Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass

On Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass, my final role was Quality Assurance Engineer.

What is Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass?

The Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass is a collection of seasonal content expansions for the Bungie-developed first-person shooter video game Destiny 2. The Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass was introduced alongside the release of the Destiny 2: Forsaken expansion in late 2018. The Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass acted as Bungie’s initial seasonal content model for Destiny 2, and included three premium downloadable content packages: “Season 5: Season of the Forge“ (AKA ‘Black Armory‘; released December 2018), “Season 6: Season of the Drifter“ (AKA ‘Joker’s Wild’; released March 2019), and “Season 7: Season of Opulence“ (AKA ‘Penumbra‘; released June 2019).

Key features of the Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass include:

  • New Endgame Challenges

  • New Locations, Characters, & Lore

  • New Exotics, Weapons, Armor, & Vanity Rewards

  • New Pinnacle Activities & Triumph Records

My work as Quality Assurance Engineer on Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass

  • Co-owned the testing and validation deliverables required for shipping exceptional and intuitive UI/UX elements to the Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass.

  • Co-owned testing and validation of essential Systems-focused game mechanics and back-end functionality pointed at enriching gameplay and encouraging consistent active user satisfaction and engagement with the Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass.

  • Created a multitude of complex test passes and validation plans and processes for various supported feature teams, along with heavy contributions to bug and work item filing, triaging, and tracking.

  • Coordinated both feature team and cross-team playtesting to investigate and research various different in-progress product iterations and small team focuses.

  • Collaborated with 3rd-party digital store ownership teams to attain signoff for product distribution (I.e., Xbox & PlayStation).

  • Regularly contributed to daily stand-ups, feature team sprint planning, milestone post-mortems, and other various development rituals and meetings.

Challenges & Learnings: Working on Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass

In tandem with the release of Destiny 2: Forsaken, my team’s focus shifted to primarily working on the seasonal content releases contained within the Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass. As Destiny 2 is a live service game, the intention behind the design of the game is to ensure players have a constant and fresh experience for a game that is engineered to have a decade long lifespan in-market. To support this customer promise, Bungie implemented a unique seasonal content release model that would see a semi-major expansion ship every 3 months. This rapid release cadence for the Annual Pass content became the primary challenge I faced adapting to during this period of my time at Bungie. as it was not uncommon for teams within Bungie to be working on 2-3 different projects in parallel, each at different phases of development and requiring unique needs to progress each individual release further into the next phase of their respective development cycles. I came away from my experience balancing these different releases with a much better understanding of how to successfully prioritize competing deliverables in a live service development environment, and how to achieve near-seamless hand-off of work items between interdependent development groups requiring rapid turnarounds on iteration cycles.

Where to get Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass

The Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass was originally released to all major digital video game retailers in September 2018 (current availability may vary).

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