Destiny 2 Renegades: Lawless Frontier Holomap

For this expansion, our team was tasked to create a UI flow that brought players into the latest campaign missions that told the story of the Renegades campaign. Following the completion of the campaign, the systems we built would then need to take players to the frontlines of an ongoing war across 3 criminal syndicates — all wrapped up within visuals that elegantly combined both Destiny 2 and Star Wars' well known aesthetics.

Our first challenge was deciding the art direction of the holomap. Our design team's core goal was to reinforce the fantasy of the game's new campaign first and foremost. The team had a general sense of where they wanted to start visually before the project kicked off, which was having the planets depicted like a hologram as a nod to the Star Wars franchise. But we needed to determine the point of view from which our audience would be interacting with the map: Is the viewer up against a hologram table? Framed as a terminal monitor? A part of some stolen alien interface?

One of my major tasks on this project was redesigning our nodes to fit the 50/50 mix of the Destiny and Star Wars IPs, while meeting all of the usability requirements necessary for players to find and complete activities. The result is a modular hit target that communicates multiple pieces of information at once.

There's almost no way to avoid some cognitive overload in an interface so complex, especially with new alien iconography to learn and memorize. But we employed a few tactics to help ease players while interacting with the Holomap:

The Lawless Frontier's Contracts and Wallet are key systems used to build reputation with syndicates, earn gear, and manage new resources. We used Destiny's existing fly-out menu framework to help players use the system on the Holomap, and I reskinned it with a bespoke icon I designed to represent Contracts as a whole and a frame that nods at Star Wars' FUI visual language.

Playtesting revealed some major gaps in the overall experience of the campaign after the initial builds of the expansion were put together. Ultimately, the experience was missing a great deal of tension around the war that was supposedly taking place between the three alien crime syndicates.

One of the critical focus areas towards the end of the project required us to emphasize the interplanetary war within the UI we were building, and visually demonstrating the consequences of the player's actions throughout their gameplay. With an extremely tight turnaround, I proposed the two wireframes above to our team. They focused on adding tension around the decision a player makes when selecting which Syndicate to wage war against, while remaining clear, bold and exciting.