Designing Gambit Mode in Destiny 2: Forsaken

All right. All right. All right. Let's get this show on the road. Uh I think I'm pretty much contractually obligated to start that way. Uh hi. My name is Peter Sarat and I am a senior technical designer at Bungie. I've been in the industry for over 15 years and one of the first things I did was I wrote the installer at Sierra Online. Um I grabbed a microphone at some point and recorded your system is correctly configured for playing wave files. Figuring that eventually that will get replaced when we ship and of course it never did. So, my voice has shipped on millions of copies of software uh that you may have played uh and especially if you're playing games in the mid-90s. Uh at Microsoft I was on the Kinect and the Kinect Adventures launch team. I designed the Mars Curiosity Lander fun lab with NASA. And uh today I'm here representing the work of a lot of very talented and dedicated

people who created the Gambit mode in Destiny 2 Forsaken. So, by show of hands who's played? Who How many people out there have Wow. Wow. Well, that's gratifying. Thank you and thank you all for coming. So, this will be a a little bit of review for you, but for the people who have not played uh first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a little bit about what Gambit is and uh then there's the overview of what my talk is going to be, why it's successful, what our result what our design goals and pillars were. I'll talk about our prototyping process on Gambit. Our iteration how we focused on player communication the inevitable pivot and then some takeaways to sum up. So, first what is Gambit? Gambit starts with fighting AI. Each team kills AI in uh two separate and identical arenas. One team per arena. Everything that you face is going to be

designed to be the same across both. Enemies drop motes when you kill them that the player can collect and you can only carry 15 at a time. If you die, any motes that you're carrying are lost forever. Players deposit their motes into their team's bank, which is at a central location on your team's map. And that's how you score points and lock them in. If you send at least five motes at once in a single deposit then you send a blocker to the other team to lock down that team's bank. Blockers don't drop motes and the other team has to spend time getting rid of them. If you send 10 motes, if you deposit 10 motes, you send a medium blocker and at 15 motes you send a large blocker. When the bank hits 25 and again at 50 motes, a portal opens up that lets one player invade the other arena and try to kill their opponents to slow them down. You have 30 seconds or one life to get the job done. At 75 motes a primeval spawns and the first team to summon and kill their

primeval wins the round, but the other team can continually invade during this phase and every time they do that the primeval will heal. So, it creates a kind of tug-of-war mechanic at the end. So, kill, collect, bank and invade. Those are our four main verbs of Gambit. Why do we think that Gambit was successful? What's the magic? We feel like we got some chocolate in your peanut butter and some peanut butter in your chocolate. If you're a PvE player, there's stuff for you to do. There are mobs of enemies that you can go after. There's a big tanky boss at the end. And if you're a PvP player, you can take on the role of the invader. So, it's mostly PvE with just a little bit of PvP. Not enough PvP to scare off PvE players was our hope. And in fact, many PvE players who never played PvP have a lot of fun in Gambit. Gambit features different roles that you

can play. There's the slayer of AI the collector of motes the defenders of the bank and of course the invader. So, there's something for a lot of different kinds of play styles built into the mode. Gambit uses the full sandbox that Destiny has to offer and lets you use all of the toys that you have collected for your character. There are mobs, bosses, opposing players, everything you've got has a potential role bringing it in with you in Gambit. There is scope for strategy in your class, in your loadout, in your roles and in your execution. So, I'll talk about our design goals and the pillars. As we were creating Destiny's Forsaken expansion, we wanted a new end game ritual for PvE players. So, a kind of a PvE equivalent to Trials of the Nine, which was our end game competitive PvP mode. So

we had four player teams. At this time in Destiny 2's development, all of our competitive modes were standardizing on 4v4. So, we were also going to be 4v4. We wanted our mode to have more variability than our three player strikes, which was the existing content that was most the most replayable stuff that we had. Um but we wanted to have longer legs than Prison of Elders, which was the piece of content in our game that we felt would be the most direct comparison to what Gambit was, uh which was a whole a sequence of fixed arenas against mobs of AI that were in a pretty reliable sequence as you went through them and it got a little bit stale over time. So, we wanted to be fresher than that. So, here is our proposal. The proposal, this is like the big elevator pitch, right? It's Firefight Halo Firefight meets Super Puzzle Fighter. What? That was the pitch. Two teams competing in their own arenas facing off against

waves of AI and what you do in your arena affects the team in the other arena. So, we developed some pillars to base our development around and this is what we started with. So, custom-built arenas designed to serve Gambit gameplay. Comebacks are always possible. We wanted to have curated randomness. True randomness was a testing nightmare. So, we wanted to make it feel like it was random, but actually have it be curated. We wanted strategy to be as important as thumb skill. Pre-planning to be essential. We wanted to create a new weekly ritual that players would come back to again and again. One team What one team does in one place affects the team in the other. And no direct player interaction. You were not going to be able to shoot each other. Only the AI. So, that's where we began. Then we went into prototyping.

So, first I have to tell you a little bit of background. In Destiny each named area of the game is what we call a bubble internally. This is an early diagram of the bubbles on Titan. It shipped a little bit differently than this, but uh there are nine bubbles here. The two big public areas that are gray um and then the seven smaller private areas. So, one of our first decisions in developing Gambit was one bubble or two. We're going to have two arenas. So, are we going to put them both in one bubble or we going to separate them into two separate bubbles? The diagram of the Emerald Coast map illustrates this choice. So, if we had two bubbles with each arena in its own separate bubble, that wouldn't allow us to have a higher maximum AI count. And for that matter, a higher maximum player count. If we're not splitting our resources amongst two different teams and two different groups of AI, we could support more of them. But we were targeting 4v4. That's what

all of the modes were standardizing on and test proved that we could have enough AI in one bubble to support 4v4. But if we put both arenas in one bubble, that would be easier to get up and running and lower technical risk. So, we chose that option. We specifically chose it because of the lower technical risk. It allowed us to get started immediately on the gameplay and not worry so much about the tech. This wound up paying off later when we introduced a key new mechanic which would have been a lot more difficult to implement had we been in two separate bubbles and I'll talk about that in a bit. So, we threw together a test map. And the first thing we wanted to do was basically recreate Firefight from Halo inside the Destiny engine. And so, we threw together this map where we had one team on each side of the map and that big white block down the middle was a transparent glass wall between them. It was immediately fun because we had the luxury of building on top of the Destiny sandbox uh and I want to

