SIVA is a plague of self-assembling, self-replicating nanotechnology that was created during humanity’s Golden Age. The Iron Lords hoped to use it to better humanity, but the corruption was too violent to be contained, and their quest ended in the downfall of many of humanity’s mightiest heroes. Now, centuries later, the Fallen House of Devils has uncovered this mysterious substance in the depths beneath the Cosmodrome, and this nanotechnology is corrupting them – turning them into deadly machine gods. The universe is in need of a Guardian brave enough to take down this new threat and seal it away forever. Come meet your new foe: The Devil Splicers.
Once Bungie settled on the story for Rise of Iron, the team knew that they had to craft a new set of enemies for players to fight throughout the Rise of Iron campaign. With the Taken King, the team had put together a new race of enemies by pulling creatures from all of Destiny’s existing enemy factions. However, for Rise of Iron, Bungie thought it would be more interesting to transform a single faction into a new enemy.
Bungie felt that there were good gameplay reasons to choose the Fallen as well. For example, the Fallen are a highly diverse race of enemies, and have a bit more variety than some of Destiny’s other races. The Fallen also have a wider arsenal of weapons, which allowed Bungie to experiment with a wider mix of new enemy weapons and combat behaviors.
The Fallen redesign for the Devil Splicers isn’t as dramatic as the Taken featured in The Taken King, but players will notice that the Devil Splicers look a bit more aggressive than standard Fallen. The SIVA nanotechnology has transformed this nomadic race of four-armed aliens into cybernetic warriors. In many cases, several of the Fallen soldiers’ limbs have been replaced with robotic prosthetics – the Dreg even have peg legs. Other Fallen are draped with red SIVA tendrils or robotic pyramid heads. Even the Fallen weapons have gotten an overhaul.
To help further demonstrate the difference between regular Fallen and this new class of Devil Splicer, we asked Findley to break down some of the biggest changes being made to a few of the Fallen enemies.
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