Story Structure: What went wrong (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Saturday, September 27, 2014, 19:11 (3951 days ago) @ Ragashingo

All of these things are related to the survival of humanity and the war between Light and Dark. If all these lines are extended and eventually cross over each other then Destiny could be very epic indeed. Unfortunately, the disappointing execution so far makes questions about the future of Destiny's story far more legitimate than questions about Halo's story, even if we just look at Destiny 1 vs Halo 1. :(

Halo 1, I believe, was a well-executed self-contained linear story unto itself. Compromises that were made to achieve its release date did not touch this, as geometry was re-used instead of whole levels and their story events removed, as was done with Halo 2.

Destiny is not a coherent well-executed self-contained story, but I'm not sure it was intended to be, at least not by everyone working on it. Aside from the unrelated threads, the sometimes boring exposition and other problems, there's the glaring fact that while most Halo games contained within them near feature length cutscenes, a sort of sci fi action movie with the action scenes removed, and Destiny seems to clock in around 30 minutes, with the balance taken up by voiceovers on top of loading screens.

There's simply much less commitment to the standard cutscene/gameplay formula we saw used in Halo. Part of that may be that with so much of Destiny's structure being built around co-op and replay, these became difficult to contextualize. I'd say there's already too much, not too little, emotional contextualization around the events of story levels that makes repetition jarring in a way that repeat Halo level play is not.

When I replay a Halo level, the whole world is reset to a known condition. It's like flipping open a familiar book to a dog-eared page. You're reliving a moment in time-- a specific moment.

When the Speaker tells me for the umpteenth time that "Sepiks Prime cast a shadow over the city" I can't help but want to heckle him-- that Prime does so three times a night, and four times on weekends. Defeating him, at least from a narrative perspective, is meaningless and can only be meaningless. His (its?) absence alters the world in no way that extends beyond that dull voiceover. (Why Dinklage is getting dragged over the coals and Nighy is getting a free pass is beyond me.)

That only makes me wonder why the heck these kill targets have names. Once they don't have names, they're not characters-- and they're not part of the story. (This is a strike, of course, and Cody already acknowledged their special position as optional content, but the point applies equally well to all story bosses, as they all get the same treatment).

If all these targets were just referred to as a member of their rank-- a Fallen baron, a Prime servitor, a Vex Nexus (vexus?) I think I'd feel more charitable during the repetition of these voiceovers. It may be that Destiny is light on traditional cutscenes because there are so few characters to put into them-- so little of consequence actually happens. I think it may be by design, but the transition from Halo's structure is admittedly jarring. Heck, either that or procedurally generate new names for each target based on a set of rules, and leave the name out of the voiceover-- best of both worlds!