Psions are also speculated to be not just a different genetic morph but a different species entirely in the grimoire cards.

IMO, they were wrong to short-shrift the story. Story is what makes games stand out in their genre. It's a central thing. There will always be games that are mechanics-only, but those games aren't $60 games to me. They're iPhone games I play while pooping.

You've got this completely backwards here.

I just...

wow.

Yeah, I'm sure the Walking Dead has a great story, but I can't get past the lousy mechanics.

Wait, what? They were still recording dialog after the beta? Holy crap! I only played the first two missions in the beta. How much could you see in the beta? Mars? Venus? The level cap was 8 right? Perhaps the recording was for the expansion?

this is why i think dinklage should be cut some slack. he got reamed in the press and on forums for "phoning it in." I wonder how many times they had to call him back to record more lines? Dude was probably fed up by the end of it.

Maybe. I'm sure he was compensated well. I would love to know the direction he received. I'm one of those who doesn't think his performance is bad, but like the Grimoire cards, it's being asked to carry more weight than it should have been.

My theory is that they spent so much time world-building and back-story building and perhaps were so immersed in it that they lost sight of what we, the gamers new to this universe, don't yet know or don't yet care about, and in an effort to be subtle (or because they ran out of time or both) they didn't provide enough story for us to understand what was happening or care about it.

I think this lack was noticed, and that's why you have lines like "there is much you won't understand," "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain," and "I could tell stories ...." Those seem to me to be pretty transparent attempts to paper over the fact that the story, as delivered, doesn't tell enough.

this is why i think dinklage should be cut some slack. he got reamed in the press and on forums for "phoning it in." I wonder how many times they had to call him back to record more lines? Dude was probably fed up by the end of it.

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, (I mean, I do love me some Tyrion), but if this was the case, you'd think there would be at least a couple of lines in there where it didn't sound like he just didn't care.

-Disciple

Why are the entrances to the Cabal bunkers significantly smaller than the standard Cabal legionary morph?

Do they only expect psions to walk in and out of the bunkers?...

I've wondered this too. The doors are smaller than the shields they carry too.

Wait, what? They were still recording dialog after the beta? Holy crap! I only played the first two missions in the beta. How much could you see in the beta? Mars? Venus? The level cap was 8 right? Perhaps the recording was for the expansion?

this is why i think dinklage should be cut some slack. he got reamed in the press and on forums for "phoning it in." I wonder how many times they had to call him back to record more lines? Dude was probably fed up by the end of it.

IMO, they were wrong to short-shrift the story. Story is what makes games stand out in their genre. It's a central thing. There will always be games that are mechanics-only, but those games aren't $60 games to me. They're iPhone games I play while pooping.

You've got this completely backwards here.

I just...

wow.

Do they only expect psions to walk in and out of the bunkers?...

Understanding that there are sometimes extenuating circumstances doesn't lessen my disappointment, however.

- Part trying to do something much bigger than they ever did before. Four consoles, a new much better game engine, much larger and more detailed playable spaces, and all the customizable class abilities and weapon perks. Destiny really does do a lot and does it extremely well. But maybe there was only so much that could be done well with even a ton of money and a longer development period?

- Part internal problems. Marty and Joe's leaving may have not affected things much, but maybe it did. Also, expanding to such a huge team may have hurt development a bit even as it allowed them to go bigger and better in many places. Right now I don't think Destiny suffered from a Halo 2 style development problems... the stuff that does work like core gameplay and ability balance and level design seems too strong to me for this to have happened... but then, would we have guessed that Halo 2's problems came about because it nearly crashed and burned if we hadn't been told so after the fact?

-Part trying to make a game with no central driving player characters. I wondered from the beginning at how Bungie would tell a good story when that story had to be general enough to support the existence of many heroes instead of just one or a few that every player played as. Also, even though The Master Chief was a quiet character, with Noble 6 and The Rookie being quieter still, each was clearly responsible for the story moving forward. Destiny, unfortunately, rarely acknowledges our Guardian's accomplishments and even then mostly does so after the fact through Grimoire cards.

- And, part by design. I don't think the shorter missions and fewer cutscenes are an accident or so much the result of cut content. I think Bungie was trying to build a game more friendly to both co-op play and mission repetition but took its sliming down of "distracting story" too far. Sure, we all ignored the stories of the Halos as we replayed them but perhaps removing story content for the player instead of allowing them to skip or ignore it themselves proved more controversial than they'd hoped?

