Destiny 2 Systemic VO

Escalation Protocol was a wave-based activity introduced in Season 2 of Destiny 2. It took place on Mars, which means like a lot of other content from that era, it's sadly no longer available to the world, and therefore hard to find video reference.

Players would generally hear only 5 lines or so over the course of the activity, so the likelihood of it getting stale was rather low — particularly compared to some of the other content for which we wrote far fewer lines, that ended up being what players repeated the most! 😬

Escalation Protocol Dialogue spreadsheet →

The nature of live games is that they change every day — based on player engagement, development resources, and a hundred other factors. I hadn't even finished writing the dialogue for Faction Rallies before the underlying seasonal progression changed, and the activity was permanently shelved.

Still, the opportunity to write for such strong personalities was a lot of fun. Each of the faction leaders (Executor Hideo, Arach Jalaal, and Lakshmi-2) were their own brand of weird and unlikeable. And come on! How could I pass up getting to write for James "Dexter's Dad" Remar, Peter "Yes, He Really Is That Odd" Stormare, and Shohreh "Coolest Voice in the World" Aghdashloo!

Faction Rallies Dialogue spreadsheet →

There are thousands of lines of dialogue that play in The Tower, the hub area for players. They're spoken by dozens of characters, ranging from major NPCs to anonymous voices on loudspeakers.

Some of those NPCs are vendors, with many categories for their VO: ambient, which plays every N seconds; triggered, which plays based on player activity, and so on. Each category, or "bucket" as I've always called them, needed X different lines written so they wouldn't get stale.

Transcripts

Click to expand. Lines sorted from longest to shortest for readability.