As and beyond.

Want to know how hard The King's Fall Raid is? Or about the secret endgame weapon in TTK? Maybe you just want to know what Bungie really thinks about the way you cheese the Nightfall. All the answers are a few clicks away...

"I assumed my position on The Taken King once I joined the project, after I finished my core responsibilities on vanilla. However, I was basically working during the day on The Taken King and then at night on Destiny vanilla, so it’s been in development for a while, and we’ve had different members roll on and roll off it at different rates. So it definitely accordion-ed up to be a sizeable team. And now it’s where... we’re in the period where it’s gotten small again. But the development timeline: I actually don’t know that, I don’t remember when I officially started!"

"I think there’s a lot of ingenuity and creativity in the 'cheesing' of encounters, but what it really is is the quest for efficiency, man! It’s all about the quest for efficiency, and when you have an activity like Nightfall, which is so punitive for losing – getting kicked to Orbit and having to re-do everything - you’re behaviourally incentivising players to play the game in a way that might not be super-fun. The game is at its most fun when you’re able to over-commit yourself, get yourself into trouble, emerge victorious and get yourself out. And the vanilla version of Nightfall kinda conspires against that, so we have to do something like soul searching as developers to say “OK, well – what’s going to be fun, and is the fun that we’re trying to create for you, are you able to have it?” What are the barriers between you and that gameplay experience? We have to continue to get better at that."

"Oh man! There are probably two that come to mind: one of them is named the Sleeper Simulant, and it is a Heavy Exotic Fusion Rifle that shoots a rail projectile that bounces. It is styled in that sort of 'Rasputin-tech' styling - it’s a beautiful weapon.

"And the other one... I believe the final name for it is going to be The Old Hunger, and The Old Hunger is the gun that you forge over the course of the endgame. Like, you’re going to be finding pieces of it as you go, like basically putting this thing together is the ultimate trophy for primarily a bunch of TTK. I think that that gun as... it’s like wrapped in cloth, it has an orb in the centre that’s... it’s crazy! To see someone put that together, with all of its moving parts will be pretty mind blowing. I’m sure someone’s going to do it!"

Is it tough? Here’s the thing man, if I say it’s tough, then people flog me if it’s not super-hard. If I say it’s easy then people are upset if it’s hard. Difficulty of the Raid is a question that really scales to each group. So what we’ve done... construction wise is we’ve built the Raid differently this time than we’ve built them previously, where we’ve actually built Hard Mode first. So we built the whole suite of the mechanics for Hard Mode up front, and then looked at that and said “OK, this feels good for that Hard Mode challenge, what sub-set of these things will feel good for that group of six who’s coming in to play through the game” like the... “What are the pillars for the Raid activities?” Any motivated group of six players who are willing to cooperate and communicate can beat the Raid – that’s what we’re looking for and that’s our bar. It’s not just for a die-hard and their friends, it’s any motivated group of players who are willing to cooperate and communicate can beat a Raid in Destiny. So that’s our bar for Normal, and then Hard Mode’s hard mode.