D2 Years 5 & 6

For this expansion, we decided to return to form on campaign length and quality. Rather than building a few missions to frame the new Throne World destination and set up the game state (like in the previous two expansions), The Witch Queen would provide a return to what we called the "Definitively Destiny Campaign" structure -- a narrative-driven, expertly-crafted, multi-hour story arc that could stand on its own as a meaningful gameplay experience. To do this, a Campaign Lead joined the ranks of the Player Journey team, alongside more campaign designers and testers. This further swelled the ranks of the PJ team, which I continued to lead and maintain the vision for.

During this project, I continued to provide oversight on project goals and coordination across multiple partner teams and leadership groups. I provided more direct input to the expansion leadership team throughout concepting and development. I proctored leadership playtests at major milestones and became an expert on setting expectations for any given aspect of the release ("What's the goal of this feature?" or "How far along is this experience?").

While still maintaining some IC work, I continued to focus on mentorship and guidance, building out best practices documents and workflows for improving efficiency. I focused my attention on removing roadblocks for the members of my team to maintain momentum.

This is the first expansion where I fully took on the role of "servant leader" and focused the majority of my efforts on supporting the Player Journey team to be able to sustainably exist in perpetuity.

The team had over 25 members by this point, and had a large pool of long-tenured Bungie talent alongside early-in-career folks, and everywhere in between. I spent most of my time working with my immediate area leadership team to provide frameworks and structures for the team to succeed at their tasks, work through ambiguity without bottlenecking at key decision-makers (like myself), and be able to not only make their own high-level decisions about what to build, but to have enough confidence to move forward with it and guide others to do the same. I was, essentially, making sure the immensely talented folks on my team were never limited by my time/attention/capacity.

This focus had a few effects:

1. I set up documentation standards, playtest formats, feedback systems, etc. that were used for years to come to improve internal alignment and development health.

2. I spent far less time engaging with the creative experience (aka project quality).

3. I lost touch with a lot of the moment-to-moment decisionmaking that I had come to specialize in.

While I'm proud to have embodied the "servant leader" approach for this project, this ended up being a low point in my career due to the mood surrounding the project launch and its mixed reception with players.