+1 (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Thursday, July 27, 2017, 12:55 (2675 days ago) @ Cody Miller

They've probably settled on this beginning early on, and to have built up more extensive new areas just to emphasize the loss the way you would want seems an impractical use of resources. I'm much happier that they've presumably used that time to develop more interesting areas that we could revisit.

This is what ultimately hurt the first game…

I am fully on board with Bungie's renewed interest in storytelling. But these are things you just have to do. You can't assume people will have a connection or care about something just because they are told to. If you want to tell a story, you have to really nail the needed elements! Sometimes it is hard, but you can be efficient and go a long way with a little.

That one picture does more to make me care about the city than all of Destiny. That one cinematic trailer with Zavala made me care more about him and the world than all of Destiny. Heck, that one shot of little Amanda did more for her character than all of Destiny.

Is anything like that in Des2ny? I hope so.

Moving forward, I predict that in the games industry this 'impractical use' of resources will eventually become necessary. It's the only way to climb out of the aesthetic / mechanical uncanny valley so many games are starting to fall into.

Yes, it hurt the first game. Yes, it would have been nice to visit the city and have a better sense of a lived-in place, but it’s not like they didn’t have any sense of place and it’s not like they didn’t leverage what they had effectively in how they handled the first story mission. It’s a good, logical place to start the campaign (Korny predicted it with great accuracy months ago). I wouldn’t say that the difference between what they did and your fantasy of what they should have done justifies making predictions about what they (and the entire industry!) HAVE to do else be utter failures. The realization of art is always constrained by limitations. When you’re editing a film, do you write new scenes and demand they get filmed else the film will fail? Building video games is a difficult. Bungie could’ve had us choose to go to the Tower from orbit first thing and made some of that stuff in the first cutscene happen in-game. I think that would’ve been better, but I don’t claim to know what the difficulties would have been to implement that or the opportunity costs involved. That’s what I dislike about your style of criticism, Cody. You dismiss such things as irrelevant and presume your idea is the only good solution. And only you can point out things they’ve done right (like in that Zavala cutscene) and still make it seem like you’re saying they’re dropping the ball.