emphasize that Gambit's success is in due is due in large part to all of the work that went on in the game prior to this team coming together. We were building on top of some really solid foundations and we really took advantage of that. So, we got a lot of things for free, I put that in air quotes um because the Destiny sandbox is inherently fun. We thought that seeing the other arena was going to be critical to feeling like you were competing and not being isolated in your own separate space, but in practice it kind of was more like this. It was super distracting and it created chaos and confusion and pretty quickly we decided to kill that glass wall. We talked about adding holograms, shadows on the ground in your arena, projected video walls that show you what's going on in the other side, but we didn't have the tech for most of that stuff and we were focused on low technical risk, focus on the gameplay, so we just kind of proceeded without it

and it wound up being just fine as it was. One place we did want a glass wall was the ready room. And this was a new thing for us in Destiny. Teams were going to be in separate arenas and for perf reasons we couldn't have viewpoints from one arena to another. That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of putting you in separate places to begin with. We would lose the advantages of being able to support more AI. So, we wanted to start the match somewhere where each team could see the other. And this established the sense of competition at the outset while giving players a chance to have fun with emotes and change their loadouts based on what they saw. And we prototyped this very early in the Gambit process. We also knew that we were going to have an announcer for this game and that we wanted to put in that space with the players, which is something that we hadn't done before in Destiny. So, we wanted to bring that announcer into the game experience and the ready room was our solution to that. We knew we wanted one team's gameplay to affect the other team, but we didn't know exactly how yet.

Pretty important thing. We brainstormed a lot of ideas and we were calling interferences at the time. They were all fine and you can see those ideas up there, but there was nothing that really got us excited. And the million-dollar question that we heard a lot internally was, "If I can't see the other team, why do I care about them?" And we hadn't come up with a good answer to this and it was a really critical question. So, the our inability to solve this problem led us to the led us to question our no direct team versus team interaction pillar. One of the easiest interferences for us to prototype was transporting a member of your team to the other side. Super easy for us to do. And we knew if we never tried it, we were always going to be asked, "Why can't I shoot the other team?" Right? We knew it was going to come from management, other people in the studio, it was going to come from players and people would just say, "Why can't I shoot the other guys?"

And we didn't have a good answer for that other than, you know, lofty design goals. We didn't have a practical real answer. We thought, "We should We should try it. We should at least give it a shot and see how it feels." So, we did. And it worked really, really well. From the very first play test, we knew we had something special with this mechanic. It created a PvP role on the team. Obviously, it introduced direct team-on-team contact, which is much more visceral. It created some strategic tradeoffs that you had to balance. If you're sending someone over to the other side, that means your team is now one man down on your own side. It created watchable hero moments. One V four. That's drama, inherent drama right there. And if your one can beat their four, you feel like a god. It broke up the PvE gameplay. Created nice moments where now instead of only fighting against the mobs,

suddenly there is a human threat in the arena, which radically changes your behavior and your approach to the game. So, that created high drama and tension. And our playtesters loved it. It was clearly going to be our secret sauce for this mode. And once we had it, we knew we couldn't possibly let it go. So, say goodbye to one of our pillars. We recognized that the the playing field, if you will, had changed and we had found some magic. And just because we had a pillar up there that said that we weren't going to do that particular magic spell, it doesn't mean we're going to banish it. We're going to use it cuz we found it. But we didn't want Gambit to just be about racking up the most kills and we already had a race through a physical space in the form of strikes. We knew we wanted it to be round-based so that players could have a fresh start every few minutes and enable some comebacks. And so, that is why Gambit has motes.

Motes did a bunch of really great things for us. It forces players to unturtle in order to collect and deposit their motes. You can't just find a nice piece of cover, hunker down, and go at the bad guys. You actually have to get out and do something. It created a much stronger gameplay loop. When we started, we had a gameplay loop that was just one node. Kill, kill, kill. Kind of repetitive. But instead of just killing now, you're constantly cycling through kill, collect, deposit. It's a much more interesting gameplay loop for the for the mode. Having motes introduces a drop rate dial that we can turn, which was a useful thing to have for tuning. We could make harder enemies worth more. We could adjust the drop rate based on team performance. It gave us some options. And that explosion of motes was a dopamine rush. Every time you kill something and that that AI goes and you get that mote floating out, you feel really good and it it drives you

forward to collect it. So, the next thing to happen once we had our motes was blockers, which we originally called interference squads, but thankfully we shortened it internally and externally. They were one of our earliest ideas. It just took a while to get around to adding them because we were focused on getting some of the other foundational elements in play first. When you think about it, blockers are actually a pretty natural outgrowth of the initial pitch of Firefight meets Super Puzzle Fighter because in Super Puzzle Fighter, you match gems and you send garbage to the other team, right? You're doing well, make things more difficult for the opponent. So, in Destiny, what's our equivalent of that? Well, you're going to be killing AI in this mode and then you send garbage AI to the other team that do not help them win. They don't drop the motes that they're looking for and in fact, they actively block them. Huh, call them blockers. So, to make players care about dealing with the

blockers, we made them lock down the targeted team's bank so that they couldn't deposit. This meant that it made sense to then drop the blockers at the bank rather than elsewhere on the map. And so, that reinforced the relationship. Blockers, bank, there's a connection. That's why they're there. We also made all the other AI spawn away from the bank. The bank is always a safe zone from those other AI. Um so, the blockers' role was clear. It This created a new team role for getting rid of blockers and keeping the bank open. But something was still missing. Ending a round by filling the bank often felt anticlimactic. The end could kind of sneak up on you. You would be scattered across the map hunting down AI and suddenly the round would end. And it'd be hard for a trailing team to make a comeback. So, that's where the Primeval came from. We had a tiebreaker in effect that if the timer ran out and no team had filled

up their bank yet, then we would spawn a really beefy blocker. And the first team to kill that blocker and then make a deposit would win the round. When it finally triggered naturally for the first time in a play test, people went nuts. The playtesters absolutely loved it. There was an energy to the end of the round that hadn't existed before. And we realized that the answer to our problem had been hidden in the game all along and we just hadn't really played with it enough. So, this also gave us a couple of unexpected upsides. A greater variety of loadouts now became viable within the game. When we were When we didn't have the Primeval and you're just dealing with a bunch of waves of enemies, you wanted a particular set of tools at your disposal. But now, in addition to dealing with mobs, you had a place for tools that dealt with the boss. Support, mob control, boss control, a mix of those suddenly had a place. It brought the whole team together at

