Environments vs Destiny's (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, May 13, 2016, 18:06 (3120 days ago) @ dogcow

After finishing Uncharted 4, the thing that stood out to me was how ALIVE the environments felt. More specifically, they felt like they used to be alive. Walking through Libertalia I absolutely got the sense that actual people lived there, and that it thrived in its day. You could see and feel the history.

Can you nail down what exactly is missing from Destiny's environments? What specifically could be changed to make them more ... formerly alive? (this is a completely honest question here. How does one make their environments feel more lived in?)

I haven't played Uncharted 4, but one of the many things that jumped out at me about The Last of Us is what an incredible job Naughty Dog did in creating environments that felt like they had "real history" to them. Almost everywhere you look, you see little details that tell a story. There's the base-level stuff like "I'm walking through an abandoned city". Then the more specific details like "this used to be a library, this was a cafe, this was a school". And then it gets into the much deeper, more subtle stuff like "There's a bunch of furniture arranged in this hallway in a way that makes me feel like someone tried to hole-up here for safety", or "this ballroom is all decorated for a highschool prom... the plates are still on the tables... this place must have been filled with kids when everything went down".

And then, on top of all that, you have the finer, specific storytelling that happens through a combination of everything I mentioned above, combined with little notes or journals you find along the way, combined with dialog between the player characters as they uncover a specific series of events. You literally discover the stories of specific groups or individuals as you move through the game by piecing together clues from all of these little details.

It really is a masterpiece in terms of environmental storytelling. Much as I adore Destiny's environments from an art-design point of view, they really do pale in comparison to Naughty Dog's work when it comes to communicating the living history of each location. Bungie didn't go much deeper than "here are some buildings" or "here is a cave". There really isn't much to tell the player that "this used to be an academy" aside from your Ghost telling you as much. The cosmodrome has a bit more detail in this regard, but not as much as I'd like to see in the future.