I think Destiny still shows a lot of promise because its gameplay is very good and, despite problems in the story it presented, its backstory and universe are also very good. I think the question now is when will Destiny live up to what it should be? With "The Dark Below"? I don't think so. I think its release is too near to react to Destiny's criticisms. "The House of Wolves?" Maybe. I expect it to at least begin to show signs that Bungie gets the need for more front-facing story. If it doesn't... well then it's time to start worrying. Destiny 2? Hopefully. Bungie has a very strong base to build on. They "just" need to do so.

And that's really a huge issue that I have with this. The bulk of story for Destiny is in the grimoire cards, in press releases, in interviews with the developers, and just is fundamentally not an actual part of what's in the game. I love that there's all of this mythos being conceived of, but it needs to be in the game!

I've said before that I don't think that the problem is so much that they aren't in the game, but there isn't enough in the game for these to be the cool extras that they should be. And I'd be very proud to have written them.

What we do know is that some guy is beaming with pride at having delivered a terrible script. And we know that I like to make fun of that guy.

You do. I don't. Dave Mongan left Bungie in March. Did he even see the final cut? I doubt it. We know they were recording new material after the beta.

EDIT: BTW, he's now a senior narrative designer at Microsoft.

With regards to scaling, I think you're right. I'd guess the publishers gave some hard deadlines, deep cuts had to be made, and the whole game was stitched together from the remaining pieces. Unfortunately, no one logic-proofed the dialogue or narrative that was left over, or they decided that a compelling story was not a thing the game needed. It's not an ideal situation, but as a developer you need to be able to adjust to these things. Other big budget games have been made with coherent narratives and compelling characters under similar circumstances, and this isn't Bungie's first rodeo with a major release, so any statements that the alleged 2013 shake-up is to blame for the poor writing just feel like cop-outs (do we even have actual proof that the shake-up happened outside of that possibly fake reddit thread?).

IMO, they were wrong to short-shrift the story. Story is what makes games stand out in their genre. It's a central thing. There will always be games that are mechanics-only, but those games aren't $60 games to me. They're iPhone games I play while pooping.

And, frankly, I've come to expect great writing from Bungie over the years. I've been playing their games since Pathways into Darkness, and Destiny is the first one that disappointed me. It's unfortunate that it was such a massive disappointment with such glaring errors and omissions, too. Someone at the top needed to die on this hill to save the story, and maybe that's what led Joe Staten to leaving; maybe he did die on that hill. But we don't know.

What we do know is that some guy is beaming with pride at having delivered a terrible script. And we know that I like to make fun of that guy.

In all likelihood, Bungie bit off more than they could chew here. Cross-platform development takes longer. The many promises made during development meant the dev team was constantly feeling like they weren't living up to expectations (plot and scale-wise, they didn't). There were obviously major internal issues given the departure of such important figures as Joe and Marty. Hell, even the fact that the Destiny website was all about pre-order sales for MONTHS before launch should have been a red flag. But I had faith in Bungie and, sadly, that faith was misplaced. The "game" elements are good. Good engine, good gameplay, good audio. The story elements suck balls. And the future looks bleak.

Everything I'm seeing says more of the same. The dev team is focusing on stopping exploits instead of fixing the bugs that make the exploits feel necessary. The xpacs look like more strikes, more boring "story" missions, and more bounties, without providing an improved experience. I look forward to the additional raids, but I'm tempering my expectations for these so-called "quests". They just sound like opt-in exotic bounties so far. Lots of text, little real content. I'm still waiting to hear a single legend in this game, and I'm still waiting to find out how, exactly, I "become legend."

The game is deeply flawed, and nothing I'm hearing from Bungie makes it sound like that's on their radar.

What's more, the game started with weekend events the first two weekends, and has had nothing at all since then. What gives? Is this game being supported or are the $20 per xpac add-ons all we can expect at this point? What happened to daily updates and an ever expanding universe?

Either they're feckless rookies who made some mistakes or they're complicit vets who should have known better. Neither is a thing I'd want to be. Both are things that have sullied the Bungie name and tarnished their image.

Or maybe it's neither or some combination of things we don't know about. Maybe some things will gel later on, and we'll regard this first effort at Destiny's story differently.

I find the writing (and delivery) quirky. Quirky could be good and interesting, but unfortunately, Destiny's story is disjointed, too, so being quirky is a luxury they didn't quite earn.

