Bungie's story goals (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, June 08, 2016, 19:10 (3183 days ago) @ dogcow

I believe vanilla Destiny would have been much better if it had been a linear mission start to finish focused only on the black garden, upon completion of which unlocked all of the other mission chains. It would have been a slightly more satisfying ending and then an excellent opening of the game world and revisiting of places you'd already explored.

So much this. Especially now that the expansions have been worked into vanilla destiny. For example, when playing through Destiny w/ my Bro-in-law we played the Sword of Crota mission, suddenly a Dark Below quest-line was opened up to us. It was quite confusing to find out we were on an expansion quest line when we hadn't even yet finished vanilla destiny. I did not like it, nor did he. I think we ended up doing one of the warmind missions accidentally too. The IDEA of a non-linear story presentation sounds good, but in practice I think it's just confusing and makes any plot/story even harder to understand.

Yeah. Non-linear storytelling isn't, pretty much by definition, storytelling. I had actually beaten Vanilla Destiny before I ever realized that stars with laurels were "main story missions" and stars by themselves were "side story missions." The storytelling made so little sense that it didn't even occur to me that there was a main story or side stories. It was just "well, this unlocked so I guess it's next."

Caveat: Parallel storytelling is GREAT and can work really really well if done properly. Take a gander at StarCraft 2's "optional" missions where you decide if you do mission X or mission Y and get different results going into mission Z afterwards (but you can't do both until you've beaten the whole game or start over from an old save).