Destiny 2 - Dual Destiny
Dual Destiny is a secret two-player end-game activity added to MMO / FPS Destiny 2 in Summer 2024 as part of The Final Shape expansion - it is a unique mission in Destiny in that it strictly requires two players, who are asked to solve cryptic puzzles that rely on the mission’s two-player nature.
Studio: Bungie
Team Size: Large AAA
Platforms: PC, Playstation, Xbox
My Role: Associate Technical Designer (Object Tech)
My responsibilities:
Create complex game objects and character buffs via in-engine setup and scripting.
Collaborate with activity designers, world artists, VFX artists, and audio designers to make sure content is easy to work with for all disciplines.
Work with the design team and test via playtests and design discussions to iterate on the raid.
More Detail
Light and Dark
The core mechanic of Dual Destiny involves each of the two players being assigned a light or dark alignment, depending on their chosen subclass. Various puzzles in the activity ask each of the players to take on different roles depending on their alignment.
Assigning these alignments, and keeping them in the correct state, was actually a very challenging problem given Destiny’s server architecture. Players could move from one host server to another as they traversed the level, and keeping buffs in sync as different servers traded authority for different players, creating and cleaning up player game objects along the way, was a technical hurdle I was able to solve on a short timeline.
The alignment system also had to be robust against any kind exploits, particularly ways to cheat the system by players disconnecting and reconnecting to the server, possibly with different loadouts and subclasses equipped each time.
We shipped the system with no significant bugs, which was a big achievement given the tight timeline for the project.
Community Reaction
Dual Destiny was considered by the community one of the best activities ever shipped in Destiny 2 - major D2 content creator Datto called it “arguably one of the best Bungie has ever made.”
The activity was built under tight time constraints during the last stretch of development on The Final Shape, which was a critical release for D2.
It is probably the work I am most proud of from my time on Destiny. Building the activity involved close collaboration with a small group of activity designers and artists without substantial support from outside the small team. I was lucky to get to be part of such a talented group, and consider this project a special achievement where I had a big impact on the quality of the game.
