Destiny 2 Seasons – Core Seasonal Activities

This is going to be a relatively short post about core seasonal activities in Destiny 2, their general format from Shadowkeep to Season of the Lost, and how the format can evolve to further engage players while maintaining existing design goals.

Iteration Over Innovation

I'm going to start this post by highlighting a point made by Tom Farnsworth, a Senior Design Lead at Bungie. You can read it for yourself here on the right, but in essence he says that "for seasonal content, we prioritize iterating on known features to keep the quality bar high while avoiding crunch". This development stance is evident in the style, delivery, and quality of seasonal content — specifically the core seasonal activity.

When I say something is a core seasonal activity, I mean that it is:

1. Matchmade, or is located in a public space

2. Progresses the seasonal narrative

3. Low stakes

4. Low mechanics, primarily combatant-slaying

Core seasonal activities have been Vex Offensive, Sundial, Seraph Tower, Contact, Battlegrounds, Override, and the current season's Astral Alignment. Some seasonal activities are bulky (looking at you, Sundial) while others are much lighter in terms of new content, like Contact. I'd place Astral Alignment somewhere in the middle of those two.

Each of these uses resources, mechanics, or locations developed in previous releases, and there is are objective(s) in each activity that resemble some implementation of one of the following formats:

• Defend the zone from enemy combatants (timed, or X total combatant defeats)

• Bring object A to the indicated zone and deposit it

Plate defense and its various appearances has been in Destiny since Destiny's inception; picking up and depositing motes was introduced in 2018 with Forsaken's release; picking up and depositing balls was introduced in 2017 with Destiny 2's release; throwing balls to a target or another player was introduced with Spire of Stars in 2018. Riven's Eye is being used in some form in Astral Alignment and it too was introduced with the Last Wish raid back in 2018.

None of this is to say that reuse is bad — it makes space for developers to work on those innovative new things while not breaking the current release of the game or crunching. But reuse of mechanics can lead to player burnout when engaging with an activity loop that remains largely the same over the course of a year.

So how do you change the format of core seasonal activities to avoid burnout while simultaneously avoiding developer crunch by focusing on iterating existing content? I feel like the answer to this lies in content which has been developed alongside the core seasonal activities since Season of Dawn in 2019.

Supplemental seasonal activities aren't typically matchmade and focus on more intimate experiences exploring new locations and defeating big bads. My favorite examples of these would have to be Expunge and Shattered Realm. Both focus on exploring beautiful zones with a mix of puzzles, combat, and platforming that keep repeat runs engaging and fresh. It is this mixing of disparate elements that I think core seasonal activities should focus much more attention on.

Menagerie remains a community favorite after nearly two whole years of new seasonal content, and I think that's because of its similarities with the aforementioned supplemental seasonal activities. Plenty of people reference its generous and deterministic reward system as how other core seasonal activities' reward systems should be structured, but with the introduction of Umbral Engrams I think loot is easier to selectively pursue now than it has ever been.

Menagerie sent players on a random assortment of different activities strung together in a massive space, finished off with a weekly rotating boss from a pool of 3, each with their own boss rooms and fight mechanics. The activities all differed mechanically as well, with only two sharing an encounter space. Vex craniums were used; Hive swords were used; plate defense, depositing buffs, even a platforming challenge — all things that were developed prior to Menagerie — were used in what I can only call a wonderful smorgasbord throwback to Destiny 2's first raid, Leviathan. Granted, I believe that was the point, but the activity experience has remained something Destiny's community has consistently touted as the best. Sundial is the only activity I can think of that comes close to Menagerie's level of replayability and engagement, and that's largely because of the play-spaces and assortment of mechanics, coupled with another weekly rotating boss system. While it is true that both activities had highly deterministic loot, and were quite generous, the crux of why they were enjoyed comes down to the fact that people were able to engage heavily with those loot systems without burning themselves out on the road there.

If an activity isn't highly replayable, which I think comes down to how well an activity mitigates player burnout, no normal amount of rewards will keep players coming back. That isn't even touching on the quality of the rewards and power/fashion creep.

My ultimate point is this:

Rewards drive initial engagement. They grab community and content creator focus.

Gameplay experience drives replayability. It keeps the reward chase enjoyable.

So the focus shouldn't necessarily be on providing a vehicle for players to matchmake and acquire loot, but rather creating at least one reward that really grabs community attention, and then crafting a journey to get that reward that keeps players coming back. If you found this interesting, I'm glad you did; I'll be posting more things like this in the future.

As always, thank you for reading.