About a month before the launch of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, a small group of highly engaged player-employees voiced a concern, this final boss, the culmination of a ten-year saga, will be a pushover for the contest event players.
For Destiny 2, a new raid releases with a contest event where some of the most engaged players in the community attempt to figure out the puzzles and gameplay challenges to be the world’s first team to successfully clear the raid. But even after our official “End to End” playtest and specific raid difficulty tuning playtest, we wondered if bosses would stand up to the onslaught of our players.
David Markus, with the approval of leadership including Catarina Macedo and Brian Frank, gathered a team of highly engaged players: Alyse Hough, Matthew Dowling, Michelle Stewart, Mitch Alpiner, and myself, to carve out work hours to focus on how contest players might approach the bosses.
Without going into details, we played the encounter repeatedly, gathering data on individual options and possible team play interactions, and presented our findings and recommendations to leadership. We had to navigate some conflicting goals, but many of our suggestions were implemented and this raid boasts critical success, termed “the greatest raid in Destiny history” by one of the members of the contest winning team, and exceeded the challenge bar, marked by the longest time to a world’s first clear.
For me, this was #JoyOnTheJob for a few reasons:
* Grassroots employee engagement was applauded
* People that I still wanted to join the contest with, even after dozens of hours testing together
* I brought clarity and alignment on our suggestions through data and visualizations
* Community Experience was the first concern
* I experienced the complex constellation of gameplay atoms leading to emergent gameplay
Also, while Bungie does focus on community experience first (for example requiring employees to wait until a community clear before entering the contest) I will drop a couple hot takes here:
* Alyse Hough figured out the Whisper of the Worm meta before you
* Matthew Dowling proved Titans can perform well against The Witness
* Julia Condemi suggested close to the final tuning on day one of our testing, it just took the rest of us a couple weeks to prove it out.
#WorkRetrospective #CareerInReview #TheStorySoFar #WorkJoyAtoms
