Story Structure: What went wrong (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Saturday, September 27, 2014, 15:36 (3951 days ago)

First, let's talk about what actually comprises Destiny's main narrative. The main narrative is meeting the exo stranger, and destroying the heart of the Black Garden. There are tons of story missions and strikes, but only a few actually move this story forward. They are:

1. A Guardian Rises - You are brought back to life kicking off the story and getting your ship
2. Restoration - Get your ship a warp drive
3. The Dark Within - The Hive are on Earth! This gets you curious to go to the moon.
4. Chamber of Night - You get the call from the Exo Stranger leading you to Venus
5. A Stranger’s Call - You meet and the Exo Stranger tells you to go to the Queen.
6. The Awoken - The Queen tells you to kill the gate lord.
7. Eye of a Gate Lord - You kill the gate lord, getting the eye.
8. The Buried City - Charge the eye
9. The Black Garden - Use the charged eye to enter the black garden and Destroy the heart.

That's it. All other missions are unnecessary to the main plot. 9/32 are part of the main narrative.

That looks bad, but that's not the problem. Sub-plots are common in narrative, in which plot threads other than the main one branch off. The key, is that they recombine at some later time. Look at Empire Strikes back:

You have Luke's plot, and then you have the sub-plot involving Han, Leia, and the others. Notice how the sub-plot feeds back into the main narrative twice: once when Luke sees the future where his friends are being tortured, leading him to cloud city, and a second time when they rescue him. Luke's story would have been over had these intersections not occurred (or it would have been significantly different).

You can get more complicated, and have sub-plots within sub-plots that then recombine into the original sub-plot if you like.

So it's fine to have branches and subplots, so long as they matter and eventually feed back into your main narrative. But how does Destiny look?

Oops. This is a problem. All these other story missions are just loose branches that don't resolve. You can have your sub-plots not resolve until later, which is fine and what happens in tons of TV shows, but Destiny has so many that branch off and never reconnect. In addition to the sheer number, many are just one offs that never go anywhere at all.

This is a major reason Destiny's story felt bad. You have a main narrative that is relatively short and simple, but not helped in any way by the remaining story missions. Everything is completely disconnected from everything else. We don't have all these story mission combining into maybe one or two sub-plots that cross back into the main narrative, and possibly branch off again to give something to resolve later. We have a complete jumbled clusterfuck. This is why nothing felt good.

Here is what a good Destiny story could have looked like:

Notice now the subplots on Earth, Moon, Venus, and Mars all either directly tie back into the narrative, or indirectly by tying back into another sub-plot which does. Notice also how some elements don't resolve so there's still things to tackle next game, but most does. This is how it needed to be.

Of course, one major problem is the strikes HAVE to be one offs, since players without PSN+ or XBL Gold can't play them. Strikes cannot therefore be integrated into the story in any significant way. The solution is either to require PSN+ / XBL Gold to play the game at all, or else eliminate the requirement only for strikes.

How nobody at Bungie did this when there are so many whiteboards is beyond me.