There is no sense in that unless you have INTERESTING CHARACTERS to put in the cutscenes. Destiny's huge problem is that the world feels dead because there are no characters. The entire game needed characters interacting with you like the Queen and her brother do.

I think the problem isn't that there aren't interesting characters, it's that you don't really interact with them. They are only off in the background where you overhear them or they give out a general missions etc. They are all trapped in the tower and relegated to just acting as vendors. Some of them have really interesting backstories in the grimoire but it's barely connected to what we find in the tower.

...but Destiny has very few cutscenes of strong narrative value (landing at The Tower, then on the Moon, Venus, and Mars don't count, for instance) and even less input from our Ghost as we went along. Perhaps even worse is the way Destiny's missions didn't flow nearly as well. There is a connection between all the missions on Earth, or the Moon, or Venus, or Mars... but: 1. Most of the mission are too short and 2. What connections are there are generally buried in the Grimoire with little to no hints given to us while playing the game.

Speaking of terrible flow, the thing that shocked me the most the very first time I played Destiny was the way that missions end with two or three inconsequential sentences from our Ghost and then a countdown! "The City will appreciate this data... at some point in the future... that you may never see. 3...2...1... Stats Screen." is nowhere near as compelling as abandoning the Autumn and watching it rush past you before your escape pod crash lands on a beautiful and mysterious alien ringworld. That there's a short paragraph of text in the Grimoire from one of The Tower Vanguard saying "That data your provided us was indeed interesting" doesn't come close to making up for the lack of the easy to understand context and excitement that even the worst levels in Halo provided. :(

They purposefully did not include a Master Chief type character in Destiny for the same reason that you never saw Master Chiefs face in Halo: to make your connection to the game avatar stronger. Instead they sought to create a world that had a huge backstory so it would feel like there was a setting on which you could play. In typical bungie fashon they hid much of this lore in hidden texts, so the more curious gamers could figure out the history as they desired, i.e. The librarian backstory.

The Halo games themselves followed a very similar story method, where there is a "front story" which is played out in real time. And a "hidden story" which was hidden in the terminals. The difference here is that We are supposed to be John.

What is interesting then is how well this has worked, and at the same time how poorly it has appealed to us. Every day on this forum I read pretty cool stories of someones "legend - wait for it - dary" game. That one time we all wiped just as The Archon Priest started melting. Or how someone finally got the Mythoclast. Or the team that killed Crota without firing a shot. Bungie executed their ideal perfectly, we just havent noticed its working because, lets face it, id rather be " the epic hero shooting the ultimate baddie who is going to end the world" then just being myself, but somewhere on mars, and with a cape, and space magic, and a gjallerhorn (oh wait, maybe that is pretty epic).

All so the destruction of Kharak would hit you like a rocket-powered gut punch.

When I worked in games, 2 years was considered "rushed" for development from scratch, and acceptable for installments in a franchise. Most annual games are really the same game engine used for 2 or 3 years in a row, just with different content and assets and story and such. Madden is a great example of a game that adds one new feature every year, but only gets a new game engine every 3 years or so.

9 years of development is a crazy long time, but often ideas germinate for a while before you're officially "making" the game. The trick is, large elements like cutscenes, boss fights, etc... all can take a lot of work to pull off. That final year is all testing, bug hunting, and fine tuning. Making major changes in 1 year is a huge red flag (diablo 3 and destiny are two recent examples of games that had major overhauls in their final year of development, and both games have been hugely disappointing to me).

It's more like, I know that at least the final 2 months of that year are lost to manufacturing, and that the 8 months before that are major testing and bug fixing months. So really, the story overhauls were all done in 2 months. 4 if they pushed testing (they clearly did). And then they're set in stone so the bugs can be fixed. Any time you change major plots in a game, you're resetting the clock on testing, and pushing your product 8-10 more months down the line.

See, that's where I think the problem is. I don't think the process that Bungie has in place for developing thier games necessarily lends itself to good storytelling.

Bungie just doesn't understand the difference between backstory / setting and narrative I guess.

The manual for the original Starcraft had about 40 pages of backstory. All of it similar to what Bungie has created with the Grimoire cards. You read it and were primed for the game. However, the game actually told a story about characters in that world. The backstory wasn't the focus or the thing drawing your interest, it was merely setting the stage for the game's story.

Bungie simply places too much emphasis on the backstory and setting. I'll bet they write it first, THEN find a narrative to put in it. That's backwards. You get your basic narrative, then you design backstory for the world and characters.

