After Destiny shipped, we created three DLC expansions. The Dark Below, House of Wolves, and Rise of Iron became some of the most successful downloadable content in history, outselling many standalone triple-A games.
The release window for a game’s first DLC is always tight. We knew that the sooner we could release, the better. But no matter how much you play a game internally, you never really know what it’s going to be like until the world gets its hands on it. When feedback on Destiny started pouring in after the September release, we knew we had to address many of those issues in our December expansion. We responded as rapidly as we could, and improved the story and gameplay of The Dark Below, ultimately finding the direction we’d take all future Destiny Expansions.
As a Senior Production Engineer, I had to support the content creation team in a rapidly evolving environment. All our Production Engineers pitched in with many unscheduled tasks, and spent hours helping content creators debug issues we had never encountered before.
House of Wolves is where the Destiny franchise really found its voice. From its inception, we knew what we wanted House of Wolves to be, and we executed with enormous drive and focus. Much like The Dark Below, we were in a sprint toward an ambitious goal with constant community feedback to guide us. We pushed the envelope of our technology with missions like Prison of Elders, and exciting new public events.
My role as the Senior Technical Designer in charge of content memory drew me onto Rise of Iron late in development to help manage the memory consumption of this new content. Although we dropped previous gen console support, we were pushing our engine to its limits. I lead two multi-disciplinary strike teams on a crazy investigative journey into the bowels of the Xbox One and PS4, and ultimately squeezed more content into Destiny than we ever thought possible. My role was pivotal in ensuring this release was a success. This crucible was also a great learning experience, and gave me a lot of insight on how to improve our memory reporting tools for our next release.