Story Structure: What went wrong (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, September 27, 2014, 20:11 (3951 days ago) @ Avateur

Just a quick note, I recall on of the Mars missions furthers the story with Rasputin a bit...

That, and there's also the larger narrative--maybe I should call it a timeline, unrelated to the main story. All the missions and Strikes feed in to that--it's not like they're completely, absolutely unrelated to one another. There are things happening in the Destiny universe. It does require a lot of digging--I'm looking forward to the community analysis on that that comes out once the community stops grumbling and decides to embrace what Destiny does offer ;-).

There is no larger narrative. This game has just about no narrative. Even the smaller story missions have just about no connections to one another. Same with most of the Strikes. There's a big bad guy we need to kill. Somehow no one has ever managed to locate or kill any of these guys. They're now found and we killed them. Yay. But there are many others out there, and we will find them and kill them, too!

That's not narrative, just going around killing things. We've seen nothing of the City. No regular humans. Nothing is at stake in this game in any way, shape, or form. All we hear about constantly are the dangers to the city and the enemies banging at the Walls that surround it. I have yet to see anything truly doing that. I haven't seen any humans dying. No one has busted through the Wall and done some damage before being repelled. Even the Black Garden is whatever. We have to take other peoples' words for it that there is this clear and present danger if we don't stop this stuff, but there quite clearly isn't. Even the Grimoire seems to state that the darkness in the Black Garden didn't have much power or energy to effectively deal with us. What kind of dangerous threat is that?

There's your analysis of some of the things we've seen so far.

While I think you are right that the game doesn't give nearly a good enough sense of danger, I do think the missions connect and flow in an order:

Earth:
1. Wake up reborn as a Guardian
2. Go back to where you were to get a NLS drive for your ship. - Only then is traveling to any other planet possible.
3. Investigate what has the Fallen all excited. - Find out it's the lost Warmind, Rasputin.
4. Try and see what Rasputin is up to. - Inadvertently connecting him to an array facility which he uses to take over portions of an AI on Mars, possibly even a Mars Warmind itself!

Moon:
1. Head to the moon to track down a Guardian who was investigating the Hive.
2 - 4. Disrupt the Hive's war preparations by stopping their attack on The Traveler, by trying to destroy Crota's sword, by destroying a major Hive power source.
5. Get a mysterious communication that leads you to Venus.

Venus:
1. Encounter the Vex.
2. Consult the Awoken as to how to stop the Vex.
3. Research a Vex mind core looking for a way to get to a Gate Lord.
4. Exploit that weakness and kill a Gate Lord
5. Learn that the Black Garden and the evil connected to the Vex within it are on Mars.

Mars:
1. Create something of a beachhead by disrupting the Cabal's complete lockdown of Meridian Bay
2. Fight through the Cabal to a way to fix the Gate Lord's eye.
3. Enter the Black Garden.
4. Destroy the Garden's dark heart, returning the Black Garden to Mars from its position in a Vex pocket world.

Ending:
1. The Traveler is, for the first time in centuries, on the mend.
2. For good or bad you have something of an alliance with the Exo Stranger.

Yeah, you can play it a bit out of order, but mostly the mission unlock or are level rated in the above order, with the Strikes and a few side missions not so connected to that main story. One of the problem is it is hard to take, say, an all channels message from the Speaker seriously when he's ordering all available Guardians to save The Traveler from a Hive ritual... when it is delivered via generic loading screen. That you were the Guardian to accomplish the task isn't so bad. The Master Chief happened to be the one Spartan who saved the universe a few times. The problem is Destiny's lack of showing and implied urgency and story reinforcement that comes from trying to squeeze the story into short voice overs.

Again, I love the universe, but just shake my head at the way the story was relayed to us. We don't necessarily need cutscene after cutscene, Halo got by more often that one would think with Cortana briefly chiming in at just the right time, but it needs more of something... and more cutscenes are an obvious way to provide that something.