Losing the plot. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Saturday, September 24, 2016, 15:11 (2984 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I hear what you're saying, but disagree that having your actions affect the game world isn't possible. In WoW they did instanced versions of entire zones, so that when you first arrived there was a great war, and when you finished all the quests half the zone was peaceful and the rest had mostly stabilized. Destiny has players as hosts, essentially, so there's no reason why the player data of the fireteam leader couldn't dictate which sorts of enemies appeared in patrol, or how powerful they were. Or they could even get sillier with it, and have defeating sepiks give you a 20 minute buff that made other fallen run away from you (or seek you out, specifically, for vengeance). There are loads of ways to give the player a sense of progression.

I am sure it is technically possible. However, to do that you're creating at least two instances of every zone, and dividing the available public population for those zones.

That means that new players or new characters who begin later in the expansion's lifetime will see less populated areas because of missions they haven't cleared.

There are, of course, lots of ways Bungie could technically have addressed these issues, but I feel that nearly all of them have consequences they did not want to cope with.

In even simpler terms, the VO lines in the tower could change as you progress through the story (and a couple did when we killed Crota, so this tech is already in the game), so that the chatter you hear could be super worried at the start of the game and then calm down a little as you progress, while also recounting your successes.

Anyway, my point was to illustrate how simplistic the storytelling in Destiny is, and not so much to debate the finer points of crafting a story.

I think to a great extent it is that way on purpose; to reflect the disinterest of a great portion of the playerbase (a mainstream gaming site did an hour of RoI gameplay on their channel this week and a commentator struggled to recall the name of the Hive) as well as the greater amount of repetition of events in a game of Destiny's type as compared to, say, Halo.

The increased focus on personal narrative since HoW/TTK feels out of place to me, for instance. Saladin calls me "young wolf", but does he say that to everyone? Cayde says that Vanguard wouldn't be what it is "without you" but who does he mean when he's saying it to a fireteam of 3?

Why does Bungie's narrative refuse to cope with the fact that the basic unit of gameplay in Destiny is the fireteam, not the individual player? Especially when ODST and even Reach did a better job of it than Destiny does?