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

by Kahzgul, Friday, February 06, 2015, 11:38 (3375 days ago) @ iconicbanana

Whoever is in charge of the narrative in Destiny needs to be given a lot more power and resources, giving them the benefit of the doubt on their ability to actually tell a story, given their druthers.

it's part of what's so frustrating about the game. The lore is there. The writing on the grimoire cards is compelling. But the actual in-game content is atrocious on all levels. It's laughable and shameful at the same time.

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. And yeah, whoever is writing the narrative of destiny needs more power; but I think they also need to be more integral to the process. This felt like a game that had a story pasted on top of its mechanics, not a story that had a game where the mechanics grew from its story. Most of Bungie's games have felt that way; Marathon and later Halo titles both tried to tell large portions of their story through text, which doesn't necessarily lend itself well to the FPS medium.

With video games, you kind of have to develop the game in a specific order in order for the story to be told well. First, you need an idea of the world you'll play in (space magic). Then you need to know what kind of game it is (FPS with RPG and MMO elements). At this point the coders can get to work on the engines that will run the game. Then you need to lay out the story. Right then and there, it needs to happen. This informs the artists about the game world they'll be creating. It lets the coders design scripting tools to set up specific, story driven encounters. It describes how the AI needs to work for each enemy type, how powerful the weapons in the player's and AI's arsenals are, and who the key figures of the plot are.

You can't re-write a story 9 years into development and expect it to be good without having another 9 years to change the entire game to match the new story.

And if your story sucks, you need to fix it before you dive headlong into development. There's no way Bungie "discovered" they had a bad story 9 years in. Most likely, they had an awesome story. But then they also had deadlines.

I think this is where my initial argument was trying to go. The process here is ideal, and considering how the last few Bungie projects have gone, I don't think that this is necessarily the process they're actually following.

*Looking back, I think we may be talking about two different things; mostly I was speaking to that Halo 2 quote about 'a story we didn't understand', which I neglected to throw into my original post. Not that it changes much of what I said here, it's just we went about 90 degrees from where I was originally heading.

I see what you're saying now. Yes, I agree with that. Story drives narrative drives action drives gameplay, imo. "I can shoot a guy" is not as compelling as "I should shoot that guy" is not as compelling as "I need to shoot that guy to save the world" is not as compelling as "The evil Doctor van Burger has developed a neutrino ray that will cause the magma core at the center of the world to explode, forcing lava to the surface and effectively boiling the planet like an egg. It will kill everyone on Earth, unless you can shoot him RIGHT NOW."

Likewise, text is not as compelling and VO is not as compelling as cutscenes is not as compelling as actual events during live gameplay.

Bungie, unfortunately, has only one actual event during gameplay (warsat dish opening) which has zero impact on the real game. They have cutscenes that are long and nonsensical, offering more frustration than plot. The VO sucks balls. Sorry Dinklebot, but the game would be better without you. Where's Sam Jacksonbot? Or AnyoneElseBot? And the text... It reeks of 1980s indie RPG. Which is a genre I love, but which has no place in a AAA title. Why does literally everyone in the Tower have VO for conversations no one cares about, while the bounties are just text text text? It's a complete miss on where to spend the game's resources.

But yeah, it's pretty clear that their development process is a shambles when it comes to story integration, and likely it's the result of letting the tail wag the dog as far as design goes. "We can do X." "Great! The plot of the game is now about X!" What?