Very true (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 19:47 (3205 days ago) @ General Vagueness

The fact is that, if you look at the writing purely on a one mission at a time basis, you'll find that it's still crap. Almost no information is conveyed to the player, and the information that is conveyed is almost totally without context (and often just about how you have to open more doors). Then consider that a bunch of the script is actually really poor jokes that don't land, and it's even more disappointing. My most fun script moments from year one were all making fun of Peter Dinklage's lines. When you open the Prison of Elders and he says something like "remember, this was your idea"... No it wasn't! Not even a little bit.

He says "Are you sure this is a good idea?", which I'm not sure is supposed to be a joke, it might be given that it's too late to not open it when he says that. Still, great to see you know a lot about what you're criticizing so heavily.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

But let's analyze the quote as you stated it:

"Are you sure this is a good idea?"

It's a bad line that is totally worthless in the game and serves literally no purpose. If it's supposed to be a joke, it's not funny, so it fails. If it's supposed to call back to something earlier, there was no something earlier where you had an idea, ever, in any mission in the game, let alone specifically about the prison of elders, so it fails. If it's supposed to be the ghost suddenly doubting the entire plan of the mission, why is it asking you if you think it's a good idea when it should be saying something "I'm not sure this is such a good idea. Zevala sure has a lot of faith in you," or something to that effect, which would show that there's some conflict (however minor) between zevala and your ghost, and would also show that you have faith in yourself as well (which, it would be implied, your ghost doesn't have), in which case the line would add something to the story. But it doesn't do that. As it stands there's no reason to have this line in the game, and the game would be the same game without it as it is with it.

It doesn't serve the story, the action, or the character development of the game and as a result I'd have cut it.

Is there a good opportunity here for character development, story progression, or action explanation? Yes, yes there is. Should there be a line here? Probably yes. But the line in place misses all three marks and goes in the giant pile of "missed opportunities" that Destiny had.

I'll add that I cannot easily think of similar missed opportunities in The Taken King. All of the truly egregious mistakes in writing which I can think of are from vanilla Destiny (and, to a lesser extent, CE and HoW, but those are mistakes by omission rather than outright bad writing). TTK really was solid as hell. I just wish the power of the missions and quests and raid carried through past the first raid completion to provide some better context for what's going on in the game world of the endgame.