D2: Monument of Triumph

Restoring the Masterpiece

ROLE	Design Lead (Through April), Product & UX Design
TEAM	Directly Led Preproduction: 2 UX Designers, 3 Technical UX Designers, 2 Visual Designers, 2 UI engineers
TIMEFRAME	Q4 2025 -Q1 2026
PLATFORM	PC, PlayStation, Xbox
CONSTRAINTS	Inexpensive to build · zero maintenance overhead
SCOPE	Product Design & UIUX Specs and execution for Distortions. First principals and preliminary designs for Distortions, Director UI requirements, public-zone events, narrative and NPC behaviors
OUTCOME	Highest concurrency on Steam since The Final Shape (168k), top selling 1st (Destiny 2), 2nd (Renegades), 4th (Edge of Fate) products simultaneously, continues to be in the top 50 grossing products on steam 2 months out

Context

According to SteamDB, the launch of the The Final Shape (TFS) in June of 2024 attracted Destiny 2’s second highest player concurrency of its time on Steam – just 2000 players shy of the 316k peak in Lightfall two years prior.

Though a critical success, achieving a 91% rating on OpenCritic, SteamDB numbers would show player counts taking a downward trend in the year following that release. The Light and Dark saga was concluded and with it the prevailing narrative for the Destiny universe to date.

A new Roadmap

The roadmap that would be announced, dubbed “Year of Prophecy, would shift Destiny 2 away from the model of a single, major annual release (with three smaller seasonal releases) to a two-expansions per year model, (each with two “Major Updates” and two Rewards Passes). And with that new model, major redesigns would follow.

The Edge of Fate hoped to kick off the multi-year “Fate Saga” by shifting the narrative focus toward “The Nine”, overhauling core systems like Armor 3.0 buildcrafting, and streamlining player navigation via a centralized Portal activity interface. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The hope was well reasoned and major parts of the design made sense. It would provide players with hundreds of hours of emergent play per season, with steadily growing challenge, that met their skill & gear level, and offered rewards proportional to their progression and challenge.

Outcome

Unfortunately engagement metrics and player sentiment decreased following the update, leading to a shift in community feedback regarding core mechanics. While these don’t reflect my personal viewpoints, A quick search on player sentiment illustrates the discourse around the game at that time.

Tiered Gear & Soft-Sunsetting

Introduction of a 1-to-5 tier system rendered older weapon and armor vaults largely obsolete due to active damage buffs on newer gear. [1, 2]

Increased Power Grind

A sharp increase in the power level requirement per cycle forced a heavy re-grind for basic readiness. [1]

Removal of Crafting/Focusing

Pulling back on weapon pattern crafting and focusing options left players heavily at the mercy of daily RNG rotations. [1]

“All-or-Nothing” Content Drops

Moving toward a structure where the narrative is packaged into a single self-contained mission—or delivered alongside major updates every three months—created extreme content droughts. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Vanishing Login Incentives

Eliminating the standard 10-to-12-week episodic narrative cadence left a massive void. Players felt they no longer had a compelling reason to log in every Tuesday for a piece of organic world-building. [1, 2, 3]

Disjointed Storytelling

Players criticized the solitary story missions for feeling like isolated check-ins rather than a fluid, evolving tale. [1, 2]

Lack of Emotional Momentum

Without weeks of dialogue build-up and character interactions between major expansion events, significant lore developments felt rushed or lacked proper emotional payoff. [1, 2]

Gimmicky Seasonal Hub Substitutes

In place of a steady narrative, the focus shifted heavily onto rotating playlist events and grinding older reprised weapons.

The “To-Do List” Fatigue

Instead of following a story, players felt the gameplay loops between expansions devolved entirely into completing passive tri-monthly checklists and rank triumphs just to maintain their endgame readiness. [1, 2, 3]

🙂😞😠🤬

Call To action

I was asked to come up with ritual activity loop which would replace the deprecated seasonal ritual.

