Loved Oni. Not at all astounded. (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Friday, February 06, 2015, 12:24 (3375 days ago) @ iconicbanana

Bungie has been telling fascinating stories up until Destiny. It's the first game that fails with that regard, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, maybe Minotaur had a sketchy plot? I didn't play that one. But Pathways was great, Marathon was inspired, and Halo was an obsession. Destiny is a flop. On the one hand, they can't all be winners, but on the other hand, Bungie seems to have lost track of what has, up until 2014, made their games stand out.

It was the design execution where Oni stood out to me. It feels so unlike their other games. Marathon had a terrific story, but you spent a lot of time reading, and that messed with the flow of the action I thought. Oni's pacing, its structure and story arc, its visual design and its conceptual tributes, were all married so well. It just clicked with me. Halo CE comes close for me, but it still feels like the other titles in their wheelhouse.

I guess I was trying to say that Oni is just so left-field for them. Almost like a different studio.

Nah, some of those bits are still there. There are little touches of gameplay that remind me of Oni, for sure. Way more than I felt with Halo. The way the supers are handled really fleshes out the feeling of fighting in that space; but other things have grown into the DNA as well. A company is an organism.

I pointed out to the group I was playing with recently that the Axion Bolt is a lot like the screamer cannon from Oni. (Honestly, I wish they'd scream as they closed in on my targets. That would be great.)

I have to say that video really sewed the entire expansion together in a way that was more satisfying than the expansion "storyline" felt to me. And it threw into relief how the Hive and the Vex would be in ontological competition with each other. A war for existence itself.

That's the kind of hook I was looking for all along.

~m