A different kind of ludonarrative dissonance. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 23:55 (3246 days ago) @ Funkmon

I'm not sure it's that surprising.

What we've gotten in Destiny so far is a game that mostly eschews the structure Bungie set up with Halo: Cutscene, level, cutscene, repeat.

For a game mostly meant for its campaign to be repeated only occasionally, possibly in linear order, this makes sense.

Destiny's structure as a kind of random access collection of various activities meant to be repeated far more often, in any order, without story continuity linking them, isn't really compatible with that sort of structure, or investing in cutscenes the way Halo did.

Most Destiny levels don't have them, and the ones that do have much shorter ones. One would probably expect players to skip them more often during replays than with Halo, and once you start playing coop, if any of the players can skip them, somebody will, and if they can't, they'll probably be miffed.

So I can easily see confict arising between whatever group or individual it is who is specifying that this is what Destiny's design is going to be, and those attempting to arrange these activities into a logical linear narrative and assemble the resources necessary to script and animate that narrative.

I'm sure there may be many, many other causes, but it seems to me as if the Director-centric nature of Destiny's current design is sort of at odds with the idea of Staten and Cowan doing the jobs they did on Halo the way they did them with Halo, and possibly with the way they feel they should be done.