MEGA::Intro.Chapters 1 & 2 (Fan Creations)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Monday, September 07, 2015, 12:04 (3364 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

Old Main Title: Bungie Hates PvE

MEGA INTRODUCTION!!!11!

STANDARD INTRODUCTION

Greetings to you all, fellow Destiny.Bungie.Org forum goers and of course, to our very namesake Bungie as well. I hope where ever you are lurking from you are in a moderately comfortable chair and are ready once again for a read. Seriously. This mega post is to be a culmination of so many things already said and unsaid. Its contents are to be just a sample of my many sporadic thoughts about Destiny Year One. Its comments sparked not just from my experiences and impressions, but of past posts made both upon this forum and elsewhere among the net. Within this tiny rhizome of embedded links before you I hope to enlighten, inspire, and simply imbue understanding. Or perhaps I'm just inadvertently wasting your time; there is always that available default.

Since this post is SO large at approximately fifteenish thousand plus of words, I became concerned that this post would not be read. I am also aware that my ability to format the written word has its moments of want. I decided that if I am going to try and communicate my thoughts in such an amount, that I might as well give another option. I have been told a number of times that my voice contains dulcet tones, so I figure, what the hey. If you don't want to read it, but still would like to know of my thoughts, I present your second option. I'll just read it to you at risk of me causing your eardrums to bleed while I adlib it along the way as I pretend I can do voice work. In this audio I shall start at the beginning, and read everything including this. Heh. Wow. What the hell am I reading? When does this happen in the post? Now. You're reading at now. Everything that happens now, is happening now. What happened to then? You passed then. When? Just now. You're at now now. Go back to then. When? Now. Now? Now. I can't. Why? We missed it. Ugh. :P

If you don't want to read this post (or be read to), or even want to understand what I have to say then what are you doing here at the beginning? The TL;DR is at the end of this total post. Too long still? Here is a Super TL;DR!!

So…yea. Welcome to my “short story”; my mega post. As I paint with words in an artist’s wild abandon, I hope it becomes very obvious that this post is not from your average Bungie fan. A degree of my incite comes from the knowhow of videogames that a majority are not aware of. I don't know quantitatively how much that might be though. After all I'm not even a junior...yet.

Since there is so much to be said, let's just start with the fine print the internet seems to require, and speak about the very meat that was to originally spark you onto this page. The reason why I started this post in the first place.

Bungie hates PvE.

------- Chapter 1:: Awareness of Self -------

At first glance this phrase of "Bungie hates PvE" is hyperbolic nonsensical click-bait, and I say as much upon my first mentioning’s of it here.

A snippet of which reads:

"I've had this thought rattling around in my brain. I'm not really sure where it came from right now, or the actual cause - nor do I have anything to back it up with at the moment. Yet I have had this thought, that has a certain taint for hyperbole upon it, that has given me serious pause in considering whether or not I should even bother playing Destiny anymore.

This thought is - Bungie hates PVE. Total nonsense... right? If you concur, then I agree. Yet I can't shake it. Bungie hates PVE.

So… In my original post of the 27th of May, this PvE phrase for me had existence but no purpose, which I should add, is a fancy way of saying I was thinking it but I didn’t exactly know why. So I decided to look into it. From this spark, the flame of my search begin to grow, and since thoroughness (or at least my attempt of it) became a very time consuming thing, this flame was able to observe E3, Gamescom, and the gradual build up towards Destinies Year two.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I am doing. All that you shall see before you are my very own observations and conclusions, where in which I strived to present how I have come to my conclusions.

I am also aware that my conclusions can’t be perfect, as the total data I have been able to collect and surmise from is hilariously incomplete. Furthermore I’ve come to the enclosed conclusions with information before us that could be and likely is in some cases, months or even possibly even years old. For better or for worse I've tried to concentrate two years of sporadic data into this pot, along with my experiences playing Destiny in its first year and tried to present the biggest chunks in the simplest way that I can.

*Sigh*

This invariably leaves a number of my examples to be open to the retort "but what about", "you didn't conceder", or some other lot-of-things. This post is stupid huge, and I felt that if I explained every single thing, then this post would never see the light of day. In other words, vanilla Destiny. Possibly.

I also know Bungie has awareness, that they read the posts and are too the players, yet I don't nor can I know the totality and the nature of their awareness. Perhaps that is a problem to be addressed in the future? Perhaps I'll talk about that. I don't know how they act on the data they gather or how they come to their conclusions. I am left with only to base the benefit of whatever ability I may unknowingly have to think out with the little bits of context I have. I haven't had a full and through conversation with any Bungie employee directly about Destiny post launch, but would love the opportunity to at least do so. Yet even if I did, I suppose I couldn't. It’s the NDA, It’s the contracts, and it’s the business of videogames. If only I was as cool as Wu. ;_;

｡◕‿◕｡Mr. Wu, when I grow up... :P.

