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Some Destiny 2 players are, we can fairly say, not in the highest spirits. Familiar events, RNG frustrations, player count woes, shallow loot pools, and endless bug complaints – plenty of them coming from me – have blunted community sentiment. That's especially true for this Episode after the all-time high of The Final Shape's release. Folks could use a little pick-me-up. With Act 3 of Episode 2, Revenant, Bungie's rolled out a new Exotic mission called Kell's Fall. It's got a slick Exotic shotgun called Slayer's Fang, more of the vampire energy players had been hoping to see this Episode, and some long-awaited narrative climax. A fresh mission to run with the clan is a good way to get me to log in, and I do love an Exotic shotgun. I don't know the staying power it will have, and this update definitely isn't a cure-all, but it is a welcome shot of stuff to do and see.
Before the mission's release, I spoke to several developers at Bungie about the making of Kell's Fall, its headlining shotgun, the impact of the latest narrative beats, and the surprising intricacy of the playable Scorn organ – the Scorgan – at the core of this vampire keep. We also discussed community sentiment, player fatigue, live service challenges, and the catch-22 of time-gating content. Kell's Fall isn't the biggest Exotic mission ever, but it is a stylish and deceptively layered space with enough secrets to – hopefully – keep us invested for a little bit.
Destiny's vampire
Bungie's wanted to do something with vampires for a while. With Kell's Fall, that vision comes across with Castlevania and Splatterhouse flare, Forsaken's Fikrul acting as our Dracula and the Barons returning for, surely, one last act. Magic mirrors, hidden doors, and undead hordes complete the look, with a huge spiral staircase for good measure. Activity designer Willie Cheng says they wanted to integrate the illusion and deception baked into vampire tropes and legends, turning away from the "definitely well-explored" blood and stakes, and imagining things like the mission's alternate mirror world and a "rogue's gallery" of devious allies. One of Fikrul's trusty rogues, the Trickster, has a chance to appear in other boss encounters – one of the ways Bungie wanted to add greater variance to Kell's Fall, alongside things like random braziers tied to puzzles.
"We're looking for ways to add variety without just building a ton of content that is linear," Cheng says. "So we're looking for these different ways to build permutations into each run so that the second, third time that you go through the basement dungeon area, you're not always looking for the same stuff. That sort of stuff is more sustainable to build."
"I think it's doing more than what we've done in the past," Kisko continues. "Supporting those replays week over week. Episode 2 does not have the time-gating, like you mentioned, and so the player can really play it at their leisure." The value here, he reiterates, is the ability to take things as you want and dip into more activities in a session.
"When we're thinking about how we support this new paradigm, I think it's through that variety, and we've learned lessons from previous episodes and seasons as well. And I think we are applying that through the variety and surprises in the Exotic mission that we're doing now."
A world without time-gating
A recurring theme with this Episode and the rollout of Kell's Fall has been Bungie's decision to do away with time-gating to see how it feels. This was a later pivot in the Episode 2 plans, and we've seen the good and bad of it. We are free to eat the whole cake at once, but inevitably there's a chorus of "wait, that's it?" when we run out of cake in one sitting, sometimes quite abruptly. This is true of the Episode model itself to some extent, too.
"The challenging thing with the new model is, players have clear expectations about what things were in the past in terms of how they interact with the vendors, or what the pacing of the story is, or the amount of content," says senior design lead Tom Farnsworth. "And with the Episodic model, there's Act 1 and it's all focused around Onslaught. Act 2 is all focused around [Tomb of Elders], and Act 3 is focused around the Exotic. And I think some players are going to appreciate that, and others are going to feel like they have smaller chunks to focus on initially, versus having them all to play with later.
"Those are some things that we're gonna have to look at and be like, is this the right model? What are the tweaks we can make to that going forward? I think live service gameplay models are literally one of the hardest challenges. I think you can look out in the broader game industry right now, and it's rough out there, and I really feel for a lot of things going on in the game industry, and that's something that is going to be one of our biggest challenges. What's the right way to give players what they want and let them have agency of experience, while also finding what you were saying about the sustainable path forward?"
"You can't have any one part of the game bear all the weight of someone's engagement," Farnsworth continues. "If everyone's time is only focused on the Episode and not on playing the core game or other aspects of the release, they're going to feel like they're going to eat everything and be done. So I know going forward, we're going to be investing in as many areas of the game as we can to make sure that players have something to do for each mood that they're in, whether they want to engage with the story, or they want to engage with an Exotic mission, or they want to play the core game, or they want to play PvP. And I think that's the challenge, making sure that if players feel like they've gobbled up everything somewhere they've got something else they can hop over to."
"I would also add that this is in some ways a good problem to have," narrative lead Jerome Virnich adds. "Because this is only a problem if your cake tastes good, right? If your cake is trash, nobody wants to eat it and it's not a discussion at all."
