Yeah, look, I WANT a good fun sci-fi story (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, July 21, 2016, 20:03 (3140 days ago) @ kidtsunami

I'm fine w/ Bungie being silly in Destiny, even in the lore with the Cabal being puzzled/terrified of our sweet sweet dance moves, but I really really love a good sci-fi story. Fun, good, not-dark sci-fi stories are largely what have attracted me to Bungie (tho' I guess Marathon had some pretty dark elements, but in comparison to other shooters on the market at the time it was a bright & hopeful shooter).

I'd be very sad if Bungie doesn't develop this story/world of theirs. It's got the foundation of a compelling story, when I finished the Black Garden I thought to myself, "There wasn't much resolution here, but I feel like they've set the stage for the next decade of storytelling." So far I feel like they've introduced us to some of the characters and got sidetracked writing short stories set in the universe that don't advance the plot much (TTK being a bit of an exception, but it felt more like a novella).

They just haven't delivered one. They've delivered amazing environments and a metric ton of obscure lore. "People want to hear about these Iron Lords..." what? I guess I do, because I haven't heard ANYTHING about them. Some dude shows up and higher level people do more damage to lower level people for a week. Oh and there's a flaming shield and some loot that is named _provactively_ but ultimately means nothing.

I think one of the problems Bungie continues to slip into as things move forward is they try to tell new stories that are better than what we got in Vanilla, but these new stories are crucially rooted in obscure lore that was never presented in a compelling in-game manner. So while TTK was a big step up in terms of mission design and the basic moment-to-moment script, it was also based deeply in knowing about the history of the reef and the queen and Hive sword logic and ascendant realms and all this stuff that meant nothing to me as a player. It's all good fun, but it didn't do anything to change the detachment I feel from it all. For all D1's problems, the Vault of Glass itself was in incredible culmination to the game. No, it wasn't worked into the plot in any satisfying way, but the actual journey of going down into those caves and fighting these Vex monstrosities that have impossible powers... I LOVED it. The fact that we (the guardians) didn't fully understand what was going on made perfect sense within the context of that little adventure. King's Fall, by comparison, feels like a contrived gauntlet. Like the final event during an episode of American Gladiators. It is fun, but makes absolutely no sense in terms of being an actual place that really exists within the Hive ship. It's like Bungie themselves stopped worrying about creating an experience that absorbs you into the world, and instead made the Destiny equivalent of a Super Mario level.