------- Chapter 2::Learning from History (with tinfoil) -------

Destiny is an ambitious game. Its creation really is a culmination of what Bungie has learned. It should be noted that I originally had mentioned in my retrospectively hyper beta review it seemed Bungie had not learned from the many facets of its past and in a way this is also still true, even now. To understand what I mean you have to look at what Bungie has done and, for the sake of this post, how I see it. Tinfoil at the ready please.

While I’m not going to start reading scripture of its humble-ish beginnings in a Chicago basement, I am going to point out a few key moments that you, my dear compatriot in creation, shall likely find are nice to know for the sake of breadcrumbs down the line.

As may be known... there once was a 3rd person action game called Halo. From its spark of creation, a divine wind would rush through the stars, propelling all who were worthy along the path to salvation; and so Bungie and all it touched prospered. It is from this game among other games that I feel the core idea(s) of Destiny would be born. That’s not to ignore Myth nor Marathon, past Bungie games which are the storied bones for so many things Bungie. That's also not to ignore, for those of you with a fascination of heretical nonsense, other possible games beyond the marbled pillars of the Ivory Tower that would make in part what could be considered an inspiration for Destiny. It's just that Halo changed things.

It just all comes back to Halo. What did Halo do? It thought it would shoot its way out, mix things up a bit. It brought legitimacy to the Xbox as a gaming platform. It proved that shooters could work on a console with a little help to a thing called magnesium. It presented with a monks grace the power of an extensive musical score upon the enjoyment of game play. Yet among all these things there is one thing that Bungie did with its Halo franchise that truly changed everything. The game is Halo 2. The mode is Multiplayer. The platform that made it possible was Xbox with its “Xbox Live” functionality. While Halo 1 LAN parties, the literally best thing in all things gaming onwards and forever till the end of time, were no doubt the best thing since Halo 1 LAN parties ; Halo 2 in a technological scope would be better for all. (Especially for unsupervised very-NSFW 12 year olds. >_<)

To quote the marketing of the time, which by far is the most honest thing to ever come out of a marketing house; “It’s good to play together”. From this... Bungie learned.

After surviving the post-E3 Halo 2 production, since it feels very wrong to call it a cycle. A Race? A Frenzy maybe? …they made more Halo ; some of which because of contractual obligation. Of these next few games, I myself feel that these next Halo games would be only slightly less revolutionary when compared to Halo 2s overall effect. So...Halo 3. It has this fancy “Forge” and “Theater” thingies. Those were cool, but no one used them which is why it isn't in Destiny. Obviously, you silly goose. You know what the big feature of Halo 3 was?

Of course you do! Say it with me!

They improved the enemies by making them less like bullet sponges and more like enemies. Yep! There is no foreshadowing in the formatting of this post. In Halo 3 we got things to shoot, not because it was just trying to kill you like in Halo 2, but because they were an army trying to kill everything and you just so happened to get in the way. I hope you can see the subtly in that difference, and even if you can’t – that's probably why it’s so easy to miss. Simply put, just like animation, it's about character. Animation is how it moves, and AI is why it moves. In Halo 3, there was very good communication about the why.

From the existing Halo 3 engine; ODST used what they had and made it new again. In one year ODST was made, and within ODST Bungie had all sorts of story mechanics to help immerse the player into the world. You could play the main campaign of course, that goes without saying; But you could also search the free roam “world” to find a secondary story in audio form. Or you could just wander the free roam world, and stumble into a continuing living story (which admittedly we had context for) right in front of you. Why are there so many dead elites? Hunters are bonded pairs, so where is the second hunter? What battle happened here? Why does this AI keep making all these alarms go off? It’s the end of the world, and someone used that time to spray paint graffiti on the walls?…

YOU DID ALL THIS IN ONE YEAR BUNGIE!

ODST was a story presentation smörgåsbord! All of which aided by ODST’s only-just-sort-of-ok-music. Obviously. All in all Bungie did a pretty good job with ONE YEAR to create content into an existing engine. For many Halo fans ODST is one of the top games of the Halo franchise. One would think Bungie would have used these elements that it had learned and applied for story presentation into later games... *deep breath* yet I digress.

Then there is Reach, where we got more customization, a larger Forge world where you really could go "over there", addictively fun to do assassinations (at least for me), and one of the best (because I say so) gameplay endings of any Halo game ever. I LOVED playing the Lone Wolf. It has so much...weight.

Spartans Never Die. With all this said I ask you – did Bungie use everything they learned and place it into Destiny Year One? Or did they try to re-invent the wheel and get run over? And of course, why am I asking questions like I’m being coy or something? ;)

------- Click here for Chapters 3 - 4 -------