Underwhelmed with Rise of Iron Story (Destiny)

by BeardFade , Portland, OR, Thursday, September 22, 2016, 18:27 (2983 days ago)

Full disclosure up front, I was not very optimistic about Rise of Iron before it launched and I doubt I've played it as much as many of you. Here is a (not so) short list of the plot points I find truly bothersome in Rise of Iron.

My first gripe with Rise of Iron is Omnigel, err, I mean SIVA. But we might as well call it Omnigel (from Mass Effect). Without any actual explanation of what it is, it is simply an omni-purpose technology that space-magically can be used to create all sorts of things. I am so disappointed in this plot device. I am all for an out of control nano-technology run amok, but give it some parameters and give me an explanation as to what it is. How unsatisfying is it to just be told that it can do many things without any mention of how it does said things?

To make this worse, inexplicably (literally, it is not explained hardly at all) the Fallen are after it. To be clear what I mean, I mean that the Fallen are pursuing the SIVA technology. This implies a knowledge of its existence, experience with it as a useful force, but there's no explanation as to how the Fallen became aware of it. Just that they are. (Are you noticing a trend, we are constantly just told things are just the way they are, with no actual evidence or reason to support it).

I think a much more interesting plot direction would have been to make the nano-technology artificially intelligent such that SIVA itself was trying to escape the bunker it was sealed in. Perhaps the SIVA finally found a way through the bunker (it can supposedly meld/penetrate/create some sort of change in whatever it touches, right)? In this way, SIVA would have slowly crept into the Plaguelands, and then perhaps serendipitously, a Fallen may have been "infected" by SIVA. A much more organic (perhaps, gruesome) evolution of the Fallen into Splicers would have taken place.

This "leaking out" of SIVA would also have given more of an explanation as to how the Guardians are currently unaware of its presence. It is absolutely implausible that Guardians who have been patrolling the Cosmodrome for two years would NOT have noticed that something was growing and invading The Divide or The Rocket Yards or The Wall. No sense can be made of this, unless you are trying to argue that every single last guardian was on the Dreadnaught for so long that no one noticed this technological invasion.

My next gripe with this is the complete and utter lack of communication between Lord Saladin and The Vanguard. Why on Earth would The Vanguard not be informed of SIVA? What motivation does Lord Saladin actually have for expunging it from the records? Grief? Bullshit. If your friends all die from an out of control nano-technology, you tell someone about the damn technology so none of their friends die. Am I really to believe that someone as noble as Lord Saladin, an Iron Lord, whose sole purpose is to be a "guardian", a protector, wouldn't tell the truth? That he would just omit some vital information for possibly centuries?

Lastly, did we really just seal SIVA back up? How moronic is this? We know it didn't work once, why on earth would we do it twice? Why not have a mission where maybe things don't go successfully (and that's the point). After we fight the Guardian Reapers (another Mass Effect reference), and we set off a detonation sequence, there should be a cut scene that's already showing the SIVA crawling out as a statement as to the futility of taking such a course of action. It should prove that the jarhead mentality that Guardians who just shoot everything cannot defeat everything. SIVA lives on, as it has for hundreds of years. Then maybe you write some more story (five missions, that's it?) to help us actually scientifically combat SIVA (we used to have tons of scientists right, that's how all this began in the Golden Age?).

Honestly, I'm ready to give it up. The only satisfying reason to play is to play with all of you, which truly is satisfying. Anyone in this forum could have written a better story arc and come up with more creative plot devices than Bungie did with this one. As you can tell, I'm pretty disappointed.

So, what say ye? I didn't write this not to hear your thoughts, so let's hear them.