Great post. Not sure if I should reply to the whole thing.. (Fan Creations)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, September 08, 2015, 15:15 (3363 days ago) @ Fuertisimo

First, I'd like to thank you for so thoroughly answering my questions. This is all great stuff.

Thanks. I know I complain a lot on these forums, but I try to explain why I hold the positions that I do.

Continuing, it's like you're reading my brain here on so many of the points you made, particularly in regards to the story. The whole game felt so sterile and lifeless. You go to the tower and the inhabitants feel like animatronics or robots or something, not real people giving a real sense of character or anything resembling humanity. The story was just so so bad, and it was shocking because of Bungie's history with committing to telling a good story.

So, again, something has slipped in the mission design element of the game. The game designers chose simplistic, linear play against simplistic, predictable AI with basic, repetitive mission objectives spread throughout. As a result, every mission feels like the same mission, and ever strike feels like the same strike. Go in a straight line, kill the predictable enemies, defeat the boss. Some bosses follow different patterns, but they're all predictable and - as a result - they all become boring after the first time through.

That would be okay, except someone in charge became obsessed with forced replays of the game. This is where poor design turns into downright abusive design. Instead of focusing on making the game fun enough to replay, some evil genius realized that the game wasn't fun enough for that and decided instead to fill the game with hooks to keep you coming back, even if you didn't want to. Here's a good article about it. In the concept of a game, I personally feel like the only design parameters should be "is it fun" and "does it tell a story." Destiny seems to have been consciously created to ignore those questions and only look at "is it addictive."

This so perfectly encapsulates my experience with the game. I found it so dreadfully boring, I had to force myself to play through all the content. I was literally almost falling asleep at the controller sometimes.

Agree on the art team as well. They nailed it in almost every aspect.

So for me, as a student journalist, my desire would be to get in there and figure out what in the holy hell exactly happened. A tall task I imagine because people want to protect their careers, NDA's, etc.

I, too, would *love* to know what happened and to see how early builds of the game were different.

Last point regarding the grimoire, I'm pretty sure that that was actually created from scratch after Staten's departure and on a very short time table. Someone named Battuta got really pissed off at me when I suggested that the grimoire might have been culled from Staten's work, so I would not want to offend him again. Battuta, I know you and others worked on the grimoire!

Well the Grimoire's writing is great, so good on the team that wrote it. Kinda sucks that the good writing all ended up on a website and the bad writing ended up in the actual game.