The lead designer of the raids from Destiny 2 talks about a terrible boss fight he just designed and how boss fights in an MMORPG like The Elder Scrolls Online differ from a shooter like Destiny 2.
In the early raids of Destiny like The Vault of Glass and Crota’s End, former journalist and WoW junkie Luke Smith was the lead raid designer. He was promoted after his good work and is now the game director. The current raid lead of Destiny 2 is Joe Blackburn.
The current raid lead of Destiny 2 comes from The Elder Scrolls Online
Before his job at Bungie, Blackburn was a designer for Zenimax and worked on The Elder Scrolls Online. His job at ESO was to design the biggest and most important PvE encounters – for both groups and solo players. He has been with Bungie since February 2015 and works on the shooter.
In a series of tweets shortly before Christmas, Blackburn explains how he had to rethink to design bosses for shooters. It becomes clear how the boss design of Destiny must differ from that of The Elder Scrolls Online to make the bosses enjoyable.
He says: The most important thing is the perspective. In MMOs, players can see everything. In shooters, they only see what is in front of them. Players need to be able to see the enemies to win. So it is crucial where players are positioned and where their enemies appear.
Blackburn had the idea for a boss fight in Destiny: In the middle of the room was the boss, and servitors spawn in the four corners of the room. They would run toward the boss. When they reached the boss, bad things would happen. Players would have to position themselves to keep an eye on the corners to spot and stop the servitors immediately.
The problem: Now there was a fight where players were constantly staring into the corner, losing sight of the boss and getting shot in the back by him.
This way, the guardians couldn’t see anything of the boss and his cool attacks because their attention was elsewhere.
Positioning and field of vision are everything in a shooter
The solution was to: Change the shape of the room and the positioning of the guardians. The boss room should no longer be a square with four corners, but a rectangle. Players on one side, enemies on the other. The servitors were arranged behind the boss.
This way, players always had the boss in their field of view and the servitors.
Now, whenever I was asking players to look at some dumb object to shoot, there was a good chance the boss was in frame. And as long as I spawned my combatants on the boss’s side of the room, both the boss attacks and my objects should be in their periphery. pic.twitter.com/blyRKAicZA
— Joe Blackburn (@joegoroth) Dec 23, 2017
For Blackburn, this was an important lesson on how boss fights work in a shooter and that it is always important to consider what the players can really see. Today, Blackburn is convinced that the environment in a boss fight is incredibly important.
Fans may have suspected: The story is apparently about the boss fight against Vosik in the Destiny 1 raid “Wrath of the Machine.”
Apparently, Blackburn knows his craft: The raid part of Curse of Osiris is considered a highlight of Destiny 2 so far:
Destiny 2 brings back the Destiny feeling – and Bungie is happy about it