The redesign had a couple of constraints:

It must be inexpensive to build
It must leverage existing systems and tech
It must require no maintenance
It must provide players with a recurring reason to play
It must recapture the ritual and magic of D2

Assessing the loss

As we analyzed the delta between the seasons preceding and following The Edge of Fate release, the full impact of the new product design came into clearer focus. We had overlooked core player motivations and the driving fantasy that brought players back week over week.

On one hand the business model of the seasonal content, with its weekly story missions and rich content refreshes (such as the seasonal artifact, novel activities, power resets, season pass, etc.) wasn’t sustainable. On the other hand, we’d attracted and nurtured a player base who would accept no less.

To solve this would require understanding player needs at the most fundamental level. Only though deep insight and an unprecedented team effort, concurrent with large staff transitions to Marathon, were we able to restore this masterpiece.

Ascertaining the “true” problem

Taking the direction from leadership, we started writing problem analysis, breaking each assumption down into atoms, abstracting their intent, and fleshing core Destiny 2 motivations out. We expanded on the asks from a product perspective, working to fully understand the underlying human truths.

Additionally, those contexts informed how we workshopped the problem. The focus of each workshop was on providing players with a sense of recurring purpose via the pseudo “social” effects of narrative (“Narrative causes me to experience a range social responses vicariously”) and the mechanical impetus of systems that promote actual social interactions (“The game mechanics encourage me to play with other people and progress through content that organically moves my relationships through the stages of relationship“).

A good example of this is how we took the stated need for “a refresh to the seasonal model.” Rather than taking that at face value we extrapolated player a need from that.

“As a human being, the reason I play games is experience a sense of agency and purpose in a context which fits my personal values.”As I experience catharsis of conflict and my role in it, the urgency of my purpose so too expires.”

What we came up with is that the solution required either or both of the following:

Some contrived context in the form of a compelling narrative driving player actions each cycle insofar as, “the seasonal model is a recurring story that I care about, my role within that narrative gives me a sense of purpose. When the narrative advances my role advances as well.”
Some emergent context where a set of mechanical systems inform how the game is experienced insofar as, “the mechanics of the seasonal model allow me to experience compelling ludo-narratives. The play I engage in makes for interesting stories I tell myself or friends (thus, it must offer recurring novelty).”Additional hanging text outside of columns.

Once those first principals were established we wrote critical success/fail criteria which would flesh out the product goals provided by leadership.

SUCCESS	FAIL
🤝 It forms interpersonal bonds	🔨It feels like chore
🏅 It fills the player with purpose	🌵 It makes D2 feel lonely & quiet
✨ It instills a sense of discovery & place	🤼 The character cast is underutilized.
🎉 Engagement come from innate desire	🎭 There’s no driving conflict
🎮 Interaction is fictionalized	👀 It’s not organically discoverable
🏆 time spent is relevant & rewarding

Synthesizing Solution

Our next step was to come up with the actual design one-pagers.

