Addendum from one of your HBO posts, Cody

by Avateur , Wednesday, August 28, 2013, 18:55 (3894 days ago) @ HawaiianPig

On Stories

I do not share your optimism regarding Bungie's ability to tell a good story. New universe? New motivation? Sure. But it's the same old writers with a pretty awful track record.

Ever read Contact Harvest? Evolutions? When Bungie employees are able to just write, some pretty awesome things happen.

Let's start with Halo 3:

As you've noted, by referencing Cody's post, Halo 2's writing was pretty good.

If Halo 3 handled the "big" story just fine, then its problem was that it squandered potential in the "small" stories. The character level. You know? Where most stories are able to thrash out interesting inter-personal conflicts that reflect upon humanity, philosophy, morality, and other things that end in -ity?

It absolutely blew the smaller stories, and didn't even handle a lot of the bigger ones very well.

In that regard, Halo 3 dropped the ball entirely.

What did we get? Well for one, the Arbiter's story was shuffled off to the margins. More egregiously, we were treated to a colossal mishandling of Truth's potential as an antagonist with any real motivation. Gravemind never really moved beyond being an evil plant monster bent on consuming all... and the Chief? Well he fell in love.

Yup. All we really got was series of events, and a love story. A bad love story.

Agreed. Though at least the series of events flowed logically, for the most part. And the love story, yeah. You get a tiny glimpse of it at the end of H2, and then it's this full on thing by H3 apparently. Word.

Things didn't get much better after Halo 3. ODST's story was uneventful. It was certainly not a "big" story. That was intentional. So what remained? What was the "small" story? Well there was none. A bunch of things happened and some stock characters reacted. Does anyone even remember what happened? Something about an Engineer. Whatever.

ODST discussions can go plenty of ways, but avoiding getting into conversations about it, it was a smaller team, a smaller project, and was fairly interesting.

Reach's story doesn't do much for me. The writing as a whole is just too easy to tear apart. Been there, done that.

So why don't I share your optimism? Well, if Bungie's most recent games had awful stories, why should I expect any different with the next?

I have the optimism because ODST and Reach, while I'm sure built with love and care, were "forced" titles by whatever deal was made with Microsoft. How long had Bungie known that their freedom wasn't secured yet? Destiny's been in development technically for how long? Did Bungie know that they weren't getting out of the Halo business before H3 launched? After? Burnt out?

I look at their record pre-ODST. While H3 had issues, it was the end of a trilogy that apparently was never planned to be a trilogy. I'm talking the record even before Halo. I'm talking Contact Harvest and other outside materials written directly by Bungie. There's a lot of potential for greatness with Destiny, and as you point out, plenty of potential for it to really not be all that great.

Side Note: I'm curious as to where Halo 4 fits in. I haven't played it, nor do I plan to. I don't know anything about it. From what I hear, I think I might be better off that way. Maybe some day... If I find the time and can justify burning some money. If I do, I'll be sure to buy it used.

All other biases aside, the story is quite terribly written and executed on the big and small levels. Characterization is awful. No point in hashing that out here, though. I've had plenty to say on that at HBO.

I really don't believe they get what makes a good story tick.

Hint: It's not the scale. Bigger isn't better.

Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are not big stories. They're small stories with big settings.

Bungie actually did this quite well. When you consider that H1, H2, and H3 all take place within a relatively confined time period, they actually did pretty well. Cody's definitely pointed out a lot of areas where they haven't. It's not earth shatteringly great. At the same time, H1 and H2 are very, very well done when it comes to their stories. The ending is where it drops off.

And we both know that with ODST, many consider it the best story while many consider it the worst. It does many, many things.

Tolkien was an expert at giving the reader only a snapshot of the big picture. He told small stories in a big world.

Bungie's also great with the secrets. There's this whole universe out there and so much of it is unknown and in the distance, just out of reach. You know it's out there, you know something happened or is happening or will happen, but you may never get to see it. You can only imagine and speculate.

The Halo trilogy, on the other hand, demonstrated that Bungie may know how to create a big world... but Halo 3 showed that they aren't exactly experts in handling the snapshots.

Agree to an extent. They figured it out somewhere around level 5. And even then, some of the rest of the game dropped the ball, too (particularly with Gravemind).

I don't know about you, but I can't think of any great creator, composer, artist or writer that ever thought his or her work was going to be fucking epic. In fact, the best ones I can think of were often dissatisfied with their works, even in their final form. A great creator is always looking at ways to improve and is often his or her own greatest critic.

I think it's PR speak. Compare every Bungie interview and action to 343 Industries to get an idea of arrogance, double speak, utter misunderstanding for the fans or the works, etc. Granted, Bungie's been at it longer, but whatever. Compare it to anything EA does, too.

The goal is to get people excited. If you're excited, and you're selling a product, one can naturally assume that others will also be excited and want to be excited if they already aren't. Conversations like these start happening. Curiosity spikes. People want to get their hands on it. Sales occur. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, something really special happens and people can't get enough. More DLC. More story. A decade of investment.

I think we'll see the humble humility a bit later on. Bungie usually shows it near the end of production, usually right around or after release, and then again as they're building up to the sequel or next version (what with taking feedback into account and doing their best to react). Right now this is the energize-and-build-the-base-and-newcomers time.

Maybe they are behind closed doors, but it doesn't show. Did any of the writers stop after Halo 3 and think "So what story did we tell? What happened? What were the motivations behind our characters? What was compelling about this story?"

What about after ODST? Seriously. Ask those questions about ODST. Now do it with Reach. Sad.

And yet, as ODST and Reach came out, this same "Bungie is amazing" attitude was ever-present.

They've had a few years to look back on that all and fix it. Even some of the greatest authors had mediocre or subpar works, sometimes even after some of their greatest works come out. People experiment, people try new things, and other times maybe they have an idea and like the way it turned out, but others didn't. Who knows. Time will tell.

It's funny that Pete references Star Wars. I have to wonder if Bungie's writers have been suffering from the "Lucas-effect" that resulted in the debacle of the prequels.

A common explanation as to why Episodes 1-3 pale in comparison to Episodes 4-6 is that George Lucas was given greater creative control over the franchise in the new movies. He was questioned less and his ideas would go further without any push-back from fellow creative minds.

And many, many, many other reasons. I refer all inquiries to Plinkett. :P

I wonder if Bungie writers get any push-back from... well, anywhere.

There's always been this undercurrent among our fandom that Bungie is some monolithic video game developer that is destined for greatness, and that the stewards of the ship can do no wrong.

"Trust them! They know what they're doing!"

Bungie does have a history of at least making games that are fun to play and immersive in their own rights. When given total creative control, a lot of fun things have happened. I have a reason to trust them, while at the same time being guarded. Like maybe a year ago when concept art leaked for Destiny and people at HBO were like OMGTAKEMYMONEYRIGHTNOWOMGYESIAMINHEAVEN, all I could think was, "This is concept art. Leaked concept art. For a game that might suck royal. We know nothing, we've seen nothing."

I'm still in that guarded area for now. 95% of my questions about this game are, quite obviously, unanswered. Time will tell.

I really hope it's just PR-speak.

I think it is, but I wouldn't know. :P

All things considered, it'll probably be a fun game. I just don't expect it to be a narratively interesting one. Certainly not worthy of a place beside great films or novels on my bookshelf.

Yeah. Dream big, Bungie, but I don't know about the comparison to Star Wars. It is what it is. Maybe it'll be the biggest thing in gaming since... well, Call of Duty. Lawl.