to get a unified answer from the design team on that one. I do know that we assigned an enormous value to individual player-agency; to the idea that every player of Destiny earnt the things that they have. Which is a great way to ignite a debate on our forum -- what is the truest way to earn something? Is it to have it drop in your lap, is it won with an Engram, is it to have it deposited in your inventory after a Crucible match… in any of those scenarios the player has earnt something and we want that feeling of risk and effort and action and reward to be very individual. For someone to say that they acquired a great item that someone might be admiring with the question “where did you get that?” with the answer “my friend gave it to me” kind of does subtract from that phenomenon.

So, again, this is an experience that we’re going to add to over time, certainly a trading system is not included in The Dark Below [but] if it’s something that the player is asking for I will without prejudice continue to ask the developers for it myself -- that’s my job, and I embrace that responsibility enthusiastically -- so I will continue to ask them for a trading system, I will continue to ask them for larger vaults, I will continue to ask them for better rewards at the end of a competitive matchup… actually something I relish is to go and look through and try and find out where the hearts and minds of these people that have invested so deeply and emotionally in our game what do they want? In some areas those are things that we can answer and in some areas that’s good to know in the future and we’ll see where we land, but in terms of an answer to the trading question I’m sure right now it’s not one I can satisfy.

AusGamers: Can you talk to the PS4 vs Xbox One content delivery system at all? I know you’re somewhat leading on PS4 but it’s been heavily lamented since launch that a lot of Xbox One players feel they’re getting the short-end of the stick… will there be a point of platform parity at any juncture down the track?

DeeJ: All of the exclusive content that we’re providing to the PlayStation community will become available to the Xbox community over time. As to the competitive nature of our industry as a community manager, it’s not something I have a lot of control over. I can tell you that the attention that we paid to the player as the developer of Destiny is a thing of complete parity -- when we update our game, we update our game for everyone. When we read Bungie.net we feed off everyone’s feedback.

What I can tell you is that at Bungie.net, all Guardians are created equal. When a player of Destiny talks about what they love about that experience or what they think can be done to make that experience better for them, we’re absolutely listening regardless of the system they use to play -- whether it’s Xbox 360 or PlayStation 4, we’re looking to satisfy every single customer who’s invested their time, their effort and their gunfire in our game and on a long enough timeline everyone gets to shoot that gunfire.

AusGamers: The Dark Below raises the cap to 32?

DeeJ: Yes. A person who decides to play The Dark Below will be able to level up their Guardian to level 32 -- this will be through a combination of a lot of the new Legendaries that they’ll find on display at the Tower -- you’ll always be able to purchase exotic material from Xur on his weekly visit to the Tower, and of course there is the new raid gear. Crota’s End will have it’s own sweet new raid gear, just like the mission itself, just like the entire expansion itself, it’ll all be Hive-themed. So whereas the Vault of Glass gave you that mechanical-looking LED polished brass armour, you’ll find that the items that you pull out of Crota’s End are going to have that calcified aesthetic that is a hallmark to the Hive, and players are going to be able to, through a combination of those materials, add all of them to their Guardian to have more powerful weapons, more powerful armour -- different perks that go with their weapons and their armour that will change the way they fight and show them new ways in which they can be dangerous and powerful and [so] 32 is obviously the new end-goal.



However, because all of those Tower vendors are agnostic in terms of how much content the player has consumed, any person who has played Destiny will find that The Dark Below expands the world in which they play. Any person who bought Destiny at launch will be able to walk up to those Tower vendors and they’ll be able to acquire, through the proper means of course, the Legendary gear and weapons that are on display.

Also there are new economies that are involved in the acquisition of these new Legendary items and a lot of that will depend on your reputation rank at the Vanguard or with the Crucible quartermaster, you know that diamond shaped reputation system where you’re always working towards your next promotion -- when you receive your next promotion your receive a package [and] inside those packages will be commendations and you will use those commendations along with the requisite marks to buy your items, which will have players thinking a lot more about the next promotion that they will be given from their story agent of choice.

So if you’re a person who plays aggressively in the Crucible you’ll always be thinking about keeping your pocket full of bounties that you can turn-in at the end of a successful day in the Arena to earn that next promotion, to earn that next commendation and all the while, of course, you’re earning marks -- so we’re adding to the economy that you’ll use acquire those items [so that] even for a person who decides not to buy new content, they will have new ways to evolve.

AusGamers: It’s common for MMO developers to worry about the concept of obsolescence -- the World of Warcraft developers have often pushed back the concept of yearly expansion packs due to the fact that people might feel… like they’re wasted their time if a new level cap comes in 12-months after the old one. You guys have changed the level cap three months after launch, what are you guys doing to combat that potential feeling of obsolescence?

DeeJ: Like I said, any of the players of this game are welcome to invest in these new opportunities to develop, so I think that obsolescence comes from sitting still. And by and large, the players of Destiny told us they want more content; that they want new ways to build their Guardian; that they want new challenges to tackle. So we’re here to provide them with that.

An MMO typically follows a subscription model where the concern is that every single player you have in your player-base is someone that you need playing the game constantly enough to opt-in with a monthly fee. With Destiny we are providing a console gaming experience, and our goal is to make that experience deeply meaningful to the people who decide to play. And to give them more reasons to come back to that experience time and time again. So even if a player takes a break to play another game that they can spin in their tray for a few weeks, we’re hoping that The Dark Below is an invitation for them to come back and check out what’s new.

Obviously we don’t want to make any player feel like they’re obsolete; we don’t want to make any player feel that the time they’ve invested in our game is a waste.

AusGamers: Is there going to be any way for current exotic weapons to reach level 32? I saw the mythoclast is going to reach 323…



DeeJ: Yeah, we’re buffing the mythoclast and the thing about the mythoclast is [it’s] not an exotic weapon. It’s a weapon that is exclusive to The Vault of Glass. So those weapons may be ‘frozen in time’ -- the Legendary weapons that are provided by the factions or the Vanguard or the Crucible quartermaster will be upgraded so that there will be a new product line that they can purchase for level 32 Guardians. The weapons that a player may have collected from the exotic category can be upgraded by Xur -- every week he’ll have a selection of weapons that he’s willing to upgrade for you [and] he’s brought with him the materials that you need to upgrade your exotic weapons -- so if you’re holding on to a Red Death, but you want to buy a Gjallarhorn -- you’re hoping to see two items in his inventory; hoping he has the Gjallarhorn for sale, brand-new, as a level 32 and you’re hoping that he also has the Red Death available for upgrade -- another reason for people to collect those strange coins: they can buy exotic shards with those strange coins, they can be used to upgrade existing exotics, they can purchase actual upgraded weapons… and it’s worth to note that when you purchase an upgraded exotic; when you upgrade an exotic in your inventory using the material that Xur has, you reset progression on that weapon. So I can ask myself “do I want my fully leveled-up Super Good Advice or do I want to reset its progression with the opportunity to re-level it back up to 32 instead of just level 30.

AusGamers: Awesome, thanks for your time DeeJ.