The Edge of Fate

In addition to Kepler's map, Neon built out the point of entry for Kepler. For a combination of technical reasons and product priorities this was placed at the top level of the game's new Portal interface, a card-based interface for launching the activities that would best help players grow their Power.

Still, the intent was for it to eventually live on the Director interface (and, with the game's Monument of Triumph expansion, this came to pass) so it was built with the Director's affordances and constraints in mind: ensuring its assets fit within a memory budget and its use of shaders and masking techniques fit within a performance profile.

On the ground, the “anomalous lines” that most visibly represent the anomaly on Kepler are present in great number. For clarity and readability at this scale, and to balance the overall piece, Visual Designers reduced their count.

While Neon's initial approach leaned more heavily towards trying to represent the lines as they appear on the ground, this proved tricky and looked busy. So, they simplified: while this effect may look complicated at first, it's actually a relatively straightforward UV animation with some clever masking.

Over the years, modifiers became a primary tool for adding non-statistical difficulty or complexity to Destiny 2's repeatable activities. Modifiers ranged from simple damage type buffs to the addition of new enemy types and behaviors that required buildcrafting to defeat.

As part of this new system, some modifiers would additionally add or remove Power from enemy combatants in the activity; more powerful combatants meant higher scores. To maximize rewards, players had to keep the Power level of enemy combatants above their own.

Neon's work augmented existing modifier communication by adding two new signals: a solid box around selectable modifiers, and a Power value at the bottom of modifiers with Power adjustments.

Previously, difficulty names had conveyed a general sense of enemy combatant damage & health pools. Specific information about the enforced difference between players' Power levels and the Power levels of enemy combatants in activities was communicated via modifiers that were present on the activity, which players frequently missed.

Now that players could configure the Power level of enemy combatants based on a combination of their taste and their desire for rewards, however, a more flexible and system was required. Neon collaborated with Sandbox, UX, and Visual Designers to implement a new system with distinctive shields (repurposing and expanding on existing Destiny visuals) and succinct labels. This information hierarchy gave players a noticeable and quickly-scannable rough signal for difficulty, and placed specific information alongside it that had previously felt buried.

During activity gameplay, the HUD displayed different icons above enemies based on their toughness: Neon adapted this system to share the calculations between the HUD and the pre-launch UI, reinforcing players' understanding of combatant difficulty through parity.

Showing players a predicted score for their current configuration was not enough, though: when selecting modifiers, players needed to understand the impact a potential modifier would have on their score. Without this, the UI team hypothesized that configuring an activity would be a chore riddled with trial and error. Playtests confirmed these suspicions.

This had been identified as a high-impact feature earlier on, but priorities slipped over the course of development and resources were allocated elsewhere; it risked being pushed to a later release. Near the end of the development cycle Neon collaborated with UI Engineers, building alignment between their team and area leads to fast-track its implementation, completing it just ahead of their lock date.