I mean, you're not wrong. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, September 22, 2016, 19:01 (2983 days ago) @ BeardFade

The story in Destiny the game (separate from the grimoire) is garbage. It's not even underwhelming; it's downright nonexistent.

The most basic way to tell a story is as a series of events: First this happened. Then this happened. And then this. The end.

Vanilla Destiny didn't even do that much. Instead if was: First you need to do this. Now you need to do this other, totally unrelated thing. Okay now a thing loosely related to that first one. Now another unrelated thing!

CE got sequencing down, but that's it. Do this, now this, now this. You're done.

The next step in storytelling after sequencing is motivation. Not just what happened but why. Here is, in my opinion, the greatest failure of Destiny's storytelling. Someone at Bungie thinks that expressly not telling us what's going on is superior to telling us what the other characters *think* is going on. They're wrong. "I'm a ghost, and you're a guardian. I'll [never] explain later." "I could tell you the stories we used to scare children with, [but I won't]" "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain." and the greatest failure is that, in the face of all of this confusion, obfuscation, and intentional not-explanations of events, the guardian is FINE WITH IT ALL. I declare shenanigans right there. At no point in the story of Destiny have I ever believed that the guardian buys in to the vanguard, it's leaders, the Traveler, or any of this other bullshit. I do not know why I keep doing what these people tell me. I don't care about any of them, and I'm immortal. Why wouldn't I just leave and force them to convince me?

The silent protagonist is an awful choice for storytelling, and Destiny is a prime example of why that is.

Let's move on. Once you have motivation and events, then you need obstacles. It's all fine and dandy if you want to go from point A to point B, but that's not *interesting*. Rather, you need something in the way of your goals which needs to be overcome.

In all FPS games you can argue that the guys you're shooting at are in the way of your goals. Sure, in the very immediate sense, that is true. But in a more broad sense, there really are no obstacles for the guardians.

Part of it is simply the setup: Guardians are immortal so there's nothing that really needs to concern them too much when it comes to their own personal well being. Part of it is the depictions of things within the game: We hear about how this sword drinks light, but we literally never see it. They tell us how "hundreds of guardians died for good" when Crota attacked, but - again - we never see any evidence of that. Furthermore, because the people telling us this have literally no credibility, we have no reason to believe anything they say. Still a third part of this problem is that missions in destiny are almost always so vague that we only know our immediate breadcrumb directions and have no clue what the overarching goals are. "There's no time, Guardian. Shut that thing down NOW!" Why? What is it? For that matter, who are you and why should i do what you say? What does it matter if I don't shut that down, it's not like it can kill me.

This is as complicated as HoW and TTK ever get, though TTK is cinematic in its storytelling where HoW was clunky and awkward.

RoI is the *first* time in Destiny that there's a semi-plausible obstacle in our path (in the form of the fallen splicers, who are semi-stopping us from stopping SIVA), and you can see from the writing how difficult this was for the designers to even explain. One character (Lord Salad) says stoping SIVA is the most important thing (even though it's not important enough to tell the Vanguard about, apparently). Another (Something-4) thinks we should go after the Fallen Splicers. And the writers do absolutely nothing to help us decide who is right. Ultimately we have no agency (or even false sense of agency) and are forced to go after SIVA first and the fallen second, but the entire time is spent with the two characters who can talk arguing that each one is more right than the other without offering any reasons WHY.

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The grimoire muddies things, because it shows us that a great deal of thought and planning has gone into everything we've seen in game. But you know what? None of that SHOWS in the game. I, reading the grimoire, am distinctly not my character in the game, and I still wonder why game-me gives two shits about any of the stuff he's told to do. I mean it when I say I would have peaced the fuck out a long time ago. Gone looking for my family maybe, or seen my old house. Maybe just taken my spaceship and left the system. The vanguard would have had to come and find me and convince me to come back.

There is nothing in the storytelling of this game to make us care about any of it. RoI is, I think, better than HoW, and I like that there's more going on gameplay wise (it does feel to me like Bungie has found the sweet spot when it comes to mission design and quest scope and implementation), but for all the people in the game telling me that things are important, I wish they'd start telling me why things are important already.

Spoilers follow.

When the ghost says "DNA analysis shows they're human... how is that possible?!" that sums up the writing of Destiny in a nutshell. This thing is happening and NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW WHY. That's a recipe for not caring about the thing that's happening.