Developer Insight - Solo Ops

Welcome to another Developer Insight article for Codename: Frontiers. These articles take a deeper dive into many changes coming to Destiny 2 next year. Check back with our Paving the Way for New Frontiers article for more information on our plans and an always-updated list of these articles as they are published.

This week’s topic is the new Solo Ops activity category. Solo Ops are short missions that are easy for lone players to jump into, quick to complete, and fun to replay.

TLDR

• Solo Ops are 10-minute missions that can be completed by single players or fireteams.
• They are low-commitment options that still allow you to use Challenge Customization to make progress toward better gear.
• They are being built for their experiences to stay fresh across repeated plays.

The Problem

Over the last few years, we’ve built on the promise of Destiny as a game where you can come together with other Guardians and enjoy the game together. We've built a lot of new matchmade activities, from Battlegrounds to Onslaught, and rolled out features like Fireteam Finder to make it easier than ever to group up with other people. We’ve watched our community come together like never before, and that’s great.

Sometimes you just want to jump in and play for 10 or 20 minutes and feel like it was worth your time. Right now, your only options for doing so either put you in direct competition with other players (Crucible and Gambit) or can feel like you’re in a race to the finish against your own fireteam members (Strikes and Battlegrounds). The activities best suited to solo players are time-consuming; story missions can take half an hour or more to complete, Lost Sectors require you to go into the destination to play them, and jumping into multiplayer activities as a solo player (for example, soloing a dungeon) can be stressful and take even more time than the activity would with a fireteam.

We identified a gap in our offerings: short activities that lone players can take at their own pace.

The Solution

Solo Ops are activities aimed at short play times and manageable for solo players. They will be launched from the Portal and have a target base play time of 10 minutes. Each Solo Ops activity emphasizes the fun of Destiny’s combat action gameplay, presenting players with straightforward objectives that focus on gunplay. Solo Ops missions aren’t intended to be intense tests of buildcrafting prowess or thumb skill; instead, we want them to focus on the joy of playing in Destiny’s action sandbox in a way that’s easy to jump into and play in just a few minutes.

Reward Scaling

Solo Ops will support scoring and Challenge Customization like many of our other activities. As such, they will allow players to make incremental progress toward better and more powerful gear, and support customizing the difficulty of the activity with a wide variety of modifiers. You’ll still want to play well in Solo Ops activities—your score will contribute to the quality of your loot—but we’re trying to construct these missions so that getting a good score is a matter of moving, shooting, and looting rather than being determined by what loadout and build you bring into them.

Mission Variability

Another goal of Solo Ops is to create activities with higher variability between plays. Since you’ll be playing these missions as a way of making progress toward better gear, we are trying to make sure they stay fresh longer and are making them less predictable in what content you see. For example, at this time we’re aiming to have each mission come with a variant for at least two combatant factions (each one with a unique objective associated with it).

Solo Ops missions will sometimes come with optional goals that only present themselves once you’re in the activity, like the presence of treasure goblins, or passageways to secret rooms opening where they are normally closed. We’re also scattering random treasure chests throughout the activity and finding them will get you a bonus to your final score.

One piece of activity tech that we’ve been working to build for these missions is a dynamic enemy spawning system. This system runs behind the scenes, monitoring how well you’re doing, how long it’s been since you’ve been in combat, and how close you’re getting to your objective, and then spawns squads of enemies when the system determines that you need to be challenged. Unlike our other activities, where enemy spawn cadence and locations are often very scripted, Solo Ops missions will spawn enemies at unpredictable times from places where you may not expect them to be.

Visiting Exciting Locations

Since Solo Ops are a part of the core game that is free to play for everyone, we also wanted to take advantage of the fact that across the game there are many locations that are either not used in free content or are underused despite being a fun place to play. A lot of beautiful, exciting spaces play host to only a single story mission, and players have no reason to go to those places outside of that mission. Some (like the Salzwerks area on EDZ) are currently entirely unused. These are awesome, uniquely Destiny spaces, and we think Solo Ops is a great venue for going back and visiting some of these places that may not have gotten as much attention as their craftsmanship deserves.

Solo Ops missions will take you into spaces you might have visited before, but the new objectives and dynamic enemy spawning system help to make the experience feel both fresh and familiar. For many players, Solo Ops missions might be the first time you go to those locations, and we think that everyone should have a chance to experience these iconic spaces.

Overall, we hope that the Solo Ops missions will be a good activity for players who only have a short amount of time to play, prefer to play by themselves, or are looking for a lower-intensity way to revel in the Destiny gameplay sandbox, as well as any combination of those three.

FAQ

Can you only play them solo, or can they be played in a fireteam?

Solo Ops activities will accommodate up to three-player fireteams, because we never want to tell you that you can’t play with your friends. We are working on a system to automatically scale up the difficulty of the encounters based on your fireteam size. However, if you want to play with other people, Fireteam Ops are going to offer the more efficient path to getting better gear.

Will Solo Ops support matchmaking?

No; if you want to play with other people, Fireteam Ops is going to be the way to go.

Will Solo Ops include Champions/Banes/[specific modifier]?

We haven’t locked down any specific set of modifiers that we are going to support in Solo Ops. We can’t just use the same modifiers as, say, strikes, because we’re really aiming at a tight experience that solo players can enjoy, and we want to make sure the modifiers we allow don’t push the missions away from that experience. We do plan to support Banes, as we think they offer an exciting way to increase the variety of experiences you have across multiple plays.