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"We want to unhide the fun of destiny..." (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY @, Toronto, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 17:23 (2501 days ago) @ Speedracer513

This is for CruelLegacey, and I decided to post it as a separate topic instead of a reply way down the other recent threads because I think this article is pretty awesome and worthy of its own discussion.

From a a recent interview with Luke Smith on Glixel:

In terms of characters, from the first trailer it appears that Cayde is much more important. The vibe is much lighter than the last game. Is that a purposeful tonal shift?
That trailer is a great look at Cayde, but of course it's a trailer – so you've kind of got him turned up to 11 or 12. We want the new game to be something that has a bunch of different character types. Everyone is not gonna be making jokes the whole time. That's certainly not appropriate. We hope the game and its characters are fun to listen to – that's definitely a goal, but we want to have characters who are occupying their own separate spaces. You know, we have a character like Cayde who's a funny, charming rogue, but then Ikora is very serious and cerebral, and Zavala is very action oriented and, again, very serious. So, we start with those three, then we ask, "well, what are the holes that we have in the character tapestry?" There are many. So in Destiny 2 we're coming up with a bunch of new characters to fill them.

Thanks for posting this!

Let me say up front that my reaction to this is purely theoretical, and I of course will do my best to keep an open mind when I actually play the game. That said...

The paragraph you quoted does not inspire confidence in me with regards to the writing or characters in D2. It makes it sound as if the characters will all be 1-note, 1 dimensional "tones", and that they hope to fill out the range of tones by having different characters for each of them. This is why I hate Cayde in all of D2's marketing so far: he's always "mr sarcastic joke guy", no matter what's going on around him.
The thing is, if you really track all of Cayde's dialogue throughout D1, he doesn't joke that often. It's noticeable when he does because he and ghost are the only 2 characters that ever show humour at all, but he really is serious most of the time.

Good writing usually involves rounding out every single character so that they each portray a full range of emotions. Some should obviously lean more heavily in 1 direction than others; that's natural. Some people in real life are more serious, or joke more often, or are quicker to anger. But what Bungie has said and shown so far is "when we want a moment of humour, Cayde will appear. When we want things to be super serious, you'll hear from Zavala". So even if Cayde only appears now and then, it is still eye-roll-enducing if all he ever does is crack lame jokes.

But again, it could totally be the case that Destiny 2's writing is nothing like what I fear it is. Most of what I'm basing this off is marketing, which may not be an accurate representation of the game.

That stuff aside, it's a very cool article.


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