the end of the round because now you're all focusing on the same target. So, you can see each other, you can share each other's successes. And the round endings became much more exciting and more watchable. So, now we had all of the basic building blocks that you recognize from Gambit today in place, but they were in a very raw state. And so, we did a lot of iteration. And let's start with the blockers. Sorry. Since the blockers don't drop motes, we needed the blockers to be visually distinct from other enemies. And players needed to distinguish between mote-dropping enemies and non-mote-dropping enemies because that really affects what your choices are going to be. But our combatants team didn't have resources to give us a new visual treatment for blockers. So, that was kind of a conundrum for us. Fortunately, the game already had taken. For those of you who aren't familiar with Destiny, Taken is a version of our combatants that have a completely

different visual treatment. They kind of look black and white, whereas all the other enemies are in full color. And they have some different abilities than the normal versions of them do. Different sounds. They They look and feel quite different, although their silhouettes are very recognizable as the enemies that they're based on. So, we decided to make all of our blockers Taken and never use Taken in any other context within the mode. And this had a number of bang-on effects. So, backstory and ready room appearance were drastically impacted by this decision. We were developing the Drifter, a new NPC to host Gambit. And as we leaned into this idea that our blockers were going to be Taken, his backstory started to take shape. Here's a guy who's been out there in some mysterious place and he's come back with technology that taps into forces that Guardians don't usually play with, right? That's some rich meaty stuff. Who is this guy? What is he after? And that kind of started with the

decision to make the blockers taken. The ready room, which you saw in our white box version back of the the beginning of the deck, started to look like this now because we we knew that we wanted to bring this whole taken aesthetic into his space. You can see those forces behind him in his ship as he introduces the match. And this also opened up a lot of great narrative opportunities for us. We were We talked a lot at the beginning of the Gambit gestation process about like the moral and ethical implications of Gambit. Um where did the aliens that you're fighting come from? Uh were they willing participants? Is this some kind of galactic fight club? And the Drifter and his technology started to help address a lot of those questions for us, um partly by making them a little bit less important. The bank became a swirling vortex of dark energy that gets more intense as you fill it up. The invasion portal also used a similar

kind of darkness effects. We made the invader's effects echo the taken. It was originally all black, but in play tests the invader would very often get confused with the blockers. When you're uh when you're a defender, you really want to be able to identify the human that's coming at you. And so we kept a lot of the same trail style that the taken have, but we gave it a red tint instead of a more white tint that the taken have. And speaking of those blockers, they originally got created when a team crossed a bank threshold. So that was the mechanic that we eventually settled on for activating the invasion portal, but it felt too passive for the blockers. In play tests, players continually expressed this desire to pay off the risk versus reward that they were feeling with collecting motes. Originally, motes were uncapped. You as a player could carry as many as many motes as you wanted around with you before

depositing. And if you're frustrated at people dying with 15 motes today, you can only imagine the rage that you might feel if we had left it uncapped. Uh and the unbridled joy you would get at depositing 30 at once. But we wanted to pay off the risk. If we were letting you carry more motes, there had to be some kind of payoff to that. So we made the bank serve as a kind of a vending machine for blockers. And we changed which blockers you get based on how many you deposit. So five small, 10 medium, 15 large. And this created a really strong connection between player action and blocker creation. Players understood the cause and effect very clearly. It also introduced more strategic choices. Timing to maximize bank shutdown, right? Now, if I time my blocker to your blocker and then the invader goes over, that's a whole strategic ballet that your team is performing. Our first pass had the small blocker as a taken scion, which in our game is a

very small, agile enemy, but not much of a threat. It felt too inconsequential. So we changed it to a taken phalanx, which has a shield that makes it harder to kill and also pushes players back, making it much more of an annoyance. And in fact, as we played the game more in live, we realized that we had actually overcorrected and the phalanx gave you way too much utility for depositing five motes. If you think about it, just getting your motes safely into the bank is a heck of a lot of utility for that five deposit. So giving you a pretty strong blocker in addition was overboard. And so there was a really strong strategy of just depositing fives, and that's not what we wanted. So we just changed it again to another type of unit to improve the balance. The large blocker was originally a wizard, which flies and has a strong ranged attack, but it didn't feel large. And so we swapped it out for a taken ogre, which is one of our largest combatants, um with got a massive size

and a lethal beam attack, which better fulfilled the promise of a large blocker. We also played around with the health of all the blockers to make them beefier than normal, but not overwhelming. Originally, they were tanks. They were really difficult to get rid of, and it was just too much. So we played around a lot in the iteration process with how strong the blockers should be. For invasion, we wanted the invader to feel like a one-person wrecking crew, but not feel unfair to the team that they're invading. So we balanced the fact that it was one player against four with an overshield, give you a little more survivability, and randomizing the spawn points to give the invader a fair chance. We also talked a lot about whether the invader should have a special attack. We're giving you this taken treatment. The Drifter even tells you that this is what the taken feel. Revel in it when you go over. And so we thought, well maybe you should have a special attack as a taken. We had decided not to do that for a couple of reasons. Um one, it would be

another complex element to learn in a mode that was already full of a lot of things you needed to learn. And so we wanted to simplify. Second, it would eliminate the strategic choices that you had in your loadout. If now they didn't matter as an invader, we were taking away uh pretty strong aspect of personalization and choice. So in the end, we let the invader use their own loadout. The defenders have numeric advantage, but we needed to make sure that players felt it was fair when an invader came over. And so we attacked that problem by having lots of vectors to inform the team about what was happening. The Drifter calls it out. He announces that you're being invaded. There's an alarm klaxon that sounds throughout the arena. The whole screen turns red. The arena kind of fills with a red fog to indicate the state change. And there's a HUD element that flashes that there's an invasion going on and gives you the countdown to how long you have left, right? Lots of cues.

