Bungie: Good at setting, bad at story (Fan Creations)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 15:30 (2586 days ago) @ Ragashingo

You would think that immortals, faced with their own mortality, would learn *something* or experience some kind of *consequence* they did not expect, but that shockingly doesn't happen.

I Disagree.

I believe its the first time you approach Zavala in the new Tower that he talks about how just huddling behind the walls of The City needs to stop and how he plans to look at the good that can be done beyond those walls.

Similarly, Ikora admits that she had grown lazy in her Light and pledges to fight all the harder. There is a real sense there that she regrets not doing enough over the previous years and decades. Regrets not using her Light to its full potential. Ikora’s whole mini-arc in D2 is about that. How she basically ran and hid because she was afraid of dying and how she overcame that fear to help save the day.

Even the random people in the Tower have a new outlook. I cringed the other day as one random woman said something like: “The Titans promised us we’d be safe behind the walls... but we weren’t...”

The things they learn may not be as directly shown as you or I wish, and yeah I agree Destiny 2 could have used a good tragic/heroic death to emphasize the consequences, but please don’t over look the pieces that Bungie did weave into D2.

TL;DR: Absolute statements will always get you in trouble. :)

I dunno. I think this is an "actions speak louder" situation. Ikora, Zavala, Cayde... I really don't think they change or grow as a result of what they say they've "learned" - which tells me that they haven't learned anything.

Zavala is still just standing around in the tower. Okay, he's moved from an interior conference room to an exterior balcony... maybe he learned to like the view? No, no, he's facing away from the outside world. Ikora claims she should have done (something) and is now helping the guardians to meditate on our past journeys (this is actually a really clever way to make the story missions replayable and I am impressed by the effort shown here to make a very video-game mechanic part of the living world), but she's not really doing anything, either. In the very intro mission we have the three vanguards actually doing something to defend the city, but only Cayde really shows up for any action (on nessus, trying to get a teleporter) until the final mission (which was a great way to use them, and I wish it was done more often)... But at no point in time have they changed or grown.

I hear you - they *say* they learned something. But their actions show that nothing has changed. I don't believe Zavala thinks the outside world is worthwhile because he's never in the outside world. He doesn't send you on missions to help the outside world. It's still all about strikes and the same vanguard territory that he always held in D1.

And I get that this is asking a lot from the game designers because, practically, I'm asking them to take their vendors/quest givers and make them mobile or insert them into the game world. I'm kind of ignoring that problem for the sake of discussing the plot of the game in as pure a sense as possible.

And I find that the world and characters of D2 are, at the end of the campaign, by and large identical to before. Which makes me wonder why this particular 'story' was told and what the value of experiencing it first hand was, while experiencing the founding of the city or the fall of the golden age was left off-screen.