Somewhat of a personal quirk in my process is I like treating my colleagues as my first set of users
- They’re usually engaged and care deeply about the outcome
- They understand the development implications of one solution over another
- They (usually) love games and hopefully the specific game we’re working on
- They’ve likely played a lot of Destiny
With that, the composition of our synthesis was a major collaborative effort:
- Reviewed past few years of UR studies, player segmentation studies, and analytics data, and social media
- Ran several brainstorm sessions with the immediate team (consisting of myself and a number of UIUX discipline folks)
- Surveyed the team in larger groups to get a(n imperfect) preview on sentiment, how a retail player aggregate might react
  - We interviewed highly engaged players on the development team
  - Ran workshops with various other teams who would either be impacted by the design or contribute to it
    - This would allow us to determine feasibility and team motivation.
Equipped with this data, we defined fundamental player motivations – first principals – as to why players enjoy Destiny, what had been lost in Edge of Fate.
We listing them out as unmet needs, some of included:
1. As a player I don’t want to always sweat out progress. I need to have time to chill and make progress
2. I miss seeing other players, D2 is so lonely now and there’s no reason to go to social spaces
3. I need to matter in the world, and to have purpose to what I’m doing within a greater narrative momentum
4. I need agency over my gear and loadouts. Stop forcing me into a meta
5. Don’t make me do another slog through a grid of empty objectives
6. I need to feel a sense of place and fantasy not a perfunctory set of menus
We began organizing these into a proposal Figjam and Miro boards, which included dozens of unmet player motivations
From those, we drafted mini pitches like:
- Bring the fantasy back to my UI
  - Bring the director back
  - Use NPCs to tell stories
- Revive the organic social game for players, let them play with other people
  - Build a new or repurpose an old social activity on destinations
  - Make it rotate throughout the system
  - Funnel the player into those activities through clear UI
  - Make them relevant and rewarding
  - Pace them so players have calm beats to goof around with one another
- Give them a renewed purpose as a guardian
  - make them care about the characters
  - make the stakes high
  - strengthen the conflict and my their in it
  - Funnel them into what matters most
  - give them agency and reward them for how they want to play
  - tell deep and personal stories through organic and targeted discovery
- and so on…
Worked closely with our PMs and UR, we sought to determine which were the most impactful
- UR continually tested features for appeal and ran external and internal playtests
We aligned with activities, engagement, sandbox and other teams to develop the most laser focused, strongest set of features imaginable given the resources and time. The team strongly believed in the plan and did some of their best work.

Delivered Features

Sometimes we get to execute the features from start to finish. Sometimes we close. In this case, I was responsible for the synthesis work, planning, scheduling, specwriting, cross team communication and coordination, documentation in the months leading up to production, prior to transferring to Marathon. Though I didn’t close these features, members of my team would remain to do so and parts were handed off to other leads to close. The work my team did would serve as the catalyst for major features that revived critical parts of the game.

The UI was overhauled to put the Director back at the center of the gameplay experience. It functions as a clear visual guide to the Sol system, cleaning up congested menu structures and funneling players into core milestones, legacy content, and rewards with high legibility. (Finalized by the Engagement team)

The introduction of Distortions (Distorted Destinations), dynamic, roaming events that periodically cycle throughout the public patrol zones of the system. They were specifically built to revitalize the “public loop”—allowing un-fireteamed players to cross paths organically in lower-stress patrol areas, tackle tougher public encounters together, and hang out between waves. (Finalized and built by the Player Journey team)

Activity Scoring and Tiered Rewards shifted progression milestones toward team completion benchmarks (e.g., in Gambit Ops) rather than individual stat-chasing or narrow bounties, significantly reducing the “sweat” required to optimize gear progression. (Finalized by the Core Game Team and built by member of my team after I’d moved to Marathon)

Sparrow Racing League returned with many updates aimed at making races feel faster, livelier, and a bit more chaotic from lap to lap. My team ported the UI from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2, overhauling the technical framework, finessing the UI to feel more modern and integrated, and refactoring scoring

Outcomes

Destiny 2’s Monument of Triumph update drove a massive player surge and overwhelming community praise, pushing concurrent player counts past 164,000 on Steam while serving as a bittersweet final live-service sendoff. [1, 2]

Metrics

Peak Concurrent Players: Surpassed 164,000 concurrent players on Steam during launch week, exceeding the peak numbers of the prior year’s Edge of Fate expansion. [1]
Activity Re-engagement: Revitalized participation across nearly all historical nodes, successfully making core playlists, patrols, dungeons, and raids worth playing again via unified tiered loot. [1, 2]
Platform Comparison: Significantly outperformed the concurrent player metrics of Bungie’s parallel project, Marathon, during its launch window. [1]

Player Sentiment

General Reception: Reviews and community impressions are relentlessly positive, with many players and critics labeling it a “return to form” and a “monumental achievement” for the game’s final chapter. [1, 2, 3]
Community Morale: Players expressed a strong renewed sense of nostalgia, community connection, and excitement due to the return of classic rewards, Sparrow Racing League, and legacy items. [1, 2]
Bittersweet Resignation: Sentiment remains tinged with disappointment that this sprawling, highly praised overhaul arrives right as active live-service development and future content support wind down. [1, 2, 3, 4]