The visual effects make the invader stand out when you do spot them. There's nothing else in the game that is moving that is glowing red but the invader. And the invader always spawns in an empty front and has to close the distance or snipe from far away. So you're never going to have the invader spawn right next to you, which can happen sometimes in PvP and doesn't really feel good. So we made sure that that was not going to be a consideration. This is what motes look like in the ship game, but man, did it take a long time to get there. It seems like such a simple thing, right? But it went through a lot of changes. This is what they started looking like. They looked like just like our engrams. Um they rolled a lot. They're dodecahedrons. They drop and they would roll, which was interesting, but it was frustrating to have the motes roll away from you, especially if you killed something on a hill or on a ramp. And it was frustrating to have the motes

get blown across the map by grenades and explosions. So we increased their weight to help them stay in place, but not necessarily lock them down, but we resist the likelihood that they were going to get blown across the map. And we changed their shape to make them distinctive and to make them not roll. But their appearance and the feedback states went through a lot of iteration. So initially, this is what they looked like in our prototypes. You'll notice it's purple. We didn't spend a lot of time on treatment at that point. And it has a waypoint right above it. That waypoint also has a timer, numeric timer showing you how long it's going to be before the mote goes away. We felt that was really important information the player to have. If there's a mote on the ground that's brand new and there's a mote on the ground that's going to disappear in 5 seconds, we want the player to know about it so we can pick up the 5-second mote first. Then as we doubled down on taken, the taken energy kind of infiltrated the motes and they started to look like this.

We pretty quickly realized that we'd gone a little bit too far here, that these weren't attractive. They didn't look like things that I as a player want to be picking up. In fact, they look a lot like blights, which in our game are a big negative thing that you always are asked to shoot. So we wound up backing away from that change. And that's when we started to investigate the whole pyramid. At this point, the live game introduced something that was also a gold pyramid. When you pick up something that we call an exotic catalyst in the game, when it drops in the world, it drops as a gold pyramid. And so now we have something else that drops that looked exactly like what we were what we were making. So we had to change how we were presenting that pyramid and wound up getting a couple of different treatments. We also uh noted that motes could be hard to spot when they're on another another level of the map. A lot of our maps for Gambit have verticality by design, which means there are ledges and things that the motes could appear under

and you could be standing right above a mote and not know it. So we added the vertical beam to help players find them. One of the biggest point of contentions was around feedback when a mote was about to expire and despawn. Originally, they emitted a kind of expanding pulse and then they flashed red. And red was a big danger sign. We use red elsewhere in the game to mean bad things. And in fact, a lot of players wound up running away from those motes instead of toward them because they thought they were going to explode. Totally reasonable feedback. So that changed. We changed to particle effects and flashing, attenuating the vertical beam. We played around a lot with the speed of the flash, when it started. Um ultimately what we wound up with was a very, very tall vertical beam that would punch through our geometry. So, if

something was standing if something was underneath you, you would know about it. You could see it from anywhere. Instead of having a numeric countdown, the motes start to emit some particles as they're getting close to disappearing and getting more intense until finally they just kind of go and disappear. So, rather than reading a number, we translated all that information into visual data. Which the player was able to process kind of subconsciously rather than using a different part of their brain to interpret a number. And in the game it winds up all working and coming together pretty well. But you can see this is a long process. Each one of these iterations took quite a bit of time and feedback and it was a long, long time before we actually landed on the mote that you see in the game. And for something that seems so simple, it's just a pretty interesting thing about development. As far as the mote economy goes, we also iterated there. Invaders originally dropped five when you killed them because we wanted players to get rewarded for stopping an invader. It

felt like a really big accomplishment. You've killed the human among you. You should get something for that. But five was pretty stiff when we felt that we wanted to encourage PvE players, who we knew we were going to be courting with this mode. We wanted to encourage them to try invasion. And if you knew that you Well, if you didn't feel confident in your PvP abilities and you knew that going over onto the other side meant that you were handing the other team five motes. We thought that was going to disincentivize you from going over. But we still wanted to give something. So, we dialed that back from five to three, which felt like a good middle ground of okay, for three motes, I'll take that risk. I don't feel so bad if I drop three motes as opposed to five motes, which is a whole blocker in and of itself. We originally played to 100 motes instead of 75, but we dropped it down to 75 to speed the round up. One thing we get asked a lot, especially in prime recently week that came out, people are asking about why can't we Why isn't the collector armor

set have a vacuum effect, right? Why can't I suck up motes from a larger distance? And the truth is that our motes are networked. So, anyone can pick them up. We had a choice. We could make the motes non-networked, which would have made them faster and would have allowed us to do that kind of mote pick up um and adjust the distance. But that would mean that we were eliminating a role. If you're the only one who can see your motes, that means that you're the only one who can pick them up. But the way Gambit is today, you can actually be the collector. You can be the designated person from your team who's going to run around and pick up all of those motes. And so, if we made them not network, that's gone and we thought that was a much bigger sacrifice to the game than having the network lag that was inherent in making this a networked object. So, that's why picking them up can sometimes feel a little laggy and non-responsive. And that's why we can't just enhance the effect and make them wider because that would only make the feeling of it worse. In the motes phase, when an invader

kills you, all of the motes that you're carrying are lost, but motes don't matter in the primeval phase and we didn't feel that kills during the primeval phase were impactful. So, we made them give health back to the boss. Finding the right amount was pretty much a matter of trial and error and playing with different values and in the end, we settled on about 12% as being the right value, which meant that if you wiped the entire enemy team, you killed four enemies, you got 48%, almost half of the primeval's health back. That gave your team enough of a margin that they could potentially come back and start to regain ground and comebacks being possible was one of our pillars. So, this played into that. We also let the other team invade repeatedly during this phase so that a team that was behind had opportunities to catch up. Initially, there was no cool down and it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal. So, we instituted a cool down, which is longer in the primeval phase than it is during the motes phase. There's now a cool down in both phases and it's a

little bit longer when the primeval is up. So, this had a nice side effect. This allowing players to invade repeatedly mitigated the possibility of players camping the portal like you'll sometimes see people camping around uh heavy ammo in PvP. Um we felt like invasion was so much fun that if you wanted to invade but were constantly robbed of that chance because somebody went through before you, that was going to feel bad. And with only two chances to invade at 25 and 50 motes, there was the very real possibility that you wouldn't get the opportunity to invade in the course of a Gambit match. But by opening it up during the primeval phase, now there are many more opportunities to invade. We can spread that around if there are multiple players who want to have that experience. I already mentioned incessant invasion was overwhelming, so we added that cool down. And we wanted to prevent instant boss burn downs. So, we added fodder units to distract and harry the team. We delayed spawning the primeval until

after the fodder came up, so you couldn't start damaging it immediately. We made the primeval super tanky and then added damage multipliers over time to overcome the tankiness and prevent the round from fizzling out to time. The longer you spend fighting the primeval, the stronger you get against him so that eventually you'll beat him rather than just running out the clock. We settled on killing special minions that we called envoys, which are shielded wizards in our game, as the way that players could accelerate their progress. We experimented with other mechanics like having blights that you could shoot and other things like that, but ultimately we realized that simpler was better. Players already knew that killing AI good. Right? So, we'll tap into that primal brain and make killing AI good here. So, that's what we did. We tested a lot of fast burn strategies to ensure that teams wouldn't kill the primeval before other teams had chance to at least send over an invader and buy their team some time.

