GamesBeat: The first two expansions were road-mapped early out. How far back did the ideas behind Rise of Iron come together?
Taylor: It’s complicated, because things like the fiction behind Saladin — we had ideas for that. What happens is, at a certain point you decide — the first thing is saying, we’re going to do an expansion. Then it’s about figuring out what that’s going to look like, what it is. Your options at that point are fairly — they could be anything. You could make a story about whatever you want. It’s about landing on this story, and I think it’s fair to say that the main campaign and the story — the main thrust of it was the beginning of this year, when we really got them team focused on the whole wrapper of this. That’s when we got started in earnest.
But the reason it’s hard to answer that question is because we have a PvP (player-vs.-player) team, a raids team, a sandbox team. They’re all working on all sorts of things all the time. It’s my job and [art director] Chris Barrett’s job and a bunch of other people’s jobs to make sure that’s all cohesive, one packagem and one piece of a story. At the beginning of this year, that’s when we started pulling all those elements together in earnest.
GamesBeat: Would you say that your player base tends to focus on one activity? Do you have PvP players, raiders, and solo players all separate? Or do most of your players do a mix of all of them?
Taylor: One of the beautiful things about Destiny is there are opportunities to do all of them. There are players who play more PvP than story, or don’t touch PvP. Because it’s a single character that does all of those things, it’s nice that you can choose to do that and not feel like you’re necessarily not playing Destiny right. We have people who just grind on raids. All those things you just named exist. And that’s fine.
We’re trying to create activities that can suit any of those things. And hopefully — the goal is that players are playing a lot of it, play all of the different aspects. For instance, we’re excited by the idea of taking something that’s traditionally been PvP, Iron Banner and the Iron Lords and Saladin, and putting that in the PvE space. That’s great. If a PvP player is like, I don’t normally care about the campaign but I’m curious about this, I want to go do this — we had an exotic quest in Destiny one to get Thorn. It required going into PvP. At the time I wasn’t playing a lot of PvP, and then I went in and it created a really organic way for me to flow into that activity. Then I did and I was like, I like this, this is really fun. I had a reason to go there, and now I play it. We’re trying to create those opportunities to play everything.
Above: Rise of Iron’s new area, The Plaguelands.
GamesBeat: You’re making a lot of content all the time. How do you decide what will be a free content release and what will be saved for an expansion?
Taylor: Similar to what I was just talking about, all the different activities — there’s a lot of ways to support the game. We think it’s great to do something like put Sparrow racing in the game for three weeks and have that be a unique moment in time. Have Festival of the Lost pop up without any warning and have people have a small cool adventure about masks.
But we also think it’s cool to — when you think about introducing a new zone and bringing back Gjallarhorn and telling a story about Saladin, the best place to do that kind of thing is in a large expansion. You’re pulling all those elements together to make one package, so you’re doing all those things in tandem. Thematically they’re tied together, and then that’s a stronger overall offering. You look at the different types of activities, different types of content, and you figure out what makes the most sense.
GamesBeat: Do you think of players in different ways? You have players who are consistent players. They’re not just playing when the expansions come out. They’re there for all the updates. Then you have players who are more likely to come in when the expansion comes out, play for a few months, and drop off again. Do you think about those groups separately?
Taylor: We want to create opportunities for both, because we think both are valid awesome ways to play Destiny. We just want to make sure that people like playing Destiny. If you’re playing all the time, we have these rituals and things you can do weekly to continue that. If you want to dive in and out when we do updates, that’s awesome too. If you’re excited about Rise of Iron but don’t play until then, that’s great. There’s not really a wrong way to engage with Destiny. That’s on purpose.
Above: Looking fly.
GamesBeat: Is it a more comfortable time in Destiny now? It was maybe a harder thing to get people to understand when you were launching. It was a new idea to sell. Would you say that there’s a looser atmosphere at Bungie, now that you’re more comfortable in the Destiny skin?
Taylor: It’s different to develop an IP before it’s released than iterating on it after. I wouldn’t say it’s easier or more relaxed. I’d say the conversations are different. The conversation you’re having before you launch something is just different from what it is once people have played it.
The fact that we didn’t have to start this interview with me explaining the fundamentals of what Destiny is, that’s nice. But it doesn’t mean we spend less time or intensity focusing on making a great experience. It’s just inherently — it’s a little different. But we’re always — we were then, and we are now – focused on making Destiny a great game. That never changes.
What’s changed a little bit is just the conversation we have. And this is beautiful, that we’re able to speak a common language about what the game is. We don’t have to have that disconnect. That’s nice. But as far as developing and my day-to-day job, it’s still very similar.