Destiny 2: Into the Light - Developer Interview with Chris Proctor! - PvE 99
With the brave arsenal reveled and Into the Light only a couple of weeks away Court, Impetus, and Saint sit down with Chris Proctor to talk all the weapons, their design, and other aspects of the Destiny weapons sandbox.
Listen to the full interview on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Into the Light - Developer Interview Transcript
0:00-0:03:54 Episode Intro
03:55 - Chris Proctor introduction, “what do you do at Bungie?”
- Chris joined Bungie in 2019, shipped a bunch of weapons, was Weapons Feature Lead
04:25 - Chris’s new role at Bungie, Combat Area Design Lead, in which he oversees “combatants, abilities and bosses”. Chris is leaving the Weapons team but mentions that the remaining Weapon developers have shipped many weapons
5:26 - Into the Light Q&A start
- How many perks can drop in columns 3 & 4 of the ITL weapons?
- Only limited-edition variants get one extra perk in C3 & C4
- 6:27: What is the acquisition path for these weapons?
- Six of the weapons will be available to acquire at the start, then one more weapon will become available each week leading up to TFS. “Attune whatever weapons you’ve unlocked that you’ve done that quest for at any point” 7:03 “50% chance for a weapon to drop that you’ve attuned to (from the chests)”
- 7:30: Will playing higher difficulty of Onslaught have any changes to loot acquisition? Is there a greater chance of getting a limited-edition variant to drop at the higher difficulty?
- 7:49 “(the higher difficulty) just increases the number of chests…. The deeper you go and the other conditions you unlock, you just get an extra chest. You get more chances at the foil but it’s not a higher chance”
- 8:19: How rare are the limited-edition variants? Is it a shiny Pokemon level of rarity? A 1/100 chance?
- 8:34 “[variants] are not that rare... You can reasonably expect to get a handful of these as you’re playing. 8:44 “It’s not reasonably possible to super target the limited-edition variant”
- 9:00: What will enhanceable perks look like on the randomly-rolled weapons? Can the barrel, magazine and masterwork be changed?
- 9:37 Only the main traits will be enhanceable. The logic behind this decision ties back to raid Adepts having a base version that is craftable. If the base raid version is craftable, then the Adept raid version should have the same level of customization to avoid powercreep. None of the dungeon, playlist or ITL weapons have a crafted version, so the enhancement process is limited to the main traits. 9:55 “The bar we’re going to use is if the base set is craftable, the Adept weapons can pick barrel, magazine, etc”
- 10:15: What will the material cost look like for enhancing these weapons?
- 10:20 should be the same cost as raid enhancing, doesn’t have the numbers on hand
- 10:30: Will you be able to enhance multiple traits in a column on these weapons?
- 10:48 “Yes you can… this is part of the tech we were waiting for to roll out enhancing more broadly”
- 11:07: Are these weapons keeping the same stat packages? What are the changes to the stats?
- 11:28 Three of the weapons have stat changes, “increased Luna’s Howl’s Handling by 10; Recluse’s Range by 6; Midnight Coup got a bit more of a substantial change…. +10 Range, +5 Stability, +14 AE” deterministic recoil was also added to all valid weapons. Impetus clarifies that Blast Furnace will have the Rasmussen ISA scope but not the stat benefits that came with the scope A: correct, BF gets the sights but not the stats, the barrels will provide similar or better stats in column 1 now.
- 12:44: What are the stats on the new Origin Trait Indomitability and what was the design philosophy behind it?
- 13:08 “We wanted to have an origin trait that reflected a Guardian’s duality [of Light and Darkness]... tie into your abilities and your subclass” Stats are the same scale as Classy Contender (2.5%). Notes that this OT plus Demolitionist while you’re on a Light subclass will generate a ton of grenade energy (Forbearance now rolls Demo in C3)
- 14:51: What are the specifics on Desperate Measures?
- 15:13 The dev name for Into the Light was Last Stand which was also applied to the ITL perk. That perk is now called Desperate Measures because Last Stand is the name of Vigilance Wing’s trait. “Grants 10% damage on weapon kill, 20% grenade or melee kill, stacks once and lasts for seven seconds” Does not need to match your ability energy like Golden Tricorn. Will have an enhanced version in TFS.
- 16:32 What was the thought process behind bringing back Mountaintop, Recluse and Luna’s Howl? Why is Micro-Missile now a frame instead of a perk?
