I've been thinking about raids in Destiny and can't help but feel excited about the possibilities that combining more traditional MMO concepts with a FPS team environment brings. My inventive side is tickled by this more than a little, so in that spirit I propose a fun little exercise: design your own raid encounter!

Because its for fun, you can choose how many players the encounter is designed for, and maybe even bend what we know about the story to suit your needs.

My raid would involve the mysterious 5th race, which I believe is going to consist of dark smoke like entities that are either capable of possessing or mind controlling other living creatures. Since I don't have much to go on so far as what these creatures might look like when corporeal, I'm going to focus on the gameplay features primarily.

the encounter would be designed for six people, and the boss would be stationary at one end of a medium sized arena.

For attacks, its difficult to say since we don't really know anything at all about this race, but I'll go ahead and take some artistic license and say it uses a few attacks. One would be a sort of dark tendril that races out from the entity, is capable of turns and some mild "seeking" behavior, as well as somewhat twisting around cover to discourage turtling behavior. On impact it would explode in some sort of gravitational distorting manner (mini black hole, perhaps) and do damage based on how close to the center you are when it gets there. Another attack could be a laser beam that slashes or arcs through the air. Maybe another skill would be for the entity to have a chance to intercept incoming grenades mid-flight and throw them back at the guardians, using a shadowy tentacle of some sort of course, maybe at a clip of about 25-30%, so it still feels worthwhile to use grenades, but it has a chance of backfiring on you.

The key feature of the fight though would be the boss' ability to posses/mind control members of your firetime, and turn them into AI controlled hostiles until you killed them, at which point the possession/mind control would end and you could revive the player and allow them to rejoin the team.

To make things interesting, the possessed/mind controlled players would be slightly supercharged by this process, gaining some additional health/movespeed so all 5 players don't just stomp the newly turned guardian instantly.

The main tension of the fight would come from the idea that you need to kill/revive the possessed/mind controlled guardian before a 2nd guardian suffered the same fate. Once there are 2 members of your party turned against you, I would tweak the difficulty so that that situation would make things very challenging for the party, and could result in a wipe. If things progressed further and 3 people became possessed/mind controlled, I would tweak the difficulty so that that would be an almost guaranteed wipe.

In order to provide motivation not to just play the encounter super cautiously and focus immediately and exclusively on killing/reviving turned guardians, to the detriment of actually damaging the boss, I would have the boss slowly increase in power the longer the fight went on. Increase in damage, maybe attack speed, maybe add some new attack types at certain minute thresholds, etc.

I think this kind of encounter would encourage communication. For example, where in arena the mind controlled person is, when its important that these turned guardians are threatening to become a problem and all focus needs to be on getting them down and revived, etc. And would provide a constant source of tension between managing the converted guardians and damaging the boss itself, while also prodding you along to work quickly, so to speak, because time is of the essence.

There could be other features of the battle thrown in here, but the real star of the show would be the possession/mind control. Watching as the AI tried its best to destroy your party would probably be a neat mixture of hand wringing and laughter, I imagine.

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This is set on Mars in the open desert between two Cabal holdouts. They need to transport something very important between their bases, but due to a sandstorm (I hope we see those on Mars), they are forced to move it on ground with no air support. A group of 6 guardians are sent to make sure the cargo does not arrive.

The guardians are dropped a safe distance from the Cabal base. The convoy has just left so they’ve got to rush to catch up. The guardians have access to Destiny’s version of the warthog and they can call down their shrikes if needed. The convoy is moving slightly slower than the guardians’ vehicles (unless they shopped at Gamestop), and continues to move at the same speed through most of the mission. There are some bottlenecks in some gullies and some switchbacks down hills with offer opportunities for ambush and coordinated attacks. The guardians fail the mission if the convoy makes it to the other base. Dying sets you back by either having to wait 30 seconds for respawn (which lets the convoy get closer to its base) or by having to ask your teammates to turn back and revive you (then you all have to catch back up).

The convoy is composed of one very large vehicle that carries the objective (think fast moving mammoth), and several combat vehicles as support. The guardians need to fight off the support vehicles to be able to board the main vehicle safely. You could use a couple of different strategies by either killing them all or having part of the team lure them away from the main vehicle while the other part of the team boards it (which saves you precious time). Once on board the guardians must eliminate the guards and find the main control panel. The vehicle is automated, so your ghost will need some time to hack it while you fight off new support units that have arrived and are trying to retake the vehicle. Once the vehicle is stopped and the storage crates are unlocked, the guardians must quickly recover the loot that the Cabal were carrying, set explosives to destroy the vehicle, and escape to a safe pickup spot while fighting off the remainder of the attack vehicles.

I'm a little scared now. I've had this exact scenario tumbling around in my mind for a few months now, but I don't think I've ever mentioned it to anyone. Even the little details about the sandstorm, the speed of the vehicles, the cargo vehicle being akin to a giant mammoth/elephant, and the terrain elevations are exactly as I imagined.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD.

It appears the mind tap I installed at the LAN is working.

And quit thinking about Canecutter that way. It's creepy.

So, you're telling me you wouldn't chow down on some delicious, homemade Canecutter stew?

stealth aboard ship, replace the objective with a McGuffin, let the vehicle return to base, press McGuffin button, base turns into a mirage that is quickly forgotten by the desert.

So, you're telling me you wouldn't chow down on some delicious, homemade Canecutter stew?

Not while Cane's dressed like that, no.

Ok, maybe.

Yes.

Thanks. If you sit around thinking about it, the merging of the FPS genre and the MMO raid could lead to all kinds of really intriguing encounters that I don't think we've seen in an FPS ever before. It really is an area where I think Bungie can separate itself from the pack with Destiny, at least so far as features and innovation are concerned.

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Landmines.