Losing the plot. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Saturday, September 24, 2016, 06:12 (2981 days ago) @ Kahzgul

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.

Your points are entirely valid and I pretty much agree with them all.

However, I do feel like pointing out that what you're talking about here, a series of events, is not a story, at least not entirely or exclusively. You're talking about plot, just one element. A story is plot, character, and setting.

Destiny is strong on setting, weak on character (with some notable exceptions) and has a very haphazard plot where events connect one to another only in limited, short-term ways, with the resolution of those events seemingly having no effect either on other short or medium term events, or on any presumed large scale plot (Light vs Darkness).

Part of that is because if its nature as a pseudo MMO. Normally you'd expect to see a significant event like, say, the destruction of Sepiks Prime in the first strike as having an effect on Fallen strength in the cosmodrome. But you can't affect patrol gameplay like that. So it had no effect. In later follow-up story missions we saw his corpse, although after the strike itself he disintegrates and leaves no corpse. You can repeat the event and no one acknowledges the repetition, but now that it is rebuilt as Sepiks Perfected, this demands acknowledgement. If only his original destruction had resulting in Guardians purging the Fallen from the cosmodrome, and thus preventing them from ever recovering Sepiks to rebuild him; but that would mean killing the zone for patrol play after that point.

That pretty much breaks a player's normal perception of causality unless you just play the missions and strikes once each, and in order. Since most players aren't going to do that, and Bungie doesn't want them to do that, it's not surprising that of all the story elements, plot is emphasized the least in Destiny.