One of the standout features of Destiny 2’s newly launched Forsaken expansion is a unique new PvE/PvP hybrid game mode called Gambit in which two teams compete to see who can more quickly defeat a series of AI-controlled enemies. In a recent interview with Polygon, Gambit design lead Lars Bakken discussed the new mode and the influences that led to its initial inception and creation.
According to Bakken, Bungie wanted to create a more in-depth endgame PvE experience for the Forsaken expansion, one which would be on a similar scale as Destiny 2’s uber-competitive Trials of the Nine PvP mode. However, the other major goal was to make a game mode that was truly distinct, one which didn’t already exist in Destiny or anywhere else. Eventually, Bungie started toying with the idea of a game mode that blended PvE and PvP elements, envisioning the sort of mode that would be best enjoyed by a group of three players who preferred Destiny 2’s strikes but who also had that fourth outlier friend that lived for PvP combat.
As Bakken tells it, two of the biggest influences behind Gambit were the Halo series’ cooperative Firefight mode and the puzzle game Super Puzzle Fighter. Specifically, Bakken liked how in Super Puzzle Fighter the players aren’t competing as directly as they would be in a traditional fighting game, but they’re still able to disrupt each other’s efforts:
“We talked about [Gambit] really early on as [Halo’s] Firefight meets Super Puzzle Fighter. That was our goal, our mainline thread. Early on, you think about Firefight: There’s no competitive part to Firefight, apart from trying to take someone’s headshot kill or something like that. But you look at Super Puzzle Fighter: It is a direct, head-to-head competitive mode where you’re not playing Street Fighter, you’re not kicking another player in the face, you are sending disruptions over to the other player, and messing up their carefully tuned set of blocks that they’re working toward.”
That idea of disrupting the enemy team initially manifested as Gambit’s “blocker” mechanic, a mechanic through which players can bank the motes they collect from defeated enemies to send special blocker enemies over to the opposing team’s side, temporarily disabling their ability to bank motes in the process. Soon after that, Bungie came up with the idea of allowing players to directly invade the opposing team, something which went against their original PvE-only vision. However, playtesters took to the invasion mechanics like ducks to water, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion and its included Gambit mode are available now on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.