Rite of the Nine
Rite of the Nine was a 12-week event at the end of Destiny’s 10th year (the year following the Final Shape expansion). I was the creative lead on this event, which was challenging due to many constraints: few allocated resources, a requirement to re-use both activity and rewards content, and a goal of making it so that each week the appeal of the event grew so that there was never a bad time to jump in and play. Despite these challenges, the event shipped successfully and delivered and end-of-year event that saw a significant uptick in weekly returning players and high satisfaction ratings. The designers, artists, testers, and engineers chosen for the team were one of the most talented cross-disciplinary groups I’ve ever had the chance to lead.
Return to Eternity
For this event, we needed to create a social space where players could go to get rewards, pick up quests, and focus their future reward drops around the specific weapons they wanted. Thanks to the efforts of an extremely talented and motivated team of activity designers and artists, we reached back into Destiny 2’s past and brought forward the Eternity space (last used in 2017 as the social space for the Trials of the Nine PvP activity), adapting it to the revamped Tiger engine activity systems.
Explorer Mode Dungeons
The biggest element of activity design change in Rite of the Nine was the addition of an Explorer mode to the dungeons featured in the event. Explorer Mode took our dungeons, intended to be challenging activities with little to no UI guidance and light puzzle and traversal mechanics, and created a variant mode with more guidance, more forgiving challenge, and with adjustments to the difficulty based on the number of the players in your fireteam. This feature was lauded by players who had not had a chance to experience some of Destiny’s most marquee content that had previously been behind too high of a barrier.
Come Play, Get Rewards
The Rite of the Nine team worked hand-in-hand with the Rewards Armor & Weapons teams to produce a suite of reprised dungeon weapons, with a new aesthetic more closely tied to the Nine, the major player in the event. The reward distribution was crafted to escalate over the course of a 12-week event, ensuring that there was never a bad time to jump in and play the game.
Trailer
See what Rite of the Nine was about, from the awesomely talented folks who put together our hype reels.