A different kind of ludonarrative dissonance. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, April 07, 2016, 00:43 (3246 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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.

But it's not. Taken King was a large step towards the Halo style of storytelling.

Only because vanilla Destiny was so far away from it. TK is still pretty darn short on cutscenes compared to Halo. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing.

You had a reasonably linear main campaign with cutscenes, then after that tons of side missions that were shorter and less substantial. That's the best of both worlds.

And as is true with so many compromises, it may be something that makes many players happy and makes other people unhappy.

I see no reason why Destiny 2 can not have a finely crafted 'story' campaign, with lots of small missions on the scale of what we have now littered in on sidestory.

You seem to be assuming that I'm suggesting that Destiny's structure can't be good or finely crafted and that isn't so.

To expand... I think it would be fair to look at some things that happened during the development of Halo that you could describe as story-driven design.

For instance, I think many players would agree with the broad assertions, from Halo 1 & 2, that brutes are uninteresting bullet-sponges, not as smart or interesting as Elites, and that Flood levels are generally less interesting than others because they are also less interesting to fight than Covenant.

A completely gameplay-design driven approach to solving that problem would have been to dustbin those enemies; go back to fighting Elites, to heck with the fracturing of the Covenant, and make the game about the Human-Covenant war and forget about all this Flood nonsense.

That didn't happen. Brutes got revamped, Flood got revised, and Elites didn't come back as enemies except in the games that took place at the parts of the story where that made sense (Reach and ODST).

Destiny content, at least to me, I think is being authored from a gameplay-centric rather than story-centric perspective. I get the feeling that people are choosing the kind of encounters they want to have, and choosing enemies for those encounters, and then those encounters are being wrapped in the lore for the appropriate units later.

Each of Destiny's initial environments was designed to provide at least two kinds of units to choose from, and the Taken King expansion's fictional construct basically allows designers to throw out those constraints and mix units from all factions in single encounters (albeit in their Taken variants).

So while you and I might definitely see TK as a step towards more Halo-like storytelling in Destiny, it may be that as an institution there is not enough commitment to that style to satisfy those at Bungie who were most dependent on it for their role in development.

Just a conjecture.