One of the longest running complaints leveled at both the original Destiny and Destiny 2 is that bosses are boring. The original Destiny was infamous for its Strike bosses which were only challenging in how many bullets they could absorb. Meanwhile, a running joke for Destiny 2 is that bosses are usually just enlarged versions of standard enemies.
In a recent series of tweets, Bungie senior game designer Brendan Thorne confirmed what Destiny players have long feared. Bungie does indeed use repurposed assets for making new raid and Strike boss encounters. However, as Thorne explained, there’s a good reason for that: building new assets from scratch takes a lot of work.
Building a Destiny 2 Boss Encounter
Within his tweet thread, Thorne outlined a potential design scenario for the Bungie development team. The scenario shows that repurposing old assets and creating an entire new boss from scratch are two very different things. For any given Destiny encounter, animators, tech artists, and FX artists all have to synergize their efforts. Also, those same designers are working on a tight schedule which means they don’t have much time to work with.
Whatever content the encounter is part of has to ship by a certain date, and building new assets takes time. With all that in mind, which of the following two scenarios do you think is more appealing to Bungie’s designers?
- Having to create a brand new model rig from scratch (a process which can take several months alone). Then having to create new animations, concept art, FX, and audio for the model. THEN having to figure out more minute details like pathing, rigging, attack animations, and environmental clipping. Finally having to test the model to ensure its implementation doesn’t break any other moving components in the encounter.
- Using an existing upscaled model with minor visual tweaks which you know won’t break anything else. You already have the animations, FX, audio, and other components to smoothly add the model into the encounter. Work is still needed to ensure the encounter works, but not nearly as much as in the first scenario.
In short, it’s not because of laziness that most bosses are just bigger standard enemies with a stomp attack. Bungie wants to ensure Destiny 2 gets regular content drops like the recently launched Black Armory expansion. Having to put up with slightly less-exciting boss fights feels like a worthy compromise in that regard. Plus, we still get fun seasonal events like the currently available Dawning holiday event.