- 17:11 Mountaintop required massive nerfs in PvP even after it was sunset due to its strength, so the major change to the new version is that it can’t one hit kill inside the Crucible. However, this change allows for previous nerfs to be removed and new features have been added (specifically mentions the nerf to in-air accuracy has been removed and the new rocket-jump feature)
- 18:05 “We’re also really cranking breach grenade launcher impact damage….Standard breach gl is not really useful for single-target damage [right now]” Mentions a bunch of scaling is taking place with this buff.
- 19:02 in regards to MM being a frame now “random-rolling that trait on other grenade launchers would’ve been super weird and this gives us the opportunity…. To release more Micro Missile-frame grenade launchers… some time in the future I’d expect to see another [MM frame GL].... we’ll see if Mountaintop breaks anything first”
- 19:24 How does Magnificent Howl work, specifically the high-damage shots activated after a reload?
- 19:52 “each [Magnificent Howl] shot does the increased damage…you will be doing almost 120 damage per crit [in Crucible]... if you get a bunch of those shots queued up in PvE, you can do a huge amount of damage…. And there’s no timer so you can carry those around” Impetus points out that there will be an enhanced version of MH in TFS “yeah, there will be…. I would be surprised if we do even more damage [on the enhanced version]” Saint brings up the viability of using Luna’s Howl to clear a wave of adds then reloading to proc Magnificent Howl on a major target. Impetus clarifies that Luna’s Howl is still a Precision frame HC so it will have that archetype’s damage profile in PvE?
- 21:34 Luna’s Howl does get the vertical recoil and the massive bump to AE
- 21:52 You name-dropped Not Forgotten in the article, any further details about that hand cannon?
- 22:13 We wanted to ship Not Forgotten when and where it can stand on its own and not be a part of a larger group of weapons (the team did not think this approach was necessary for Luna’s Howl) Court asks if Master of Arms and Magnificent Howl will remain unique traits or if those perks might appear on other weapons similar to Chris’ earlier tease of more Micro-Missile-frame gls 22:39 “We see these perks as being like when we introduce a perk for a raid, we like it to be exclusive to that weapon set for a little while… I’d expect us to leave it for a couple of releases… so sometime in the year after TFS you would see these [perks] start to pop up elsewhere… we’ve tested it locally and it’s pretty fun running Master of Arms on another weapon type or Magnificent Howl on a 180 hc”
- 23:20 Was there a thought of making Mountaintop/Recluse/Luna’s Howl an exotic?
- 23:45 That comes up a lot on Reddit. “The problem is that the performance is not exotic… they have exotic-level strength but they’re not [at the same level as] Dragon’s Breath… they don’t meet the exotic quality bar… We’re more likely to do unique weapon subfamilies for legendaries instead of converting them into exotics”
- 24:44 Was there any concern that bringing back existing raid weapons might undermine the originals?
- 24:59 Lot of discussion went into this decision “Ultimately we decided to update the raid weapons in a small way [one or two new perks in C3 & C4] and lean on the ITL origin trait [as a unique draw]” hopefully encourages players to go get the original versions
- 28:11 Will Kinetic Tremors be tweaked to proc on mag percentage like Target Lock?
- 28:50 “That’s definitely on the table… We can do tuning per weapon type or magazine size… we can’t easily combine those two”
- 29:33 What were some of the weapons that didn’t make the cut for ITL?
- 30:15 around 40 weapons were on the list of requests, only 12 could make it 30:43 “Chroma Rush… FILO… Dust Rock Blues… 21% Delirium… Fatebringer… Dire Promise… Wastelander… Antiope-D… Trophy Hunter…. Erentil FR4… The cost to bring back weapons varies, the older they are the more expensive”
- 32:25 What was it like to design the Stranger’s (now Elsie’s) Rifle?
- 32:58 Bungie wanted to include several Destiny 1 weapons as long as the creation process was within the scope of the project. “If we have the source art from Destiny 1 it's not too bad, it's on the expensive side but it's not too bad. If we don't have the source art, we have to rebuild the thing from scratch and then that's the cost of a whole new weapon which was definitely out of scope. [Elsie's Rifle] was one where we were lucky we had the source art and an artist was able to quickly turn it around and we were able to include it."
33:52 - General Q&A start
- Deterministic recoil vs recoil direction stat: it isn’t intuitive to the player, how has deterministic recoil landed?
- Mercules gave an in-depth answer on his Firing Range appearance. Chris acknowledges that there is a disconnect between the pattern and the stat: 35:55 “If the DR pattern is already pushing to the right and you have a RD stat that pushes it to the right, it will go even further to the right OR if the stat pushes it to the left, it will center” not ideal situation but does allow for players to learn the recoil pattern of a weapon
- 38:34 What are the specifics on the Chain Reaction on specials nerf?