Bringing an end to things
For all the doom and gloom going around, not entirely undeservedly, I think the cake is very much not trash. I've become an even more hardcore-casual Destiny 2 player since The Final Shape: I log in when there's new stuff to do or collect, or when my friends want to do a dungeon or raid or GM, and I let the game chill otherwise. (Playing other games remains the ultimate Destiny 2 hack.) And the new stuff is generally fun when it's new. On the narrative side, with Kell's Fall putting a bow on this Episode, Virnich says "our only goal is to have an Act that is emotionally resonant, that does justice to the world and the characters, and does right by their character arcs." On that front, I look forward to reading the responses to the handling of Eramis, whose resolution, anticipated since Beyond Light in 2020, was more of a redemption arc than I ever expected. Speaking of, there is a greater push for finality as Destiny 2 gears up for its next expansion, which is looking to be key.
"It was our desire to leave all of the characters pretty settled at the end of this Episode," Virnich says. "We had another hanging thread with Mithrax and the influence of Nezarec's curse on him, which plays big into this season, and then his relationship both with Eido, his daughter, and then also with Eramis, who has a different idea of Eliksni unity, of Eliksni nationalism, than Mithrax does. And so we really wanted to leave Mithrax, Fikrul, and Eramis in kind of a settled place so that we didn't have those threads flapping in the wind anymore as we turn our attention to some really exciting unnamed things in the future."
"There's always a tension between finding a satisfying button or bow to put on a storyline, and leaving oneself room to grow, leaving threads to pick up later on down the road," he adds. "Every time we do any single mission, every time we write any single script, we are always asking ourselves, where do we want to leave the player in relation to the characters? And sometimes we look back and I think we might wish that we had settled some things that we left open. And then other times we wish that we had left ourselves a little more room to maneuver."
The Scorgan
As you replay Kell's Fall and finish these character arcs, you'll find Scorn music notes scrawled on the walls. These may end up being a bigger lure for some players than the Act finale. Technical designer and Scorgan mastermind Ashley Baker explains that the castle's central instrument, its size and majesty crystallized by a fateful piece of concept art, is slowly repaired run over run. Players discover new notes and pipes are restored by some mystery character scurrying around the castle. "So if you're able to blast through the entire Act 3 story day one, you will have a fully fixed organ," she says.
I love when games make me bust out some pen and paper, and I get the feeling the Scorgan will do that. "You're trying to find the notes in different locations, and where they are in those locations and the order that they're in matches the order of a melody that can be played on the Scorgan," Baker adds. Some melodies may unlock secret passages while others might screw you over, and "then there's some extra, extra secret ones that, for our music-savvy players, if they can figure those out, they might find a couple extra reactions."
The Scorgan has a full octave for Guardians to play, with notes meticulously concocted from over a dozen sound layers. Senior music editor Adam Kallibjian tells me these sounds include a PVC trombone, a pipe organ from Sweden, light bulbs, sonar pings, and even some percussion from a Destiny 1 track dating back to the House of Wolves. The "broken" notes throw in an antique car horn and a busted cello. You'll hear Scorgan notes throughout the Episode 2 score if you listen for them – a little extra juice "that helps sell that vampire vibe," Kallibjian says. Baker expects and hopes to see players use the full-fledged instrument to write and play their own songs. Enabling that kind of user-generated content was central to the Scorgan's design, to the point that music theory and notation was woven into the Scorn runes.
Making it replayable
We are, of course, going to be playing through Kell's Fall several times to fully max out Slayer's Fang and polish off the story beats. It's the cornerstone of Act 3. Yet before it was even released, I saw some players expressing exhaustion over another mission grind loop. (There's valid criticism to be made of this delivery, but some Destiny 2 players truly seem to hate having to play Destiny 2.) Varied hazards and puzzles can help, but since I hadn't yet played the mission, I wanted to learn more about how Bungie is building activities to suit multiple playthroughs, especially in the context of the un-time-gated era we're currently in. Kisko points to the addition of Exotic missions to the player journey and how this affected their view of what these missions look like.
"It's this delicate balance of creating something that's not too hard but still holds onto the core essence of what players expect out of Exotic missions," he says. With Kell's Fall being the "tentpole" for this Act, Kisko says Bungie paid special attention to how follow-up runs feel while trying to balance hardcore and casual play patterns.
Kell's Fall has some depth, but for pure combat it is markedly easier than the likes of the Whisper or Zero Hour missions, especially in the boss fights. But Kisko says they're open to making demanding missions like those again. "I wouldn't say anything is off the table," he affirms. "And I know that in a game like this, variety is amazing. We never would want to push something like the idea of a Whisper off the table for those players who enjoy it. We did Hawkmoon, and then it was like, alright, let's bring Presage in, and we brought the version with the timer back in. Some people really like it, some people don't, and that's okay.
"Sometimes we're gonna cater to certain audiences more than others, and if it's not your cup of tea, that's fine, because the next release will probably have something more aligned to them. So all that stuff's on the table and we have a lot of vehicles to deliver those. It's not just the Episodes or the different Acts within the Episodes. We also have our future stuff that we're really excited about in Frontiers."