Now, the sandbox evolved over time to give the players more power. And so, as the game was out there for a while, player power kind of started to eclipse the game mechanics. There's a lot going on in Gambit. It's a very complex mode when you compare it to say Clash, which is straightforward just kill as many guys as you can. So, we had a lot of critical information that we wanted to communicate to the player and we iterated a lot on how to do that most effectively. What's the most vital and what to leave out. It was a challenge to present all this information on our HUD but not clutter up the screen too much and get in the way of what you really want to see. And one of the places that we think was most successful was with our mote bar. That's up at the top of the screen. I'll give you a close-up here. Um the colored bars show how many motes each team has deposited while the gray extensions on those bars show how many motes each team is carrying. This made an immediate and strong impact on player understanding of the game state. Before we had this in, there was no way

to tell how many motes the other team had, which meant your invasion timing was effectively random. But now, you could see the state of the other team and you could time your invasions to have the greatest impact. You could also see how many motes the other team had and whether they had an invasion available. So, if you're walking around with 12 motes, maybe instead of hunting for three more to get that large blocker, you'll just get your butt to the bank and put them in. Hash marks in the mote bar show when those invasions will activate and icons above the bar appear when an invasion is available. So, a glance at this bar tells you all the most vital information about the global game state. Originally, we had the timer and what blockers were currently up up here as well, but we removed them to simplify and focus the player on the most important information. We still show them when you're dead or when you're in nav mode if you ever do that. If you There's a button that you can press that brings up your ghost and when you're in that mode, which means you're not actively shooting, we'll show you that extra

information for you to process, but we take it away when you're in the heat of actual combat. Understanding what was happening moment to moment was still difficult until we started adding our VO. It was really, really valuable to get somebody, in this case it was me, uh to record temp VO for everything we thought we wanted as early as we possibly could. Initially, we were way too chatty. We talked all the time and when that happens, you start tuning the announcer out and so you're losing the information that you really need to have. So, eventually we dialed it back and we had settled on we're going to let the Drifter give you some really flavorful intros and outros to the mode. When you start and when you end, he's going to really set the tone. And then in the heat of the match, he's going to comment on the essential gameplay moments. These are things like invasions, uh the primeval being up. And then occasional color commentary when

you as a player do something dramatic. One of the last additions that we added was reporting back on what the invader did. For a while, the invader would go over and they would have their invasion and then just pop back into your arena and that was it. And you as the invader know what you did. You know that you got an army of one. You know that you killed all four members of the enemy team, but your team didn't know that. And so, it felt like your accomplishment as an invader wasn't being adequately communicated to your team so that they knew that you were contributing. When we had the Drifter comment on that, hey, your invader's back and they took three guys with them, right? Whatever that kind of line that he says. That really closed the feedback loop and it brought it all together. And that helped us address that question from way back in the beginning of the talk about, "Hey, if I don't see the other team, why do I care?" Like, knowing what the invader did while he's over on the other side made a very strong impact on the feel of

the mode. Players are often confused about where and when new waves spawned, and so they would waste a lot of time just searching the map, trying to find something to kill. So, having the drifter call out the name of the incoming front immediately helped with that problem. Each map has three named fronts. And we could have called them A, B, and C, or north, south, and west, or something else generic, but we felt pretty strongly that tying them to each individual map increased the immersion in the space, and um was unique for the mode, and just enriched the experience. But, it had the cost that we were committing to that meant that anytime we create a new map, we're going to have to pull our voice actor, Todd Haberkorn, back into the booth to record the new call outs for the new maps. We gave ourselves a back door. We do have him saying A, B, and C, or we do have him saying north, south, east, and west, so that if we ever release a

map and can't get him back in, we have that option available to us. Hopefully, we'll never have to use it, but the realities of production means maybe for some reason our schedules won't align. So, we made sure to give us the back door in case we need it. But, so far, we've been able to go back for every map. The primeval heal is a vital mechanic that came late in development when we had very limited ability to give bespoke feedback. And so, we were actually kind of worried that players weren't going to understand it. They weren't going to get, like, "Why is this thing healing? I don't understand. I don't know what's happening." There are effects on the primeval, but they're difficult to see. And aside from a brief tutorial, little box of text that pops up on the screen, nothing tells you that killing guardians will heal the primeval. So, we addressed this with two things. A very distinctive sound effect that you hear at no other time during the game. When you hear that "wrong" sound uh during that mode, you know that one of

your teammates has bit the dust. And when that happens, "Death heals primeval" plays on the top of your screen, like, in the center of your screen, those words pop up in red. It was crude, but really effective. And it wound up generating a meme, which generated a shirt, which has sold out multiple times in the Bungie store. So, it's interesting how sometimes necessity breeds invention in cases like this, and we made something out of basically nothing. Even though the language of our game went through a lot of iteration, for a while we went too far into the taken direction by having players bury motes in the crypt, and that terminology never really gelled with the team. Um so, we went back to depositing motes in the bank, which were terms that players already understood, and so they did a lot of the heavy lifting for us. Why invent a whole new set of terms when we can in a in a mode that's already

complex and has you needing to learn a lot, anything that we're able to leverage about modalities that you already understand and interactions that you understand just help jump into the mode much more quickly. So, we've come to the inevitable pivot. Uh I'm sure many of you have worked on projects where you get to a point where you're really happy with the way things are going, and then you kind of get Gary Cole from Office Space walking down and saying, "Yeah. Um I'm going to need you to do this other thing over here, you know? You know that cart racer that you're doing, I we need them to have guns. Yeah, you need to be able to destroy the other racers, right?" Something a major shift. That never happened to us. We were very, very fortunate that we had buy-in from our management throughout the process. They were playing it along with us. They believed in what we were doing, and they never directed us to change the gameplay

in any way. But, what they did say was that was that Gambit was too much fun to restrict to pre-formed fireteams as we were originally planning. It was going to be an equivalent of Trials of the Nine, which you could only play with your friends, with uh a team that you pre-formed. You weren't going to get matchmade. And so, the thinking was this game really wants to get in front of more people, and the way to do that is to allow you to matchmake. So, the mode changed from being an end game ritual that you would return to every week to being an always available playlist for matchmade teams. And in practice, this didn't really affect us as a development team very much. We knocked the game down. Originally, it was going to be best three out of five, uh which felt right for a an end game competitive activity, but for matchmade, we felt that was a little bit too much, so we dropped it down to two out of three to make it more casual friendly, but keeping multiple rounds so you could still have those comebacks.