- 38:57 “On special weapons it will have a 15% smaller detonation radius and 20% less damage but on heavy weapons it will have the same radius and 30% more damage… heavy gl will be significantly better at add clear than a special gl” coming in TFS
- 39:34 “We can put this on all sorts of stuff now… I really want to see it on a pellet shotgun”
- 40:15 Chill Clip is getting tweaked in TFS, what are the details?
- 40:29 the nerf didn’t really affect Riptide but did hurt other weapons. Riptide with Chill Clip will freeze in three shots while other fusion rifle archetypes & other weapons will freeze in two shots. Impetus asks if Riptide was going to come back with Into the Light no playlists weapons were selected for ITL
- 42:23 What are the upcoming changes to Truth, Queensbreaker and the Colony?
- There are exotic changes coming with ITL but we’ll have to wait to hear more about that
- Queenbreaker: situationally good (on-demand Blind), “increasing damage against bosses, minibosses, Champions and vehicles by 12% and increasing reserve ammunition by 3”
- Truth: Grenades and Horseshoes removes impact damage so Bungie is buffing the AoE damage to deal a full rocket’s worth of damage “we increased its reverses by three which is on top of the previous reserve buff…[end result is] large number of rockets and three in the mag”
- Colony: “now spawns additional insectoids on final blows” minor enemies spawn one insectoid, higher targets can spawn up to five insectoids. These types of targets are called ground follows in game dev everyone goes on a tangent regarding ground follows and how confusing the Queensbreaker firing sound is
- Confirms that Necrochasm’s One for Thrall catalyst change is coming in TFS
- 47:54 Any news on Tessellation’s catalyst?
- Tessellation is getting a catalyst but no information yet “will be subclass/ability-related” more info soon
- 48:48 Questions on weird trait behavior
- Bait and Switch proccing on different shots: Networking issue between the server and client
- Cold Steel on Slammer, how should it apply Slow stacks on heavy attack: it should apply stacks once per heavy attack
- 51:43 What kind of weapon subfamilies are we getting in TFS?
- More information coming soon
- 52:15 What about more rocket-sidearms?
- “There are two of those coming in TFS, one solar one strand. Extremely spicy, shipped in a really good state” Chris wanted to make a rocket-sidearm before leaving Weapons team hence Indebted Kindness appearing in Warlord’s Ruin before the other two rocket-sidearms
- 54:00 What are the takeaways on adding roguelike mechanics to Seasons Deep, Witch, and Wish?
- Not Chris’ area, lots of excitement about that internally and may appear in future content
- 54:35 Can you tell us about the Playing Card weapon set featured in TFS?
- More information coming soon, they are definitely in the game
- 55:06 Any traits that sounded simple to create but were difficult to implement and vice versa?
- “Dawning Surprise was fairly complex to implement” Bait and Switch and Hawkmoon with their race conditions were expensive to implement. Conditional Finality was challenging in its interaction with armor mods.
- Easy to implement: Indomitability was pretty straightforward as well as Chain Reaction
- 1:00:13 How are you feeling about the reserve changes to rocket launchers and heavy grenade launchers?
- “Pretty happy with heavy weapon balance overall” Rockets seem a little spicy, “pretty sweeping set of changes to PvE weapon balance coming in TFS, little early to talk about it, you can definitely expect some meta changes” Impetus asks if the roles of heavy weapons has changed at all “We’ve pushed heavy weapons more into their intended role”
1:03:03 - Fun Q&A
- Favorite weapon exotic ornament?
- 30th Anniversary ornament for DMT, Dreaming City ornament for Traveler’s Chosen
- 1:05:33 Favorite sound design for a weapon you’ve worked on?
- Osteo Striga’s scream while the bullets fire “[fantasy for the sound design] stream of corrupted insects”
- DMT’s sound designer allegedly made the cowboy whistle in his bathroom during the work from home period of development
- 1:08:18 What other weapons could you lift out of other franchises and put them into Destiny?
- “So the problem is we’ve already done this a bunch of times” rocket pistols come from a certain franchise that can’t be named, Ticuu’s Divination was “what if Legolas had a magic solar bow”, Chris’s personal pick would be the fully automatic crossbow from Van Helsing
- 1:09:50 What other games are you playing right now?
- Helldivers 2, huge fan of the first game
- Just started playing Dragon’s Dogma 2
- Playing through Cyberpunk, 1:11:16 “really clever weapon design, some of the best gun feel that we see in non-Bungie games”
1:13:27 End of Q&A
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