Warmind Story Time (spoilers) (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, May 09, 2018, 14:11 (2189 days ago)

I'm not going to necessarily knock Bungie too hard for this. After all, stories in games only have to really be functional to facilitate and enhance play, and Warmind's story was fine in that regard.

But it was still wasn't good.

Because you can't replay the missions, I'm going to have to go from memory here.

I think the biggest problem is that characters are behaving and doing things for no apparent reason. For instance, Zavala shows up and has beef with Anna. He doesn't trust Rasputin. Okay… but why? Where have we ever seen Rasputin do something that would cause Zavala to be nervous? Never? Yeah. So why is he worried? Did he find something out? That would be cool. I mean, this expansion was ostensibly supposed to be about Anna uncovering things… But after all is said and done, I still do not know why Zavala feared Rasputin the way he did.

Maybe, I don't know, you uncover data that proves Rasputin shot down the Traveler to force its hand at defending Earth. Maybe the thought of Rasputin attacking the Traveler makes Zavala nervous. That would at least give him a reason to not want to wake up Rasputin.

Through all this though… did Anna really learn anything about her past? Did we really learn anything at all? What effect did the story have other than to wake Rasputin? I guess we learn that Rasputin was on Mars the whole time, which just retcons the Last Array mission in Destiny.

In fact, the story was barely about Anna and Rasputin. We are tasked with destroying Xol. But we don't know why Xol is on Mars or what it wants. Why is it a threat? What is it trying to accomplish that we don't want it to do? Just get to Rasputin? The threat was vague and not specific.

So we kill Nokris, and Xol appears and sucks us into the deep. Super cool right? But then in the next cutscene we stand up as if nothing happened. What the fuck. Seriously. How did we get out? If we just stand up and get out, then how dangerous is it? How cool would it have been if we has a story mission where we fought our way out of the deep, and in the process fought strange new enemies and learned some valuable insight about the darkness?! Instead we got nothing. What was the consequence of that?

Xol is also introduced in a com message from Zavala (I think). We are TOLD how big and powerful he was instead of shown. Des2ny got Gaul's intro right. We get massacred, all at Gaul's hand, and to top it off he shoves us to what should be our death. We know right there what he wants, and that he's powerful enough to get it. Did any of the threats from Panoptes or Xol feel like that?!

The bite sized DLC format just is not a good fit for story. It's fine for extending the game, but there's just not enough time to really tell anything meaningful. Rasputin, Xol, Anna. 3 characters, over 5 missions. That's 1.66 missions per character. Think that's enough to do them justice?

I'm sure for a lot of people, this is their first introduction to a lot of these characters. Not everybody knows the lore. Which makes that first cutscene with everybody even more confusing. The game does zero to establish and explain relationships and character motivations. Even if you never read Fall of Reach, you still understand Halo. But for those that DO know the lore, everybody is shortchanged. I think Oryx was the biggest success so far, in part because while he had a lore before the Taken King, the Taken King extended it. We got to see what he could do, and we learned about his (and the Hive's) past. It added to things. What did Warmind add to anything? If anything, it took away. Simplified.

Lastly, I think Xol felt… lame. I'm not saying that that bad guy in every destiny expansion should be the end boss in the raid, but it really helped to sell Crota and Oryx as an epic threat when you had to go through the raid to take them down. In a way, it justified their power and the fear of them.

Like I said before I am not disappointed, because sadly I didn't expect much. The story did it's job I guess, and the game is pretty fun. But… with all the resources at their disposal, it would be nice for Bungie to nail the narrative just once. Maybe in the next Taken King.