Explaining the lore
How to make the Destiny universe a little easier to understand (concept)
Before I go into details I want to make it clear that I love Destiny. The combat loop that Bungie created with Halo is still there: Grenade, shoot, melee, retreat, reload, repeat. Bungie nailed it some ten years ago and even close friends of mine who hate purple lasers and all things science fiction will admit that the gameplay is solid.
Having played a lot of Destiny in a short amount of time however it saddens me to say that after finishing it I had no idea what I did or why I did it.
There were robots that travelled through time, zombies who lived on the Moon and glowing metal flowers on Earth. At some point I realised that the characters giving me missions over the radio were the same characters who I had met in the tower area about five hours earlier.
Say that again
Bungie.net has an extensive list of information cards about Destiny; they call them Grimoire Cards. They explain who the enemies are and why you have to shoot them.
Getting to them is a bit longwinded however as you have to open up a virtual stack of cards then go into another stack (for example enemies or weapons) before choosing a card to view and flip over for information.
You can only access these through the companion app or the Bungie site. Destiny has no section within the game explaining anything about the games universe.
This is not the most user friendly way of showing information (a shame as the user interface in Destiny is lovely) but it is there.
Arguably the game could have benefitted by having a Mass Effect style menu option, which users could access from within the game to read up on enemies and locations once they discovered them.
Looking at the design language that Bungie created for the interface I wanted to try and come up with a menu addition that would suitably add to the enjoyment of the games universe without distracting or changing the way it currently works.
So it’s got to go somewhere, right?
Looking at the current Destiny menu it makes sense to add a new section to the far right before settings. I’ll name it Lore in keeping with the tone of the game.
A quick look at the Grimoire Cards on Bungie.net shows a LOT of information. Enemies for example break down into twelve sub categories.
The current menu design in Destiny doesn’t use the vertical plane. However you can use the thumb sticks to move horizontally across and over the viewable screen space.
In order to not break the current menu logic we need to stack the screens and avoid any vertical scrolling.
The first level of the menu will list the six main sections. From here users can click into a section and the new screen will load in a similar fashion to the current menu.
Destiny has a nice parallax effect when you move the cursor around so I wanted to keep that effect by spacing out the content and giving everything a lot of room to move around.
Once in a section the title menu is repeated on the top left and expandable areas are listed below.
By pressing on the action button users can expand an area down; any sub sections are then indented and are easily clickable. When clicked the content area on the right will update to show imagery and copy related to that area.
Another nice feature that Destiny has is the ability to rotate your character. By hovering the cursor over your character model you can use the thumb sticks to rotate them slowly. This could work in this area too depending on what the content was.
Not all content will be able to have rotatable models though, some will require imagery. For those areas I used a small image which floats between the menu on the left and the content on the right.
For areas that have a lot of copy you also need a way to read more. As mentioned there is no vertical scrolling in the current menu so vertical pagination dots would be used on the far right of the copy area to indicate how much more content there is to read. Users can click on the second or third dot to read more content.
Back back back and back
This added section works at a basic level. Depending on how you categorise the content (which may need a slight rearrangement), you’re looking at a maximum of three button presses to get to an entry, four/five if you count needing to read lots of copy.
The only problem at the moment is the top area. Destiny removes the top navigation bar when users go into a new section.
If a user had pressed the action button five times to read content, they would then have to press the back button five times to reach the main menu again, which is not ideal.
The current settings section loads content in at the sides. An example of this would be the look controls or the voice options. By having this different layout it lets users quickly exit the section by pressing on the left or right bumpers if they desired.
A potential solution is to keep the top nav bar on the lore screen at all times, like on settings, which lets users instantly exit the lore section by pressing on the bumpers. This could be annoying if a user accidentally pressed the bumpers but at the same time, it allows them to quickly exit deep content so we might have to live with this.
Oh so the wizard came from the moon
I love the menu and general interface design of Destiny. I like to look at this as a potential addition which would make it easier for users to understand and appreciate the universe Bungie has obviously spent a lot of time and money on creating.
Having to rely on a second device in order to understand the games universe is not ideal and I, for one, missed a lot of useful information when I was playing the game.
Edit: I found one of the designers responsible for the user interface. I recommend checking out Ryan Klaverweide’s work if you wanted to see some of the original design explorations.
