Maybe this is why Bungie hates story-telling now? (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, February 06, 2015, 10:23 (3375 days ago) @ roland

In a lot of ways I don't think a story is really understood until it is finished. Same goes for a video game as a whole. One of my favorite looks at game making recently was the Final Hours of Tomb Raider, a Geoff Keighley app you can get for iPad. Tomb Raider (2013) is fairly high up there on my favorite games of all time. Somewhere in top ten or twenty maybe. All the gameplay and story elements, which not the most complex ever, all sorta came together and just work sorta in the same way that Halo 1 just works. But getting an inside look at the development process... Tomb Raider was really screwed up and wacko for a large portion of its development! There were spirit ghost monsters, and little kid sidekicks, and all sorts of strange things that would probably have been awful. They had team leaders go on emergency medical leave and financing problems and almost had the project cancelled at least once... and then at some point near the end of development the combat system finally clicked and the rest of the gameplay and story quickly formed up around it leading to a surprisingly good game.

Similarly, go read the history of Toy Story and A Bug's Life. For Toy Story, Pixar was a group of very very smart computer graphics nerds with fairly little story telling experience so they trusted Disney to provide feedback. Disney's feedback was awful and nearly doomed the project. Toy Story was in fact cancelled but Pixar did a miraculous quick turnaround where they trusted themselves, undid many of the changes Disney had wanted, and ended up producing one of the best films ever made. Likewise, with A Bug's Life, they were riding high on the success of Toy Story and decided to go bigger and bolder and... similar to Bungie and Halo 2... their reach for even greater success nearly wrecked the company. People got burned out. Friendships were damaged. By the end the leaders of Pixar apologized to the company and promised that they would never make a movie in that stressful damaging way again. And yet, A Bug's Life is also now a classic film!

What happened to Destiny? I don't know. Surely some of its story problems come from splitting its narrative across a year or more of DLC releases. Might Destiny's story be more forgiven and feel more substantial if on day one we were able to save The Traveler from the Vex, prevent Crota's invasion of Earth, and stop whatever plans are being implemented by the House of Wolves? Maybe. But maybe not. Because I think some of Destiny's story is meant to be mysterious and teasing like the Exo Stranger's cutscene. Most see that as bad storytelling but I see it as the opposite... a short intriguing cutscene that hinted at bigger world that we were only a part of. I think it needed more of an immediate pay off and a new, more specific tease of things to come in the ending cutscene, but for the most part I like the feel of Destiny in those two cutscenes.

Likewise, the story of Rasputin is being handed out very slowly... probably too slowly and too scattered across Grimoire and cutscenes and missions dialogue and strikes that half the population can't play, but it seems to be a classic Marathon-y, Bungie-y story of an AI who has gone rampant. It's just a bit too hard for most to put together the pieces and a bit frustrating because even if you do get them together you still don't have the end of his story and might not for months or perhaps even years!

To me the most frustrating thing is I don't have a sense of what Bungie wants to do now. Do they want to keep filling in pieces until Destiny becomes a fantastic whole? Are we going to keep getting largely self contained story bits like The Dark Below that don't really tie the greater world together? Will we see a comet release with huge swaths of new interconnected story and play spaces? Or will big new stuff wait until Destiny 2 on a platform I don't own? It's almost like Destiny is caught in the bad space between episodic storytelling and Halo-y large chunk story telling and Bungie's classic secrecy means I don't know which was intended or which they will try and bend the game towards...