Destiny 2: Forsaken

On Destiny 2: Forsaken, my final role was Quality Assurance Engineer.

What is Destiny 2: Forsaken?

Destiny 2: Forsaken is a major content expansion released in 2018 for Destiny 2, a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken focused on the player's in-game Guardian character seeking revenge for the death of fan-favorite Vanguard leader Cayde-6 at the hands of the Awoken Prince Uldren Sov. Destiny 2: Forsaken was notable for being the first major Destiny 2 expansion to feature a full-length narrative campaign, expanding on in-universe lore, and introducing new characters, factions, locations, weapons, and activities for players to explore.

Key features of Destiny 2: Forsaken include:

  • New ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken‘ Story Mode Campaign

  • New Worlds: ‘The Tangled Shore’ & ‘The Dreaming City’

  • New Enemy Type: ‘The Scorn’

  • New Raid: ‘The Last Wish‘

  • New Dungeon: ‘The Shattered Throne‘

  • 4 New Multiplayer Strike Missions

  • Four New Crucible Maps

My work as Quality Assurance Engineer on Destiny 2: Forsaken

  • Co-owned the testing and validation deliverables required for shipping exceptional and intuitive UI/UX elements to Destiny 2: Forsaken.

  • Co-owned testing and validation of essential Systems-focused game mechanics aligned to back-end functionality pointed at enriching gameplay and encouraging consistent active user satisfaction and engagement with Destiny 2: Forsaken.

  • Created a multitude of complex test passes and validation plans and processes for various supported feature teams, along with heavy contributions to bug and work item filing, triaging, and tracking.

  • Coordinated both feature team and cross-team playtesting to investigate and research various different in-progress product iterations and small team focuses.

  • Collaborated with 3rd-party digital store ownership teams to attain signoff for product distribution (I.e., Xbox & PlayStation).

  • Regularly contributed to daily stand-ups, feature team sprint planning, milestone post-mortems, and other various development rituals and meetings.

Challenges & Learnings: Working on Destiny 2: Forsaken

When my time working at EA Sports came to a close, I secured a new contract at Bungie and moved back to Washington to support the development of Destiny 2 as the team continued their years-long journey to build onto the base game experience after its initial release in 2017 with expansions and downloadable content. At the time I joined the team, Bungie was hard at work getting ready to ship Destiny 2: Forsaken a few months later, which was the third overall expansion for Destiny 2 and the first major expansion to feature a new narrative campaign. The primary challenges I encountered getting started at Bungie and working as a part of the launch team for Destiny 2: Forsaken was rapidly getting up to speed with the project in a mature state of development and wrapping my head around how content development works in real time within a live service development environment. I also encountered additional challenges in getting familiarized with the wide set of tools used to build Destiny 2, which varied from being ubiquitously popular licensed tools through to being custom in-house tools which are reliant on large amounts of tribal knowledge in order to easily use and navigate.

Where to get Destiny 2: Forsaken

Destiny 2: Forsaken was officially released to all major physical and digital video game retailers in September 2018 (current availability may vary).

Destiny 2: Forsaken - Links & Media