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How Destiny 2 unexpectedly became a game about dealing with trauma

How Destiny 2 unexpectedly became a game about dealing with trauma

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When Destiny 2’s haunted season first started, it seemed inclined to pit players against Calus, a villain who’s been playing in the game since its 2017 release, with a new, frightening power— – In other words, another relatively typical bad guy waiting for the player to shoot. However, the characters in Destiny 2 actually end up fighting their own personal demons.

The stalwart superhero in Bungie’s MMO shooter is what the season’s title refers to as “haunted,” and the story unfolding each week is a surprisingly emotional and honest one about coming to terms with personal trauma. As Merritt K pointed out on Fanbyte, somehow, a shooter about killing giant aliens is talking about mental and emotional health — and doing an admirable job of tackling these difficult subjects.

The premise of Haunted Season is actually a product of the Shadowkeep expansion, in which players face spooky enemies called Nightmare. While nightmares look like red ghosts, they are actually manifestations of memory and regret. In Haunted Seasons, nightmares are weaponized against the game’s characters, forcing them to confront those regrets. Senior Narrative Designer Robert Brookes said that once Bungie had set the direction for the season, approaching the subject matter with sensitivity became an important part of the narrative process.

“Our goal at the start of the season was not to have mental health as a topic,” Brooks said in a panel interview that included several Bungie developers who worked on Haunted Seasons. “But once we realized what we wanted to do — like, ‘well, every character of our main cast is going to have nightmares’ — we realized we wanted to be like Shadowkeep against them, which was [Shadowkeep main character] Eris not only banishes her nightmares and makes them disappear, but restores calm after losing her fire team. “

Launched in 2019, the Shadowkeep expansion focuses on its protagonist, Eris Morn, as she grapples with survivors’ guilt over losing a friend.

“So being able to use the language that Shadowkeep has already built for us and then extending it allows us to develop a story that feels like this is a natural place for us to deal with the idea of ​​things related to mental health because you are How to get through nightmares? It’s just accepting them…so I think it’s just a natural progression of what we want to do.”

So far, The Haunted Season has focused on two main characters, Crow and Zavala, who have been a major part of the game’s overall narrative for over a year. Crow’s story is all about his past regrets – although he’s now the Guardian of Immortality, in his past life he was Uldren Sov, a villain who murdered Cayde-6, one of Destiny’s most popular characters. one. When people are resurrected as guardians, they forget their past lives, so Raven and Uldren are different people. But earlier this year, Udon’s memories were restored by Udon, who has been grappling with the fear that he might slip back into the dark place Uldon once occupied.

Meanwhile, Zavala has been the stoic leader of the Guardians since Destiny’s original launch in 2014, but of late, the role and the losses he’s suffered along the way have put a lot of pressure on him. The Haunted Season fleshes out Zavala’s character more than we’ve seen, telling the story of the Vanguard commander’s wife, Safiyah, and son, Hakim. Zavala and Safiyah were separated after his son was killed in a raid, and he has mourned them ever since, longing for their forgiveness and unwilling to pay any price for himself.

With the help of the player and other characters, both characters have dealt with their baggage through this season’s story. The fact that Destiny 2’s strongest heroes can’t solve these problems alone has always been at the heart of the stories Bungie told.

“The truest stories always touch on the fragments of life, the reality, and the kind of culture or global zeitgeist that everyone is going through,” explains Senior Narrative Designer Nikko Stevens. “Things like shame or doubt or sadness, they are feelings that everyone has and are not usually talked about. Emotional vulnerability is often given the stigma of being weak, which is kind of ridiculous. So we want to make sure we get over those The challenge is not just through shrewd tactics or brute force or some kind of new power that you unlock. We want these things to come from within. We want them to come from the people around those characters as well.

“There are these common tropes in the novel where characters just overcome their shortcomings through sheer willpower, or they have some pivotal moment that takes them beyond what they couldn’t before,” he continued. “In Destiny, our themes revolve around companionship, support and hope. So we wanted to use those ideas through our characters and show that even the most powerful people in the universe have all their power and power, Can’t beat their own demons either. They need help, just like everyone. That’s Sever’s main motivation [the weekly mission episode telling the season’s story]. We, as a team…all the designers, all the artists, right down to the audio, music and dialogue, we all want to show that these challenges must be overcome with understanding and support, not bluffing and force. “

Brooks also said that when he found himself dealing with his own grief and pain, the process of writing Destiny 2 characters to overcome grief and pain helped him personally.

“As we worked on this season, I didn’t expect it to become a personal journey,” he said. “But when we were at the end of the season, I lost my mother very unexpectedly. And spent three months dealing with the grief of three different characters and their different emotional journeys, and then having to go through my own Yes, right when I was done – that moment was almost like a surprise reward task that I didn’t ask for, to put it in layman’s terms. But I also feel that exploring these three different ways of dealing with trauma helps me for my own Getting ready for the journey as well. It also makes this a very personal season for me because getting the job and getting what I have is something my mother keeps pushing me. So in this story I have Little by little she arrives.”

Seasons of Haunted Severing Missions are traditional shooter levels, but they represent players helping Destiny 2’s characters as they grapple with trauma.

While The Haunted Season, which Bungie was originally meant to address mental health issues, may not have made it, Destiny 2’s story in general is in keeping with the studio’s recent approach to the topic. Back in 2021, Bungie added a page dedicated to mental health resources on its website, with in-game loading screen messages pointing players to the site.

Responses on social media suggest that Destiny 2 players will definitely resonate with Haunted Seasons. Brooks said he thinks games are useful in dealing with tough issues like grief and trauma, giving players a different way to deal with those feelings.

“Mental health in general is an important thing, not just for storytelling and acceptance for general audiences, but just for Bungie,” Brooks said. “And we wanted to do justice to the topic. It was our first major, real driving goal, because we knew it was something we wanted to get close to. It’s also a universal experience — everyone experiences it. Some lingering things.

“…mental health is a topic that not everyone likes to talk about. So sometimes games as a medium can be used to explore these things in a safer, newer way and give you a little bit of your The distance between the feelings of the game and the feelings of the characters on screen. We wanted to explore this in a way that is realistic, subtle and not easy to address, making our characters feel like they are human and actually dealing with these types struggle.”

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Wilbert Wood
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