Bungie Weekly Update - Mar 12 at 11:18:16 PM

This week at Bungie, we're mapping the next game changer for your Guardian.

If you checked in with us last week, we teased you with the next upgrade for Destiny. With the dust from 1.1.1 still settling, it wasn't yet time to dig into new details. We could only say that you'll download it before the House of Wolves arrives.

Until then, we'll call it 1.1.2, because a fancier name like "Claude" or "Miguel" wouldn't help us with version control. For now, we can start to talk about what it will contain. Once again, it will add some new features to the game - and fix some old ones.

Let's plot a course to what's next, and see if you like where we're headed.

It's Alive!

This time last year, every developer in the studio was focused on a single goal: Preparing Destiny for launch. We were building a new world - and dreaming of the day when the walls would fall away and you'd be invited in to make it your own. That's what brought us in to work every day. Every Artist. Every Engineer. Every Designer. They were all striving to enable your first steps into that world.

Ever since Destiny went live, there have been various teams at Bungie. We're all working on Destiny, but different teams have goals for different projects. We've specialized to meet the needs of this sprawling community. Each class of developer has a specific focus. Some of them are creating new adventures for your Guardian - those both revealed and still secret.

The team we're talking to today supports the Live Game. They're the ones looking at the original blueprints to support the journey we began last September. They help us all to evolve, one update at a time.

One of the goals of the Live Team is to listen to the player and improve their experience. They hear your voice when you tell us what you want. They react to what you're teaching us as citizens of the world we built.

Design Lead M.E. Chung talks about how we decide what to include in each update:

here are a lot of things that factor into which features make it into a release. We get feedback from everywhere. We meet with our Community and Player Support Teams every week. They bring up the latest topics and top sentiment from various forums (b.net, reddit, etc). The User Research team gives us a regular report on how the community is spending their time in the game. We have conversations in the halls with our coworkers who ask for changes. We get friendly peer pressure from our buddies outside the studio when we're online, playing the game for ourselves.

Our goal is to figure out what will result in the best experiences and make the most players happy. Every day, we have to think about how we allocate our time. Some plans can be surprisingly complicated to execute. At the end of the day, we want to continue to make the experience of playing Destiny better and deliver content to keep things fresh (and boy, do we wish we were faster). It's been a huge learning process for us, and we are committed to improving.

Lead Producer Matt Priestley talks about the challenges in deploying new content:

We need to pick improvements that we can design, build, test, and release with quality in a given timeframe. That starts with Design and Player Support nominating a set of changes. We put our ideas on the whiteboard and try to drive an acceptable Design and Test plan for each of them before our internal cutoff date. Our first job is to start with a big ambition. Our second job is to scope to what we can actually get done. Many ideas don't meet our standards for the time we have.

With a game as complex as Destiny, that process can be tough. Take, for example, our fix for losing heavy ammo on death. That bug arose from the way in which several major gameplay systems work together. We engineered several fixes, but always wound up creating new bugs. We didn't think it was acceptable to create new problems for a minority of players. Eventually, one of our engineers had a clever insight for how to fix the bug, and we patched it in the 1.1.1 Update.

The room where they meet is a place where you are discussed constantly. If you're talking about an issue on the forum, it's a safe bet that are they're working it out on their whiteboards. Next up, 1.1.2 is their project. While they have yet to arrive at a locked list of guaranteed features, there are some priorities that they're excited about exploring...

• Vault Space - We know you need more space to collect all the treasures you gain from your missions, and more gear is on the way.
  
• Raid Fixes - There are times when Atheon and Crota can be uncooperative, so we're tackling their worst bugs.
  
• Audio and Visual - Not everyone wants to see or hear a game the same way, which is why we're looking at providing more options.
  
• PVP Ammunition - The Crucible team wants to change the way ammo crates dictate the flow of a battle.
  
• Strikes - The numbers tell us that there are some missions that are successfully completed far less than others, inspiring us to look at why people quit.
  

Fair Warning: Our hopes and dreams are always at the mercy of "Triage!" The longer we support the Live Game, though, the more confident we feel about calling the shot.

1.1.2 is still weeks away. That gives us plenty of time to delve into each point. We'll talk about this again (starting next week).

Knowledge is Power

We just made the point that talking to us on the Bungie.net forum is a great way to add your voice to the process we use to support Destiny. There's another team at Bungie who is devoted to addressing your issues, and making sure they end up on the Live Team whiteboards. Every week, they share with us their report...

In an effort to communicate to players about the issues we're investigating, we have created more articles on known issues and why they occur. Please take a look at some of our newest knowledge-base articles:

• Sword of Crota turning speed issue
  
• List of Crota's End issues
  
• List of Vault of Glass issues
  
• Black Hammer perks
  
• Text in game replaced by question marks
  

We're seeing some reports of players losing items when transferring items using the Companion App or their Bungie.net profile. We are actively investigating this issue and have a list of steps you can follow to attempt to retrieve these items.

Your Feedback is a huge Help to us. Please keep it coming!

Time to Silence Your Phones

Not all Legends are born from dance videos. Sometimes, all you need to shine is a little luck and a lot of skill.

WINNER: Sweet cuts don't always need a Hunter's Knife.
Warning: Lyrics NSFW, and LOL at 0:43.

https://t.co/JwxP2HHBtw #DestinyMOTW

— YUNG DRAGONiTE (@Originnnn) March 12, 2015

HONORABLE MENTION: He's a one man army in a bubble.

Going so HAM: http://t.co/DHx9ZvKp3i @Bungie @DestinyTheGame #DestinyMOTW

— Derek Evans (@DogofWar1) March 9, 2015

That dog of war dares you to show us a better clip. Make sure you tag it with #DestinyMOTW so we can see it. We'll make you famous!

Pay us a visit in exactly seven days to learn more about what's coming up soon. In the meantime, let's try something different for the weekly feedback loop. As we mentioned up above, the forum is where we look to learn about you. Start a new topic there to tell us what you think about what's coming to Destiny or add your thoughts to a debate in progress. Be sure to cast some votes for the topics you like the most, too.

The conversations that you have with each other are the most valuable.

DeeJ, out.