Great Interview With Luke Smith (Destiny)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Wednesday, June 14, 2017, 14:50 (2720 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Is there a world in which we never find out who the Exo Stranger was talking to on the phone?

Yeah, I mean, there’s a world where you never find out anything else about the Exo Stranger, and there’s a world where the Exo Stranger is the star of—

Destiny 3?

[Laughs] Yeah, there’s a world where the Exo Stranger has a cartoon or a comic book series or whatever. With Destiny, we have so many cool opportunities to tell stories in and out of the game. And we have a bunch of characters who are interesting, but the Exo Stranger is one that always makes me chuckle a little bit. Because I feel that’s one character where we actually wrapped up the arc. She gave you a sweet gun and then dissolved, presumably off to do something else. So I feel like, of all of our characters we’ve introduced and exited, we actually exited her effectively. But she always comes up. She always comes up, so there’s obviously something to that character that piques people’s curiosity.

(Coloration my edit)

I actually find my self shocked about this. I audibly gasped. In so many words - Bro! You can't be this blind. I refuse! I refuse. I mean... you know what. "I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain."

Are the old subclasses—Sunsinger, Defender and Bladedancer—gone? They’re replaced by Dawnblade, Sentinel and Arcstrider?

Yes. For all intents and purposes, they’re gone.

How did you decide which subclasses you wanted to give more major overhauls?

We peer into the subclasses and look at opportunities. While I know that many players love the Sunsinger warlock, I think the fantasy of having a super in Destiny is the fantasy of using it, and the Sunsinger encouraged you to not use your super. It encouraged you to sit on it and use it like a one-up when it was time. That also makes things like counterbalance more of a headache than we want it to be. So we knew we wanted to give the solar Warlock an overhaul.

I think we just had a different fantasy in mind for the Arcstrider from the Bladedancer. I think there are similarities in that they're modal, but there’s no stealth capabilities, and that’s a key difference. I think the Bladedancer could be, at times, certainly when the game first shipped, very difficult to fight [in PvP], and that the Arcstrider feels more fun and more fair to fight against.

With the Void Titan, in looking at the Sentinel, we wanted to take some cues from the Nightstalker Hunter. And I mean this in the sense of themes that override. When we were working on the Nightstalker for The Taken King, we were constructing a subclass that we specifically wanted to feel like an aggressive support character with battlefield control.

To be fair, Sunsinger was overall a fairly lame super to begin with, (through not the lamest, sorry Hunters,) in the scope of what all the other supers could do, and I'm saying that as a life long (or whatever work with me here) warlock. If it wasn't for the AMAZING ability to save the team from wipe, I think it would have been rarely used at all. That said - I think we ALL are going to miss the Warlock Rez. Particularly in the raid.