Bungie discusses the creation of Last Wish and Destiny 2's colossal raid boss

Bungie has peeled back the curtain on the creation of Destiny 2: Forsaken's raid, Last Wish. Over on our sister site GamesRadar+ Tim quizzed raid team lead Joe Blackburn about the raid's inception and the design of the awesomely huge final boss.

"Riven was more of a response from when we made Oryx," Blackburn says. "Players felt like they didn’t have much interaction with this giant creature. So we were like “OK, we need to put the players really close and then we need to have the monster interact and not feel like it’s sort of a puppet on a train ride." We tried to do as much as possible to make Riven feel alive and massive but also having her own will."

"We have a series of very early meetings where we take everyone involved in raids, put them in a room, and start coming up with what we call experience statements.

"These are the moments that drive what we want the raid to be about, or what we want a specific encounter to be about. So when we talk about encounters, people will say something like: “What if we made an encounter and the experience was the hunter becomes the hunted?” and that’s sort of where the Gardens [in the Leviathan raid] came from, right?"

For more, and to find out what it's like to watch your community try to crack your elaborate raid puzzles in real time, check out the full interview on GamesRadar+. For more Destiny 2 chat check out our interview with the creators of the excellent hybrid co-op/PvP mode Gambit.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.