Maybe, but... (DBO)

by Claude Errera , Thursday, April 19, 2018, 09:47 (2198 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

It's true the Grimoire is no longer accessible on Bungie.net. I have no idea why, but I also don't think that it's because they plan on making any big changes to the lore. If anything (especially combined with the comment about it being folklore) I think they are trying to more get across the idea that just because a story or idea is in the grimoire or lore does not mean that it's going to be in-game in the future. I seriously doubt they are going to go and retcon anything major in the Grimoire. A lot of it would actually take work to purposefully retcon that would be unnecessary for DLC.

Now, on the point of lore and story building, as we talked about a little on the podcast, the lore in Destiny 2 is honestly on par with the lore in Destiny 1, it's just not as easy to find. This does annoy me a lot as I mentioned since they talked about making the lore easier to access by putting in game, but they did the opposite unintentionally by making it incredibly difficult to find a specific piece of lore. But there is a lot of good lore added even in CoO, you just have to find the items that have it.

One of the comments I've seen from a few people is that the move to take the lore out of "text on a website" and put it "in the game" actually makes it less digestible. Because having it all on a webpage that you could return to and read at your leisure was ultimately more convenient than having little scattered pieces of dialog attached to specific pieces of geometry or lone missions throughout the whole game.

Of course, "put the grimoire in the game" was one of the loudest and most repeated cries from the community from the very beginning. But I think its a perfect example of a situation where the players see room for genuine improvement, but don't think their criticism through fully enough to understand what they actually want. I think a common reaction to D1 went something like this:

1) Player goes through the campaign, is struck by the lack of a fleshed-out or compelling story
2) Player starts reading the grimoire and finds loads of compelling pieces of story, fascinating concepts, mysterious and engaging characters
3) Player says "Why isn't this in the game?"
4) Bungie reads this over and over and says "I guess players want the grimoire in the game!"

But in reality, it was never the grimoire itself that needed to be in the game. It was the mystery, the tone, the gravitas, the sense of history and scope and scale. It was the way characters in the grimoire would actually reflect on the nature of who they were and what they were doing. It was the way concepts like "what does it really mean to be a guardian" were explored. Players wanted those elements woven into the core narrative of the game... but they still wanted it to be a core narrative (whether or not they knew they wanted it). Because that's the kind of stuff that makes a great story, and the grimoire showed promise of it constantly.

Really, I always felt like it wasn't an either/or thing; my problem was not that the Grimoire was collected in cards that you could read on a website, it's that it WASN'T IN THE GAME. I don't want them to REMOVE the cards - I want them to INTEGRATE THE CARDS. (Well, the content on the cards.)

I STILL want the cards on a website outside the game. Hell, I've spent the past couple of decades aggregating hard-to-find content in Bungie games and putting them on websites, and I LOVE the idea of them doing the work themselves. I just don't want it UNIQUELY outside the game.

D1 had most of the lore in Grimoire cards, accessible only outside the game. D2 has lore accessible only INSIDE the game. I want both.