Re: Destiny in 2019 (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, December 12, 2019, 16:49 (1815 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by Ragashingo, Thursday, December 12, 2019, 17:08

No, don’t take it like that.

Ok. It's just when someone enters a positive thread announcing that they are the downer it does give me some pause.

I genuinely enjoy the lore books. I love them, if not on the same level you do.

I’m increasingly frustrated that the genuinely good story threads of Destiny are hidden in them, and we get most meaningless filler as the “real” story that everyone sees in the game. Shadowkeep had great moments with Eris, but even the stuff with her fireteam every week ended up feeling hollow. They could do so much more, but they just don’t. They probably have very real reasons for doing things the way they do, probably good reasons. It’s still disappointing.

Of course. I think there's two main things that limit Destiny in terms of in-game story. First is the one that affects all studios: Inherently, there's never enough time or money to make content as fast as it is consumed. But, more unique to Bungie and Destiny, is that the Destiny engine is terrible for storytelling. It takes it far too long to set up a scene. It can't even go from gameplay to a in-game cutscene in a timely fashion. (See confronting Uldren at the end of the main Forsaken storyline, for instance.) 15 - 30 seconds to resume the story in real time form is an eternity and kills timing of story beats. I kinda question if Bungie even can use in-game storytelling without just rendering everything into gigs and gigs of4K video that we'd have to download...

The Speaker actually getting any form of communication from the Traveler is absolutely huge for the world of Destiny. Instead of actually making that matter to the game and story at large, they put it in a lore book most people won’t read.

The lore is an important part of things event to event and season to season. Playing Destiny while skipping the books is like playing Marathon while skipping the terminals. Or playing a Mass Effect by choosing dialogue options as fast as possible and skipping back to the gameplay. Yep, you lose something if you skip the stuff that's not gameplay. That's true of any game.

Also, I think it is very important to note the change in the way key pieces of lore are being distributed as of Forsaken. Just by visiting the Queen / Eris / (something in this season... the Sundial? Osiris?) Bungie is giving us lore pages that are important to the overall story and universe of Destiny. And those pages come in order now. This is very different from the Books of Sorrow, and most every other Grimoire story, like The Last Word, that were only given for doing specific obscure things and even then the pages were given out of order. That they are no longer treating Lore as random Loot (at least in some cases) is pretty huge.

At the end of the day, skipping the lore means you miss out on the story of Destiny. As always, I don't like the idea that there is no story because the story isn't presented in the way you (that's a general "you", not a personal "you") want it to be. If all of the Grimoire was part of animated cutscene and radio chatter and whatever nearer to the gameplay would it be better for more players? Sure! Even then, though, there's only so much of that anyone can do. Only so many hours of cutscene that would make sense. Only so much downtime for radio chatter to be understandable. Eventually, storytelling comes in the form of text. Even in games with much better in-game cutscenes. Think of Mass Effect... with it's tens of thousands of words of backstory and world buidling in its Codex. So did God of War (2018). Even though it had lots of awesome cutscenes and even a character that narrated lore to you while you travelled, it still used journal pages to fill in world details and reveal things about enemies and story characters that are not revealed anywhere else. Same goes for Witcher 3, which had many hours of cutscenes and many thousands of words of lore than could be read about allies and enemies.