“Hey Ghost, could you grab my Gjallarhorn?” -The Guardian
A Ghost Loadout System
A concise and incomplete history of Destiny 2 for context
Destiny 2, the second entry in the Destiny saga by acclaimed AAA studio, Bungie, launched without features that players had become accustomed to in the original release. From the dual-primary weapon system to the simplified subclass trees, customization opportunities were reduced and simplified, leaving gamers like myself feeling reduced and simplified, too. Destiny 1 provided seemingly endless gear, garb, and exotics to allow players to build unique character builds. Why take that freedom away in the sequel?
Because Bungie is deeply in-tune with its community, the studio pivoted from this simplified version of the game and gradually started to reintroduce some of the features that made the initial game so good. Features such as Armor 2.0 with mods and weapons that were not locked to the primary or secondary slot started to create a huge build-crafting community.
All these additional ways to add power to my guardian left me wondering, when would D2 get a loadout system to manage all this newfound power? As a UI designer and Destiny fan, I wanted to see what I could come up with. And after 2 years of noodling and a deadline brought on by Bungie announcing an official loadout system launching with Lightfall, here’s what I’ve come up with.
Eyes up, Guardian
It’s the day before Bungie’s latest yearly release and as a fan, I’m excited! Lightfall is introducing a slew of new features that have been teased for the last year including the infamous green subclass, which we now know as Strand. But Strand isn’t the only new feature coming to Destiny.
Bungie has done a great job introducing new ways for players to strategically decimate its large variety of enemies. The “Subclass 3.0” system changed how players could customize their guardians’ abilities to be more lethal across experiences. They’ve also continued to double down on how players can get additional buffs and de-buffs via the modification system on their armor, introduced in Season of the Warmind (3).
The character screen
I chose the character screen as my starting point. In Destiny, this is where you can modify everything from the way you wield the light (or dark), the ornaments to make your cloak look a bit more wolfy, and the specific mods placed on your weapons and armor to make them perform better in certain areas. Mods can also improve your character’s intrinsic abilities. For instance, if you wanted the ability to dodge more as a hunter, you would equip more mobility mods to your armor pieces until you achieved the level that you were looking for.
This function manages guardian stats, important info the player needs to determine if they can perform in-game actions the way they want. I wanted to use this existing system for crafting an in-game loadout feature with a storytelling approach to how a loadout fits into the lore of Destiny 2.
The Guardian’s best friend, The Ghost
The Ghost is the Guardian’s biggest ally. It picks the Guardian up when they fall (out of the tower), help the Guardian hack into control consoles, provides waypoints to the next fight, and could hold the Guardian’s guns, armor, and Gjallardoodles and equip them for that next fight. From the early stages of thinking through this idea, I thought this made sense, and the Ghost would even be able to remember and recommend the most effective loadouts for your Guardian’s combat style.
I have dubbed this concept the “Ghost loadout system”. There are three main components to this system: customizing a loadout in the character screen, the ability to apply, set, save, and reconfigure loadouts within the character screen, and lastly, the ability to access some of these loadouts on the go, via your Ghost. Let’s jump in.
The Ghost Pack
Using the character menu, players were already customizing loadouts but didn’t have a place to store them in-game. Games such as Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had loadout (class) systems, but placed them in the sub-nav menu. I wanted to make sure the loadout system was accessible in the character menu.
Here’s my Ghost Pack, or G/Pack for short:
The G/Pack is where players save their loadouts for in-game use. There are two ways to do this. The first way is from the character menu. From the image, you can see there are four “swappable slots” located below the G/Pack heading. These slots allow players to quickly save what they have equipped on their Guardian. Once saved, players will also have the ability to reconfigure or lock these loadouts for future use. Once set to one of these four slots, players will be able to quickly equip the loadout from the character screen.
The second way is to use the “Save Loadouts” button. This allows players to save what is currently mapped to their Guardian and places it in one of the open slots within the G/Pack (12 total), but not one of the four key bound slots (which you can change later).
Once a player has saved a loadout into the G/Pack by either using a swappable slot or the save button, they will be able to edit the name of the loadout, select and apply it to one of the four available slots, mapped to the four directional pad buttons, or reconfigure the loadout to open up additional space in the G/Pack for other loadout options.
Access to the G/Pack from Nav mode
Now that we have an understanding of how a player can create and save a loadout, how does the Ghost come into play? I talked about the four swappable slots and how these four slots are mapped to the directional pad on the controller. This comes into play when a player wants to go from one game mode of Destiny to a different game mode without interrupting the flow of the game. With the G/Pack added to the “Nav Mode”, players would have access to four of their favorite loadouts using the key binds of the left trigger + whichever direction the player chooses.
Navigating into the G/Pack, we can see now that we have two saved loadouts, both mapped to the directional pad.
Exiting the character screen, the player is now “in-game” and can access the Ghost Nav menu. In this view, the player can see the two setup loadouts mapped to the directional wheel provided in the G/Pack menu. The player can now choose to swap to the other loadout, or keep it as is. Either way, the G/Pack makes the change easy for the player to do on the fly! Thanks, Ghost!
Learnings from this experiment
Thinking about a player’s experience and how everything in a game has to work and feel a certain way has been a humbling experience. As I worked through how I would translate each part of this system into the current (pre-Lightfall) game experience, I worked hard to maintain the patterns and visual affordances that Bungie has already worked so hard to build. As someone who enjoys studying and playing with the bounds of an already-established system, this was a real challenge. There is so much information that is easily accessible and understandable that when you really get under the hood, you can see how much time it takes to make sure all these systems in Destiny work together to deliver an unparalleled player experience.
Now, with all this being said, let’s give a big shout-out to Bungie for giving us what we’ve all been asking for, a true loadout system to build-craft the ultimate, baddy-destroying, true-to-you Guardian that you’ve always wanted!
See you star side, space cowboy.
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Some resources that were clutch:
https://app.destinyitemmanager.com/login — You know it, you love it.
https://data.destinysets.com/ — You thought I re-made all these icons?!
Adobe Xd, Photoshop, and illustrator, working together as intended
Destiny 2; I check the source material out quite frequently.
Special thanks on my first Medium post:
Tim Neal; A true gamer at heart, and a great soundboard.
Megan Van Patten; For giving me way too much of her time talking about Destiny.
Aashrey Sharma; For providing me with some excellent feedback throughout the process. Check out his Figma plugin, Prototyper.