I'd bet money I've just pinpointed Bungie's main problem.

I fucking loved that manual. When we got Starcraft we actually couldn't fit it on our ancient HDD and we had to get our dad to buy a new one. So I spent a couple months waiting for that HDD to get ordered and shipped out to backwoods Vermont, and the whole time I read that manual over and over again.

They really packed those things full back in the day, didn't they? Warcraft 2 had a really good one as well.

See, that's where I think the problem is. I don't think the process that Bungie has in place for developing thier games necessarily lends itself to good storytelling.

Bungie just doesn't understand the difference between backstory / setting and narrative I guess.

The manual for the original Starcraft had about 40 pages of backstory. All of it similar to what Bungie has created with the Grimoire cards. You read it and were primed for the game. However, the game actually told a story about characters in that world. The backstory wasn't the focus or the thing drawing your interest, it was merely setting the stage for the game's story.

Bungie simply places too much emphasis on the backstory and setting. I'll bet they write it first, THEN find a narrative to put in it. That's backwards. You get your basic narrative, then you design backstory for the world and characters.

I'd bet money I've just pinpointed Bungie's main problem.

I fucking loved that manual. When we got Starcraft we actually couldn't fit it on our ancient HDD and we had to get our dad to buy a new one. So I spent a couple months waiting for that HDD to get ordered and shipped out to backwoods Vermont, and the whole time I read that manual over and over again.

I guess I was trying to say that Oni is just so left-field for them. Almost like a different studio.

It WAS a different studio. It was Bungie West, a group of people who weren't integrated into Bungie until AFTER Oni. (Some of those people are still there and still very influential - Dave Dunn, Lorraine McLees, etc - but they didn't come from Chicago, and they weren't involved in pre-Oni Bungie projects.)

Which one?

Ha! I was pretty good at all of Muro's moves, but not really what I was talking about.

I thought ODST was fantastic from a story perspective. [Theory blown.] I also thought Reach tried to present actual humans pretty well, but okay, okay, the story didn't work as well as it should have.

Yes, always play The Last of Us again. No game I've ever played does narrative better.

I too don't view the storytelling as a downward slide. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses.

Halo CE laid down an intriguing premise and gave us two iconic heroes to get behind. The innovative and hilariously-fun gameplay made that premise like a true adventure.

Halo 2 lost a bit of the oomph and excitement in some places, but delivered a detailed, character-driven (at least on the Arbiter's side) story that expanded the Halo universe ten-fold from the first game, from characters to culture to lore to mystery. Sure, the cliffhanger killed me at first, but that's more about the serial nature of the release and less about what's actually happening in the story.

Halo 3 didn't have as much story to tell because it was the third act - and I was very happy about that because the gameplay fulfilled that third act promise by upping the ante with wide landscapes and huge battles that made it feel like Return of the King. Thankfully, I didn't think the main characters were lost in the epic stakes, either, and so in the middle of these climactic showdowns, I felt more for the Chief, Cortana, Arbiter, and Johnson than ever before.

ODST and Reach's overall plots weren't very cohesive to me and the narrative seemed to get away from itself, but they made up for it with great characters, especially ODST.

I don't have a problem with Destiny's story and I think the universe is great, perhaps more ripe with potential than Halo ever was. The only problem is...Bungie forgot to put it in the game. :)

I've always gotten the gist that Bungie wants to tell a great story, but with their huge ambitions some things have to get cut so other things can survive. And I think they value gameplay over narrative. With Destiny, you also have a completely new format of gameplay and ways to deliver the story which I could see making it hard to get right out the gate, especially when there's art and engineering trying to deliver on a new kind of game as well.

I also think the larger the studio, the harder it is to interconnect story and gameplay. You've got things getting cut or added in the game world over here, and you've got to scramble to try and plug the holes they make in the story, or gloss over them as that launch quickly approaches. Maybe that's why so much of the Destiny narrative fell through the cracks this time.

I can totally see them learning from it and bouncing back.

Yep. I give ODST story points because of the structure, which was cool as hell, and Sadie's Story, which was the first time Halo tried to present civilians. The intersection of the two storylines is still one of my favorite video game easter eggs if you want to call it that.

I thought ODST was fantastic from a story perspective. [Theory blown.] I also thought Reach tried to present actual humans pretty well, but okay, okay, the story didn't work as well as it should have.

Yes, always play The Last of Us again. No game I've ever played does narrative better.