We tabled any ideas that we had about emphasizing team communication and cooperation. We didn't want to introduce any new mechanics that would require pre-made fireteams effectively. And we went with a simpler investment plan, the Infamy ranking system that we have, rather than a more complex plan that we might have gone with otherwise. So, let's go back here. Now that we're getting down near the end of our development, looking back at our pillars, we'd already killed that no direct player interaction pillar. And this pivot killed the pre-planning is essential, cuz we wanted people to just matchmake with whoever and be able to play. And we killed the new weekly ritual. That was no longer deemed to be important. It was more important to get more people into the game. We started Gambit before D2 shipped. And Crucible was going to be all 4v4, but midway through, we re-examined that. By making the technical choices that we had made, we had already closed the door on Gambit being 6v6.

Because both arenas were in one bubble, if we tried to put six players in the arena, we would have to increase the AI count to keep your players busy. And plus, now you have six supers potentially in play at once instead of four with all of their concurrent effects, and it would have been too much. The perf cost wouldn't have allowed it. So, we asked ourselves about, "What if we went the other way? And what if it was 3v3?" And we tried it, but it really didn't work as well. It wasn't as much fun because invasions became less balanced. Now, when you lose one person from your side, you're down to two, and that really weakened the experience across the board. It it meant removing a player really meant removing a role. Fewer players meant it was slower, less exciting, and it just didn't feel as good. So, we stuck to our 4v4 guns. So, takeaways about the process. Gambit was a fully funded, multi-discipline team, where we had members of uh a lot of the shared disciplines at Bungie, things like

sound, UX. They were embedded in our team. And we had representatives from across the board in our stand-ups, and it really impacted the development of the mode. It was very smooth. Everybody had buy-in, and it was highly collaborative. We had clear design goals and pillars that our team and our leadership were aligned with. And we had autonomy. At only that pivot that I mentioned, um were we redirected in any meaningful way. Uh our leadership never stuck their fingers in that design pie. They trusted us. They believed in what we were making. And so, Gambit's success stems from that trust and giving the team the resources that it needed to design and execute something great. People on the Gambit team, as a result, have no horror stories about the development of that product. And in fact, most people on that core team view it as one of the best experiences of our professional lives. It was satisfying and rewarding, and we were bought into the process. Uh it was just a terrific

experience all the way around. Ironically, we succeeded by failing. We didn't find a way to make players care about the other team without direct player interaction. And as it turned out, direct player interaction was the secret sauce. That 1v4 dynamic really makes Gambit stand out. Simpler is often better. This is something we returned to over and over and over again during Gambit production. Not seeing the other team made things simpler. The primeval mechanics of not having something alien like blights, and focusing on things that players were already doing, killing AI. Uh hiding the clock and the blockers from uh the mote bar. Streamlining the motes so that you're not seeing a timer. Player communication, making all of that simpler. Creating hero moments is one of the things that Gambit does really, really well. In addition to invasion, there's also our high value targets. These are uh

big, beefy bad guys that come out even over the course of the match, and if you kill them, they shower a whole bunch of motes on the ground. And so, it gives not only the PvP guys, but the PvE players that moment to really shine and take out a big, beefy bad guy and deliver motes to your team and be a rainmaker. Uh and the primeval, coming together, burning down that primeval, your team as a whole feels like a hero. So, creating the hero moments, I think, is one of the things that Gambit succeeded at. And finally, players don't always know what they want. Nobody was asking Bungie to make a PvEvP mode. That really wasn't on the radar, right? Listening to players is valuable and you want to give players what they want, but sometimes it's even better to surprise and delight them with something they didn't even know that they wanted in the first place. So, thank you.

And if anybody has questions, I'm happy to address them. Hi. Hi. So, you mentioned that this was originally intended to be sort of a weekly end game activity rather than uh sort of the strike playlist or the crucible playlist, right? Yes. So, considering how those works in terms of rewards, um they usually give you powerful rewards once a week. Was there a reward structure in place for Gambit that was different from the one that is there now before you made that change? Like can or did that come later? That that actually came later. So, the question is about the reward structure for Gambit and were we giving a different set of rewards when it was going to be a an end game activity. And while we had ideas on paper, nothing had been decided yet. So, uh the the investment portion, the reward portion

really came after that decision to open it up to more people had been made. We were fortunate in that it took about it was a 15-month development cycle roughly for Gambit uh starting with a core small team and then getting bigger and bigger and bigger as we got deeper into production. And so, we had a playable game fairly early. The pivot didn't come all that late. So, we still had plenty of time after deciding to not make it be an end game ritual to respond to that and craft the reward system afterwards. Thank you. Sure. So, uh I played quite a bit and there are a couple mechanics you mentioned that was actually oh, it works that way. You know, I got to go back and try that. Like dropping the three motes when you die. Um the the the bar for the 25 and 50 motes opens up the portal. I I didn't know when it opened up. So, it got me thinking. There's a lot of new mechanics in this mode. Did the the team explore any other ways to try and communicate these nuances or do you do you prefer them to be something that players discover? Like, you know, loading screen tips or or that kind of thing. Right. Uh so, the question is hey, there are a

bunch of mechanics that are in the mode that maybe aren't as discoverable. Um did you think about any other ways to make them more discoverable? And we would have loved to have given uh a more detailed introduction to the game. There were a number of things that we explored from having a tutorial mission where maybe you prepared a Gambit arena uh to having a video that you could play that would walk you through the mode, but um for various reasons, time being a primary one, uh a lot of those things didn't happen. And so, in the course of production, you kind of have to choose where your battles are and you've got five bucks to spend, where are you going to spend those $5? And we focused on the mode itself, trusting that we know that the Destiny community, there's a lot of information that you can get online about a lot of things about Destiny. And so, we just trusted that that information would get out there one way or another. And so, we did the best we could with the resources that we had. Yeah, it's certainly playable without knowing those things, so good job. Thank you. Hi. Um you mentioned um the the group

