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

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, September 23, 2016, 18:16 (2982 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I think there is an important difference between ambiguity and lack of information. Inception is a great example of a movie with an ambiguous ending, but one that provides the viewer with enough information to come up with their own interpretations or explainations for what they are seeing. The Matrix is in a similar boat. Even if the precise nature of all the events is a bit unclear, there is enough material there to give the story weight, and give the viewer thoughts and questions to "chew on" over time. I think that Destiny's story (without the grimoire) is too sparse to pull this off. The ambiguity isn't the problem. It's that we aren't given enough information to take us beyond the most superficial questions.

But even Inception and the Matrix are not 'ambiguous' in their themes. You know what the characters want and how the world works at all times, and what ideas the filmmakers are putting forth. We don't see what happens to the top because it doesn't have anything to do with the theme or the real story at all, which is itself very clear. Is Cobb dreaming or is he not? It doesn't matter, which is why we don't get the answer.

Inception is the story of Ariadne performing inception on Cobb so he can get over his wife. An inception within an inception. But even if you don't pick up on that, you still understand the nature of the film's stance on letting go.

Good point. That's an interesting thing to think about: what is the "theme" of Destiny?
Does it really have one? Does it even need one? I think it depends on the kind of experience Bungie wants to deliver.

I am 100% ok with games that lack a powerful or compelling story. I don't need every game I play to be The Last of Us. I know lots of people here are huge fans of the Halo story, but I'm not one of them. I always thought it was stereotypical, derivative sci-fi... but it worked FANTASTICALLY well within the context of the game. As the player, I always had a clear idea of where I was and what I was doing, why my goals were important, the ramifications if I failed, etc. So while I don't consider it a great story, I do think it is a wonderful example of well executed videogame storytelling (if that makes any sense).

A few people in this thread have mentioned the issue of "suspension of disbelief", and I think that is where I clash with Destiny's story. I don't need my videogame's story to be good, but I need it to make sense within its own world. Nothing pulls me out of the game faster than those moments where the characters in front of me say or do something that makes me think "wait, that doesn't make any sense!" One of the reasons I have a difficult time connecting with Destiny's universe even today is there are fundamental concepts that have never been addressed or explained. We spend a great deal of our time in Vanilla Destiny focused on saving the Traveler, but I don't know enough about what the Traveler is to care. Forget about "why" the Traveler helps us, we're never even told "how" it helps us. This is another example of what I was talking about in my post from a couple days ago:

"I think that in the past, fantasy was worked into Destiny as a way to justify or explain stuff that the player wouldn't otherwise understand. Things like "darkness zones" or "the light" or "the oversoul". We just rationalize that stuff by telling ourselves "oh yeah, this is a fantasy game" or "space-magic!"."

Bungie's storytelling in year 1 was so vague, that I often get confused when they reference certain events later on simply because they reference them in ways that don't fit my understanding of what happened. For example, Ghost's very first line in the cinematic intro to TTK is "I was born the moment the Traveler died..." I heard that line and my first that was "wait... the Traveler is dead?". I thought we saved the traveler in year 1, when we freed the shard from the Hive on the moon. Something about "the Traveler can now begin to heal". Then there's the Undying Mind strike, where Ghost Ikora mentions something about "restoring the birthplace of the Vex", and my reaction was "... the Black Garden is the birth place of the vex?". If that's the case, then why did destroying the Black Garden suddenly cause light to begin to return to the Traveler, and how is THAT possible if the Traveler is actually dead... and so on.