Universal Consistency in Storytelling is Important (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, November 16, 2017, 14:59 (2360 days ago)

The CoO livestream thread got a little off-topic and the subject of whether or not it was important for a fictional universe to be consistent in its reality came up. Harmonius, apparently, does not believe that to be the case (please clarify if I'm misunderstanding you). I do.

I'm not saying Destiny should adhere to the laws of physics, and clearly the game doesn't.

What I'm saying is that, in any story, the fundamental rules of the universe should not be changed willy-nilly simply because it looks cool or whatever. Destiny is generally very consistent. The traveler is the source of light, and when light shows up from other sources, it's either a piece of the traveler (vanilla D1's shard that the hive are draining and D2's sort of fundamental premise both have this), or it's residue from the traveler's work (as seen on Io). Ghosts can bring you back from the dead, but it has something to do with how much light is inside of you, too (Ghost mentioned this when scanning a pod in an old colony ship during, I think, RoI's intro missions).

Anyway, my point is that the things that are "non-science" are still very consistent. The universe of the game has rules and adheres to them.

And then there's that final cutscene, which breaks a lot of them, all at once. It's... really weird.

First and most obviously, the size of the Traveler. It goes from roughly the size of NYC to the size of Texas pretty much instantly.

And there's the condition of Mercury. It's been partially dismantled as fuel for The Almighty, and we saw it basically 1/4 broken apart in an earlier cutscene, but in the final cutscene, it's 100% back together and fine.

And then there's the speed of the traveler's pulse of light. It would be fine with me if the pulse was simply faster than light - our ships have ftl, that's an established thing and wouldn't even bother me if it were introduced for the first time right here. What bothers me is that the speed of the pulse is, apparently, relative only to the camera's viewfinder. When we're up close, it's moving at several thousand miles per hour. When we see it reach saturn, it's moving well over the speed of light. When we see it break free of the galaxy it's moving millions of times faster than the speed of light. And then, when it hits the pyramid ships, which are presumably smaller than the size of our galaxy as seen in the previous shot, it's moving slowly enough that we can track its movement with our eyes again.

Even if that was a thing (and you could argue that the traveler's "light" travels more quickly the farther it gets from the traveler and I'd have no logical basis to dispute that) there's the fact that we're *seeing* it grow from a distance greater than the area it encompasses. Which of course indicates that the actual speed c light that reflects off of or is generated by the Traveler's light has reached our eyes *before* and at a vastly greater distance than the Traveler's light has reached us, which is absurd, since the traveler's light is clearly moving a millions of times greater speed than actual light is capable of moving.

So yeah, I think that final cutscene is completely nutty. Looks cool but makes no sense.