The events in the court are player initiated!
[dropcap size=small]D[/dropcap]estiny’s most recent expansion, The Taken King, includes a new series of playable events in a new area, The Dreadnaught, called the Court of Oryx. During a Twitch livestream earlier this week, Bungie described how the Court of Oryx works and how players need to cooperate in order to take down a series of bosses to earn new loot.
Unlike most events that are public, which players are spawned randomly in, the Court of Oryx’s events are players initiated. Players need to obtain runes, which is dropped in the Dreadnaught, to one of the statues that are just outside the court in order to initiate challenges that take place in the Court of Oryx.
Game designer Ben Wommack said that the use of statues for Court of Oryx was somewhat inspired by PlayStation 2 game Shadow of the Colossus.
Players start challenges by placing a rune in front of one of the statues and the statue initiates a challenge in the court. The player that offers the rune will receive loot that is better than the rest of the players after completing the event. But in order to split up the rewards to other players, Bungie will prevent players from hogging all the valuable loot with a debuff called Summoner’s Exhaustion. It lets other players initiate the challenges so they can also collect valuable loot at the end of the challenge.
For difficulties, there are three tiers in the Court of Oryx that correspond with a tier of rune. Tier one represents the easiest difficulty, while Tier three represents the hardest difficulty. Wommack said that when players The Taken King’s campaign, they’ll be “just about ready” for tier one challenges. He added that tier two runes are “just below Nightfall (weekly strike) difficulty.”
The Court of Oryx include bosses that have specific gameplay mechanics that “mix-up” how the players fight them, Bungie said. Talking about the Court’s bosses challenges to a puzzle, Wommack said “each is a different idea you have to wrap your head around.” In the livestream link below, Bungie provides a few examples of the challenges that players will go through in the Court of Oryx. For example, one challenge has the players lure a pair of bosses into close range of each other in order to cancel out their shields, allowing everyone to open fire. In another challenge, the players a boss’s Ogre’s shields can only be cancelled out when it’s caught in a blast of an exploding Thrall.
Tier two events combine tier one events together, meaning that players will have to go against either two, three or four bosses at a time, to go along with a normal Hive and Taken enemies, at once.
Bungie did not show any examples of tier three events in the Court of Oryx gameplay. Players will have to wait until September 15th for the release of The Taken King expansion.
