Destiny 2's The Witch Queen expansion has been out for over a week, and the overall reception of the campaign and the Void 3.0 update was overwhelmingly positive, with many players praising Bungie for the experience delivered with this release. Two of the biggest standards to which every release is held in the history of the franchise are both The Taken King from Destiny and Forsaken from Destiny 2, which are considered to this day as the best releases ever. And yet, The Witch Queen's success is so blatant that many players are now addressing the Hive-themed expansion as the pinnacle content Destiny 2 and the series as a whole has ever gotten.
With several new Exotic guns, The Witch Queen shakes the old Season of the Lost fusion rifle meta in many ways, from glaives becoming a fantastic pick in PvE content, and new DPS kings emerging from the deep. In fact, the Exotic Worm Launcher, Parasite, is now widely considered one of the best guns in the game because of how much burst damage it can deal if players manage to land a shot just right while the Worm's Hunger buff is stacked all the way up to twenty, dealing over 300k damage in a single shot. Destiny 2's Exotics often have unique characteristics across the board, including their signature sounds, but the process of creating the sounds for Parasite is quite bizarre, to say the least, as it involves making fresh pasta - the mac n cheese kind.
How Parasite's Sounds Were Made in Destiny 2's Witch Queen Expansion
One of the side effects of the pandemic is that many video game developers had to push back the release of their games or expansions because the slower times of working from home were taking a toll on the final product. This is the case of Destiny 2's The Witch Queen as well, with the expansion being pushed back to February of this year rather than going live a full year after Beyond Light.
The result is that every piece of The Witch Queen was made while working from home, including the musical score and the sound effects, both of which are normally arranged in a studio with several engineers and professionals. In a recent roundtable interview session, Destiny 2's Senior Audio Lead Evan Buehler shared a very peculiar detail about how the sounds for the new Exotic grenade launcher Parasite were made.
One of the things about The Witch Queen that is unusual is that the whole of it was still work from home. All of our sound designers, normally we can do some recording together, but a lot of these were done in isolation. [...] The best example was Parasite, the Worm Launcher. Those are actually sounds you might find in your house. Specifically, if you've ever made some fresh pasta, especially beef mac n cheese, and you mix it around a little bit, those were the sounds we used to create that.
It doesn't come as a surprise that sounds for video games, even titles as big as Destiny 2, are made in weird ways, and this is something that started a long time ago with movies and simulated sounds included in them. What's interesting is the creative process of making the sounds for Parasite, specifically, because it's the only gun in the game that actually uses a Hive Worm as ammunition, making it explode on contact for extra damage.
The team had to first understand what sort of sounds a Worm Launcher would make, and then come up with something that made sense for it, hence the freshly-made beef mac n cheese, which can be done by anyone in the safety of their homes. A similar process went into making the sounds for Destiny 2's new Osteo Striga Exotic SMG, and even for other Legendary guns introduced with The Witch Queen. Overall, there are many layers to the game's audio bits, and it can be quite surprising and insightful to discover more about how every sound is made.
Destiny 2 is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.