I suspect the problem with Destiny's writing was a scaling issue, and I'm not really talking about staff, because I don't know about that. I suspect they wrote assuming that more content would make it into the first game, and scaled back such that what shipped didn't hang together as well as it might have had they'd known how much content they could deliver from the start. A ton of concept art was created and music was written before the actual game took form, and maybe it was the same for the writing, and finding the best way to use this content was the difficult part.

In a way, I think the ten-year-plan and ambition of the game hurt them because they could view this game as the foundation of what was to come, which enabled them to justify some deep cuts that hurt the first game's ability to exist as a stand-alone narrative.

Game development is hard. Bungie's games have come in hot before, and I think this was a bumpy landing for those of us who like story in their games. You don't always know, though. At Naughty dog they've said that The Last of Us didn't gel until the final weeks of development, and in retrospect that game seems pretty close to perfect to me--there's nothing I would change about it, but apparently important changes were made very late. Sometimes things come together. Destiny's story hasn't yet--for me, anyway. I'll say it again, though, the Grimoire cards are excellent.

If that's the case, I'd want to know what it was, out of curiosity.

But I'm not going to scold them them like children or tell them to fuck off, rather I'm just going to watch carefully for their future content and decided after it comes out if I want to get involved with it.

I'm not going to let the hype train derail my fun.

I feel that personally, I've had a better experience with Destiny than a lot of people here because I went in with minimal expectations.

This game is clearly a foundation setter. Gotta walk before you can run, dude.

If the mistakes aren't fixed or improved upon in the next title, then I won't buy it, and I won't come here anymore.

Simple as that.

Nah, those guys know what they're doing. To imply that bungie has a bunch of inexperienced leadership now is laughable.

Okay, then those guys know they put out a terrible story with poor design in a world that is far smaller than they advertised. The AI is generally poor, the enemies are all basically the same, and there's no character motivation or even sense of contribution to the world of the game.

They should be aware that the game has amazing art, music, sound, and gameplay mechanics. But they should own up to the crap story and terrible writing. They should also be aware of the incredibly amateur mistakes in the level design and execution, as well as the glaring omissions in the user interface.

Either they're feckless rookies who made some mistakes or they're complicit vets who should have known better. Neither is a thing I'd want to be. Both are things that have sullied the Bungie name and tarnished their image.

In the long term, Destiny may be the game that broke Bungie, not made it. If Bungie stays the course on this one, I predict fewer players buy the sequel, fewer still the one after that, and an eventual dwindling to nothing of the franchise, only to be recorded in history as one of the largest disappointments in gaming history.

People give 343 a lot of shit for being in Bungie's shadow with Halo, but even Bungie themselves are still trying to get out of Halo's shadow.

AAA gaming, mang.....

At the end of the day, it's a business. These people need to make money to support themselves and their families too. I get that.

It's a product.

Because it's a product, you'er going to have clashes between the creative types and the executive types.

The Artist wants to give give give, create create create. The executive type needs to tone that back, so they have something to sell, something to stretch out to make as profitable as possible, for as long as possible.

If we got everything that Bungie wanted to give us, what incentive would we have to purchase extra content? Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free, etc. The only way these things will continue to make money, is if they can get you to keep playing.

The success of AAA gaming created it's own problems. Inventors only want to make money. They don't care if the product is shit or success, as long as people keep buying it. The artist just wants to make something cool, and make a little to keep making things, period.

Not every new game needs to have the same sales and player base that CoD and Halo have had to be successful.

Unfortunately, the people who have the money don't see it that way.

Every time Dinklebot says we've heard the legends I say, "No I haven't. Nobody had the time to tell me the legends." They could have but they didn't.

This is course a burden on the video game. The player has to have some sort of knowledge of your character's motivation.

I've been trying to get a film off the ground for a few years based on a video game. In the game, it starts in the middle of something, and since the player wouldn't know what the main character is doing, one of he first things is an interaction with another character asking him if he has completed his task yet. The character is a major one, yet pretty much exists only for this purpose.

In the screenplay, this character is eliminated. The main character can do what he does, and the audience doesn't always have to know why. In fact, there's a bit of a dramatic irony now where we think he is doing one thing, but find out later it is something else. There are many many more ways to do this, and it is much more flexible when you audience is not directing the action.

It is entirely possible a lot happened 'off screen' in Destiny, and in a film this would be fine, as your main character can have knowledge your players don't. In a game, that doesn't work so well.

That being said a lot of Destiny's problems I think come from senior level staff never working with a staff or project so big before. If the game did get overhauled in 2013 the fault for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the upper echelons. This includes a lot of grizzled ancients.