that came together to um to make Gambit was pretty complete and autonomous. And I'm wondering um kind of how um how did you go about kind of crafting vision early and who was involved? Sure. Uh early on, we had designers and artists uh primarily in the mix. We also had an engineer and producers, of course. Um and the early design direction of the the big pitch, Firefight meets Super Puzzle Fighter, um that was kind of from the directors of Forsaken and from our creative lead, Lars. Um and once we had that like as the foundation, then we had that core group of four or five people who were on board from the beginning. And how were they decided like what disciplines and who? It was kind of who was available at that time because you have to remember that D2 was still under production. And so, there were a lot of people who would come on board later who simply were not available to be involved yet. So, it was a small tight-knit group of design, art,

and engineering. And um everybody had a pretty much equal say in all of the decisions that we were making at that point. And that's that really continued throughout the production. And I think if you were to ask people on the Gambit team, they would all tell you that they felt personally invested in the game because of that. They didn't feel like they were executing someone else's vision. It was our vision together. It was our game. And I think that is a huge part of the success. I think you can feel it in the way that the game turned out. Uh so, uh the feel free to ignore this one if it's out of the scope, but uh given the release recent release of Gambit Prime, would you describe Gambit Prime as currently as sort of the a more pure expression of the original vision of Gambit because several of the pillars that you noted you had to strike off the list came back in full force in Prime like team composition, roles, communication, um but uh it's still matchmaking.

So, Yeah, so the the question is about Gambit Prime, which is the new iteration on Gambit that was just released that kind of leans really heavily into roles. And um I think the answer is that Gambit Prime, we looked at how are we going to evolve Gambit? What do we want to change about Gambit? And there were a couple of things. We often got people asking, "Hey, it'd be great if as an invader I had something else that I could do, right?" And so, that's kind of where the mote draining came from in part. Um and then the the roles of Gambit evolved somewhat organically. And we looked at that and realized that we had something really great. One of the success factors of Gambit was that I could be the collector while you're the killer and you're doing this other thing you're the invader and we could each have a role in the game. And so, we thought that is part of what makes Gambit special. Let's really double down there. So, it wasn't uh it wasn't a conscious effort to say, "Hey, let's go back to those original pillars and bring it back to that." It was more of what do we already have in the game that we can

uh really build upon and what's missing? And look at that and make some adjustments accordingly. And that's where that came from. Thanks. Hey. Uh for the exotic quest for the um hand cannon level is was that part of the original Gambit development? And if so or not, like what were some of the challenges you guys faced for balancing the uh the you know, original Gambit uh Primeval fit is versus the exotic quest phase. Were there any, you know, big uh hurdles that you guys had to go through? The Which exotic quest are you talking about? For the exotic hand cannon um that Malfeasance? Yeah, Malfeasance. That's what it was. Thank you. Um so, Malfeasance, so the question is, "Hey, there's a in our game, you can there you get given a quest to get a powerful item which we call exotics in our game, an exotic weapon. Um and one of them involves Gambit pretty strongly, very closely tied with our character, the Drifter. So, how did those things balance out?

And um the the quest team is actually separate from the activity team in this case. So, we developed we were really focused on Gambit on the this team, on developing the Gambit mode. And there are other people on the team who are looking at, "Hey, how are we going to keep players occupied throughout the Destiny ecosystem?" And one of them is we're going to send them on this quest. So, we knew that Malfeasance was going to be tied to the Drifter. We knew it was going to be related to Gambit. But the actual mechanics of the quest itself were not the focus of the Gambit team. Okay. Thank you. Mhm. Yes. Um I I found myself kind of smiling to myself when you were explaining the player testing um because of the you know, the invasions announced, the claxon, the red fog, the hot the HUD, etc. It just sounded very familiar to me. So, I was wondering about your play testing cadence and also kind of the percentage of internal versus external play testing that you did on the mode. Great. So, the

question is about uh how often do we play test and what's the ratio of internal and external play tests. We as a team play tested with each other daily. We played the game for an hour every day together and unless the builds somehow weren't working out. Sometimes that happens. Uh so, we were playing it all the time. And that gave us a really good pulse on where things were or weren't. But we also had um late it's more Whoops, excuse me. More late in the process, we had some external testers and some user research going on uh bringing some people in to see how new players were exposed to it. And both players who were new to Destiny and players who were experienced in Destiny. How did they differ in their reactions to the mode? What did they understand? What did they not understand? There were user surveys after one game, after two games, after three and five, right? What do you know about the mode now that you didn't know before? And so, that helped us understand where our messaging was failing and where we needed to shore things up. And we knew that invasion was

just a critical mechanic to the game mode and we had to make it very very clear when that was happening because it felt for a while like before all that feedback goes in, of course, you're just playing it on trust. You know that, "Oh yeah, later we're going to do stuff. We're going to make this better." But meanwhile, all we have is like a little thing at the bottom of the screen that says invader, right? Or whatever it might have been. So, it was really easy to miss. So, we knew just from playing those early iterations that we need more here. And so, as each layer kind of went in, it was like, "Yeah, still need more. Still need more." And we kind of built it as we went. Thank you. Sure. I was interested that with Gambit Prime, you've now introduced health gating to the Primeval bosses to stop people baking them like in a couple of seconds, really organized teams. But that's kind of led to like a different rhythm where you have usually now both teams tend to get the Primeval up, and you have this kind of constant back and forth invasion. How happy are you with that kind of cadence in Gambit Prime of of the kind of final phase? So, the question is the new version of

Prime has a different cadence than Gambit does. And how do we feel about that cadence? And we're always looking at it. We thing about Bungie, and this is one of the things that impressed me when I was first joining the company, is how many people at Bungie play the game. Right? The philosophy at Bungie is that in live, we get no perks. Like we have to play the game just like you guys do. So, I don't have a thousand voices. I haven't earned that yet, right? There are things that I don't have I would love to be able to flip a switch and just get a thousand voices. It doesn't work that way. Sure, at the office I can get it, but not on real live code. So, we're constantly playing the game ourselves and feeling it and evaluating what we want to change and what feels right. I think we like there are a lot of things about Gambit Prime that we think work really well. We really like the fact that one round it feels like lengthening the round and then making it one round has just about the right length to it. Um

but there are things we might want to tweak. We're looking at things like, "Hey, is the Primeval phase versus the motes phase? Are they adequately balanced?" Right? It seems a lot of the time like the invader and the defending team are in sync. So, you'll get to that well of light at the same time that the invader comes over and over again by just you're in the right rhythm. And so, we're looking at maybe changing that up so that there's a little more variety there. Is the amount that the Primeval is healed the is having it be the same amount in Prime the right decision as it is in Gambit? There are a lot of things that we can tune, and we're looking at all of those things, but so far I mean still so early that we're kind of taking a cautious approach. But the reaction so far seems to be really positive to a lot of the changes, so we're feeling encouraged. I got 21% Delirium before coming to GDC, so I can help you with the See, I'm still working on that. I want it badly, but I don't have it.