I too don't view the storytelling as a downward slide. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses.

Halo CE laid down an intriguing premise and gave us two iconic heroes to get behind. The innovative and hilariously-fun gameplay made that premise like a true adventure.

Halo 2 lost a bit of the oomph and excitement in some places, but delivered a detailed, character-driven (at least on the Arbiter's side) story that expanded the Halo universe ten-fold from the first game, from characters to culture to lore to mystery. Sure, the cliffhanger killed me at first, but that's more about the serial nature of the release and less about what's actually happening in the story.

Halo 3 didn't have as much story to tell because it was the third act - and I was very happy about that because the gameplay fulfilled that third act promise by upping the ante with wide landscapes and huge battles that made it feel like Return of the King. Thankfully, I didn't think the main characters were lost in the epic stakes, either, and so in the middle of these climactic showdowns, I felt more for the Chief, Cortana, Arbiter, and Johnson than ever before.

ODST and Reach's overall plots weren't very cohesive to me and the narrative seemed to get away from itself, but they made up for it with great characters, especially ODST.

I don't have a problem with Destiny's story and I think the universe is great, perhaps more ripe with potential than Halo ever was. The only problem is...Bungie forgot to put it in the game. :)

I've always gotten the gist that Bungie wants to tell a great story, but with their huge ambitions some things have to get cut so other things can survive. And I think they value gameplay over narrative. With Destiny, you also have a completely new format of gameplay and ways to deliver the story which I could see making it hard to get right out the gate, especially when there's art and engineering trying to deliver on a new kind of game as well.

I also think the larger the studio, the harder it is to interconnect story and gameplay. You've got things getting cut or added in the game world over here, and you've got to scramble to try and plug the holes they make in the story, or gloss over them as that launch quickly approaches. Maybe that's why so much of the Destiny narrative fell through the cracks this time.

I can totally see them learning from it and bouncing back.

I think it's going to take a lot more significant changes to the game itself to allow them to make the story much better. The Dark Below feels like the best they could do with the current constraints of the game.

What about the nature of Destiny prevented them from adding even a simple introductory cutscene?

I think you're taking the word "improvement" to mean "is as good as anything could possibly be." No one's saying The Dark Below's storytelling is perfect, or even especially good. Just that it's a step in the right direction as compared to the base game.

I'm not sure what I said to give the impression that I expect perfection. I expected an improvement (again, only because Bungie told us to expect an improvement), and I'm not convinced the Dark Below qualifies as an improvement in terms of storytelling. I think there is *more* story present in the DLC than there is in the base game, but I don't think the storytelling itself is any better.

I think a lot of people are making the argument that "more stuff happens, and it is connected" is equal to "better storytelling". I don't feel that's the case. Do we care more about the characters in the Dark Below? To we feel the motivation behind our own actions? Is there character development of any kind, whatsoever?

These are not hallmarks of "perfect storytelling". As I said before, these elements are the bare minimum to telling a story. The Dark Below has a series of events, but it barely tells a "story" of any kind.

I pointed out to the group I was playing with recently that the Axion Bolt is a lot like the screamer cannon from Oni. (Honestly, I wish they'd scream as they closed in on my targets. That would be great.)

GODDAMN THAT WOULD BE AWESOME.

Did you notice that the Shanks are basically M.A.Ds from Marathon?

Yes.

I don't know how people feel about it here, but that game was such a brilliant execution of an idea from top to bottom. It had artistic, philosophical, and narrative reasons for its design choices (3rd person with fist-fights actually looks like a damn comic book), and it executed those choices (fights playing out actually made you feel like you were in a damn comic book)...

In my opinion Oni was flawed in a ton of ways. I guess you can give it a pass because most of the problems have been worked out since in other similar games and it was before that time, but the level design was bland, the gunplay was poor, and a lot of the moves were useless. Like, the crescent moon kick is supposed to knock enemies out of the air, but if the enemy is jumping at you are you really going to have time to press back-back-forwards-kick?

Oh absolutely. My brother and I used to speed run the hell out of that game, and when you have it mastered, the whole thing plays out like a movie. I'll give you the gunplay being unintuitive but I got really, really good at it (sliding-countersniping is the best), and at the time I can't say I noticed the level design being an issue because when it came out it looked pretty good. It felt like reading a comic book or a manga: it looked like one, you had action set pieces similar to one, it had drama like one...mastering that game was a really enjoyable experience, and I still hold it up as one of the most memorable pieces of storytelling I've ever experienced.