Bungie's story goals (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, June 06, 2016, 15:58 (3185 days ago) @ Cody Miller

My feelings regarding the Destiny story are this:

- They have a universe that is interesting and full of lore.

- They have a tremendous backstory.

- Neither of those things are in the actual story of the game.

The story of the game of Destiny is that you wake up with no idea what's going on and are given a gun. You shoot some things, and then you go to a place where people talk to you. They could tell you the story, but they won't. Then you shoot some more things. You're given breadcrumbs to go meet someone who might tell you what's going on, but they don't have time to explain why they don't have time to explain. They do point you towards some other things you have to shoot, though, so you shoot those things, too. The end. Oh, wait, there's also this Vault of Glass thing that was mentioned once and I guess you should go in there and shoot things too, though why this happens is never explained in game at all. Not even once. And none of the things you do in any of the game appear to make any difference whatsoever in the game world, which leaves the player with a "why did I even bother" feeling at the end.

The story of Crota's End is a little better, but not much. Still no explanation is in the game. We still don't know who we are or why we were chosen. But we know who Eris Morn is - she was part of a fireteam that went to the moon to stop Crota, leader of the invading army. Cool. She came back and is all messed up both physically and psychologically, and she warns us that Crota is coming back. Weirdly, no one else believes her or seems to care about what she says at all, even when her predictions turn out to be true. Which is pretty crappy writing imo, but let's move on. She tells us to shoot some things because those things are trying to bring back Crota. We totally shoot those things. We shoot the hell out of them. I know from the grimoire that we stop crota from entering our world, but in the context of the game and explanations given in it, that doesn't appear to be the case. This is a HUGE disconnect between "what's actually going on" in the context of the grimoire card lore and "what appears to be going on" in the context of just the information given to us in the game itself. Because the game never explains throne worlds, it seems as if the player has failed to stop Crota's return in the game, when in fact you totally succeeded. The motivations afterwards are equally confused: The player either chooses to invade Crota's throne world and end him once and for all, or the player must take the fight to Crota before he grows to strong to stop. Very, very different motivations - Do we kill him because we can or do we kill him because we have to? And the answers tell us very different things about our character's role in Destiny, as well as the general attitudes of the guardians. The fact that these incredibly different outcomes can be realized is due to really shitty writing in the actual game, and the failure to include the grimoire in the actual game as well. Of note, explaining CE took me like six times as long as explaining Vanilla Destiny. That's how much better the still super bad storytelling of CE is.

HoW's story is more linear and makes more sense as well, right up until it doesn't. Here's a good example of storytelling not matching gameplay. In game, all we know is the reef is now open to us. There is no in-game explanation for Skolas having once been a prisoner of the reef and then being given to the Nine and then escaping. In fact, where CE had good backstory explanation for the premise of the missions, HoW has none whatsoever. But hey, missions are missions right? In fact, we get our first missions that are not expressly to shoot things. Our mission is to track down Skolas. Shooting things is required in the process, but our goal is not to kill anything, specifically, and if we could somehow track down Skolas without shooting, it seems that would be totally acceptable. This is a watershed moment for the game's writing and is the first time that our goal is not directly to murder things. All of the missions are then a linear progression of our efforts to track down Skolas. We make some wrong turns, get ambushed by assassins, and even discover that Skolas is trying to steal vex technology for his own. This makes our efforts to track him down more urgent - vex tech in fallen hands would be disastrous (as the game actually tells us!). We eventually are able to catch up to him and capture him before he can use the tech too much, and crisis is averted. An actually compelling plot thus far, and fairly well written (minus the lack of backstory). At this point, however, it falls apart. We went through all of that to capture skolas, and the very next thing we're supposed to do is go into his prison and kill him. It's completely fucking stupid. There's no plot reason given at all. It's literally "thanks for capturing him, now kill him." I've heard that the lore reason is Skolas somehow started staging a rebellion from inside the prison or something, but I haven't read that in the grimoire (I may just be missing the ghosts needed, or not have read them yet - I just picked up like 6 I was missing this past weekend)... But that doesn't matter. There should be a damn cutscene or something explaining all of this. Whatever, let's move on:

TTK was really well done. Well written, good cutscenes, kinda weird that Oryx speaks English, but I'm willing to forgive that given that everything else makes a lot of sense. Oryx comes to avenge his son's death. The Queen tries to stop him but fails, though she does ensure his dreadnaught stays in Saturn's orbit rather than progressing further. Oryx uses previously unseen powers to "take" enemies and make them his as well as give them more powers. We first investigate this and then realize shits going downhill quickly. We have to get on board the dreadnaught, so we find a cloaking device and manage to (just barely) get aboard. Then we plant some beacons and disable the super weapon, allowing more guardians on board. Eventually we figure out that to bring the fight to Oryx (with the throne world actually kind of explained in-game!) we have to become ascendent hive. Which we can do by stealing Crota's essence from his tomb. We also learn that Eris has some dark power we didn't know she had previously. We open the portal to Oryx's throne world, enter it, kill all of his minions, and eventually blast the bastard into space. it's pretty great.

There's an additional story element here that takes place after each expansion, and is - I think - why it feels like Destiny falls short. The endgame story of Destiny is boring as fuck. It's literally meaningless with no plot or purpose. After the initial missions, and the missions of each expansion of the game, there is nothing to do. The endgame is booooring. Not a single new plot element shows up until TTK, which had some very cool stuff in The Sleeper Simulant, The Fate of All Fools, and a few other very high level "quests" such as getting Touch of Malice or the Beltane shader. Before TTK, every endgame activity was unguided collection of RNG-based loot drops, the use of which was purely to help you get more RNG-based loot drops. Boring, boring, boring. It's about as not-epic as an endgame could be.

I, for one, do not get why nearly every game "ends" its story right around the same time the player hits max level (or, in the case of vanilla Destiny, before then). Why have levels at all if they're just placeholders that match your progression through the story? Why have a story that ends just as the player is becoming truly powerful? Why not give endgame players something to do that furthers the plot? It's all a wasted opportunity and a disappointing fact: Destiny is a game about loot, not about epic storytelling.

That's why it will never live up to the worlds it purports to emulate. The focus is repetition, which requires plot stagnation, and not epic storytelling, which requires plot progression.