Bungie discusses the design philosophy behind Destiny's newest raid and what fans can expect from the sci-fi shooter's signature 6-player cooperative endgame challenge.

Destiny: Rise of Iron is just under a month away from launch, and there are a lot of features coming in the expansion that will officially kick off Destiny’s Year Three. One piece of content many fans are looking forward to is the latest raid, called Wrath of the Machine.

Bungie’s lead raid designer, Gavin Irby, recently sat down with Game Informer to talk new details about Wrath of the Machine, its design philosophy, and how it compares to past raids.

Wrath of the Machine features the Fallen Devil Splicer enemy type, and will be the culmination of the expansion's storyline about the Iron Lords and the nanotech virus known as SIVA. Irby says when the raid design team at Bungie starts planning a new raid, they sit down and identify a theme that influences everything in that activity.

For Wrath of the Machine, that theme is "collision". Irby says it started as a lofty theme, which transformed into an action-packed one:

“We started with some highfalutin' ideas and literary themes that we were trying to achieve, and through iterations it actually became about smashing s--- into other s---. […] The Fallen faction with the SIVA, that’s partly where that comes from, the hybridization and the idea of these two things coming together, that’s some of the s--- smashing into other s---. But in gameplay that just turned into like well, let’s start smashing stuff and that’s awesome.”

In relation to other raids of Destiny’s past, Irby discussed how Vault of Glass was like “Raid Middle School” where players were learning the basis of how raids work in Destiny. King’s Fall was designed to take players to the next level of difficulty. But Wrath of the Machine looks to be focusing more on the fun and the action:

“We had King’s Fall and it’s like, okay we’ve explored Raid College, let’s make something that just purely about fun. Put control in your hands, play up the strengths of the Destiny sandbox so it’s sort of leaning the pendulum in the other direction.”

It appears that Wrath of the Machine may be similar in some way to Crota’s End, which was much more of an action sprint through a raid instead of the very methodical proceedings in Vault of Glass and King’s Fall. But Irby says that doesn’t mean Wrath of the Machine is going to be easy, at least not at first:

"It’s hard. It’s largely a function of what your light level is versus the raid. King’s Fall has this property of where even if you’re over-leveling the mechanics don’t get easier so it still maintains this high difficulty, which at the time we felt was a virtue because people specifically wanted it and had been asking for it, and I think maybe now the community might be ready for something a little different that they can actually overlevel and get some mastery over."

Wrath of the Machine sounds like a good contrast to King’s Fall. A higher Light level seems like a huge advantage in this raid, which should cause many fans to want to get their Light level up as fast as possible. Luckily, it appears that Rise of Iron will have a lot of new gear to chase to help get players up to the new Light level cap.

Destiny: Rise of Iron launches September 20 on PS4 and Xbox One.

Source: Game Informer