Because… (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 15:13 (3201 days ago) @ General Battuta

I wrote a very large chunk of the D1 Grimoire and in-game flavor text, as well as a large contribution to Dark/HoW and all of the Books of Sorrow, and I really think I'd have suffered writing game script.

Grimoire cards were a case of 'we'll lock you in this room, brainstorm and jam and write whatever you want, your boss will review it with his expert eyes and then it's going to translation'. (This process was intense and fun and probably the best time I ever had at Bungie.) Voiced game script is a highly political process, with review from studio leads, multiple rewrites, designer feedback, and, of course, the need to meet the actor's schedules.

Note that the Grimoire cards are pretty stylistically and thematically diverse. You've got talk about mind forking, concatenated simulations, military flash traffic, Cormac McCarthy stylings...how much of this would survive the process of becoming a game script, which needs (for very good reason) to be accessible to a broad audience?

Well, you did a great job with the Grimoires! Thank you!

As for becoming a game script, it seems to me that Bungie handles scripts in a way that I'm not used to from my time at other companies. Past places I've worked we just slap in placeholder dialogue (usually the devs record it themselves) until the game is in beta and then record the real stuff. It sounds like Bungie recorded dialogue years before the game was set to release and then found they were backed into a corner by it? I'd love to know if the original script made more sense than what was left.

Anyway, there's a really means for making the game script accessible, and that's having a character who doesn't know what everyone else is talking about ask questions like "can you say that again in normal English?" And Destiny has a perfect hook for that, because you just came back from the dead after hundreds of years! Of *course* you have questions! Except you don't. You don't even talk most of the time. It's so sad. I wonder if the main character is brain damaged?

It's a moot point since none of the D1 Grimoire or script team is still at Bungie, but while I'd love to (and hope to) keep writing Grimoire cards, I think they're much more like Marathon terminals than they are like game script proper.

Sorry to hear that you and the others aren't there. I think the Marathon terminals *were* the game script for Marathon (and I loved them).

The current Bungie writing team is full of super cool talent and I'm excited to read their cards!

This is good to hear :)