That's a good gun. Yes. How big was the original Gambit team? And second question, why and at which stage you decided to use chess terminology to to name this particular game mode? What kind of technology? Chess. It's from chess. Chess, the game of board game, yeah. Um Why is it so? So, uh So, I think your the first part of your question was how big was the team. So, initially there were I think four or five of us on the team for the first couple of months, and that grew as more people became available and we could bring the resources on, but also as we knew more about what we were making. So, originally it was very designer heavy, but also artist and engineering so that we understood what the repercussions of some of our decisions were, and we had to develop like the theory of what is a Gambit map, the fact that it would always be three fronts. Like we had a lot of different versions of what a Gambit map would be, and we iterated on those concepts as

well in the early process before we were really building anything. Um so, as resources and knowledge increased, the size of the team increased. And I'm sorry, but I I didn't quite understand the second part of your question. About the name of the game. Why is it called Gambit? Oh, why is why is it called Gambit? You know, that was originally just the code name. It was code name Gambit before we even knew what it was. It was like, "Okay, it's firefight meets puzzle fighter, and it's code name Gambit." And then as so often happens in development, the code name is like, "Can we just ship it as Gambit?" And it stuck. So, we had it from the very beginning. It was no marketing invention. No, it was actually Yeah. Day one, it was Gambit. Got a couple of different questions. The first one was, have you ever considered on the original Gambit where the invader when they go across, instead of dropping just three motes, that the motes would increase as the player kills additional players? Interesting idea. I don't think we did

consider that. Okay. The second question I had was on Gambit Prime, uh was it ever considered the instead of farming for three different armor tiers in Reckoning, having the tiers unlock as you are a single piece of armor that would unlock the additional tiers as you completed those tiers? Uh so, I was not directly involved with the investment loop for Prime and how the how we determined how those things worked. Um so, I can't speak to that except to say that I know that the that team looked at various past things that we have done like Solstice armor and other ways that we have used armor in the past. We're always looking at trying new things, and so this was the solution that they landed on, which I'm sure there might have been technical reasons as well as design reasons for doing it the way that we did it. Okay. The reason why I was asking was some of the other people I play with would done um feel as though

now since tier three is out, um trying to farm for tier one and tier two armor sets are kind of pointless. That's true, and I think that was intentional in the loop that once tier three becomes available, people are going to be focused on tier three, and we're okay with that. Okay. Thank you. Hi there. Um huge fan of the game. I just wanted to ask how you went about collecting feedback for Gambit and how you decided to act on it cuz you guys recently changed the blockers and from three rounds to two in a kind of a boss rush round. And then I also wanted to ask um if there was any significant feedback and changes specifically due to the player summit that you guys had about a year ago. Mhm. So. Uh so, the question's about feedback. I assume it's you're talking about post-ship feedback, right? Yes, that's the first question, yeah. Yeah. Um So, like I said, we play the game ourselves in live, and so we feel it the way that players do, and some of us, like myself, have played a lot. Mhm. Uh and so we we're pretty well aware of

the issues that are in the game and things that we might want to change. We also have a community team that is listening to our Bungie forums, to Reddit, to Twitter. Like they're keeping their fingers on the pulse, and they surface the issues that players are having back to the team. It's like, "Hey, like these are the top end issues that we're seeing people reporting." And so, we'll look at those issues and say, "Yeah, yeah. No, not doing anything about that. Like you technical reasons we can't do anything there, but oh yeah, we totally want to do that too." Right? And so, that helps inform our process. Uh and the other part of the question was was there any big changes due to the player summit player summit, right. So, actually the player summit was incredibly positive about Gambit. When when the community members played Gambit, their first thing was, "So, we're getting this tomorrow, right?" Like they didn't want to wait for it. So, that was really gratifying. We there may have been some minor changes, but I don't think there was anything really big that

changed about Gambit as a result of that. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Um thank you for the talk first. I think this will be quick. So, as the game industry is kind of moving forward, we're getting all of these more niche kind of roles, and I wanted to ask what a senior technical designer is exactly at Bungie. So, there's actually a talk tomorrow that someone is giving about technical design, which I'm actually looking forward to cuz I'm interested in hearing about what technical design is in other places. Uh but at at Bungie, a technical designer is a designer who can do really technical things that other designers might not. So, in my case, I can write code, and not all designers can write code. Um so, it's more about it's not necessarily about responsibility so much as it is about skill set. Okay. And the fact that there are things that I'm just capable of doing that maybe someone else might not be capable of without training, right? That's all. So, I have the permissions to check code in, whereas

most designers do not have the permissions to check code in, that kind of thing. Cool. Thank you. Mhm. A few things. First, can we get your voice overs in Gambit as a DLC, please? Cuz that would be The team has asked about that, too. Yeah. No, thankfully I don't have a SAG card, so we we couldn't actually ship my voice. Okay. Other thing, did you anticipate linear fusion rifles being so dominant in Gambit when you invade? We did not. Okay. Um we were we really expected that supers would be a lot more prevalent, and especially roaming supers we thought were going to be like I think the the bet was that Golden Gun was going to be the thing to beat in Gambit. Um and we had we knew about snipers, we were certainly using a bunch of those, but the the rise of linear fusion rifles in the Gambit meta was definitely not expected. And part of that is because after one day of being out in the wild,

the game received way more play testing, like a gazillion times more play testing than it had received internally up until that point because just math, right? There's a limited number of people at Bungie, and there's like way more players out in the world. And so, the meta evolved in a way that our small group didn't anticipate, and that's just one of those things that you have to be prepared for and react to. And so, we tuned linear fusion rifles to kind of bring down their efficacy in Gambit as a result of that. Um, and we're also aware of for future map development, maybe that will impact how we design maps so that linear fusion rifles may not have as much of an impact in the future. So, maybe. Or we might decide that we're going to lean into it. You never know what we decide to do. Awesome. Thank you. All right, it looks like we're cutting things off. So, thank you all for coming and if you have any more questions, just come find me.