"Dramatic Clarity" (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, September 14, 2018, 19:52 (2295 days ago)

Having finished the Forsaken campaign, it is interesting to see that the story failed in an unexpected way. The lore is of course badass and completely awesome. But lore is not story. And the Forsaken story quite simply lacks dramatic clarity.

What is dramatic clarity? It's simply the audience / player having enough information and context to be invested in any given moment. It's the difference between seeing two random people fighting across the street, versus your two best friends. In one case you don't really care. In the other you would care quite a bit. You have all the history with those friends. You know who they are and what they want. You know why they are fighting, and what the stakes of that fight is.

This doesn't mean that the player / audience has to know everything. What they know at any given time can later turn out to be wrong. But they need to know something which gets them invested in the conflict. Character wants / motivations, how they conflict, and stakes. Simple stuff right? Then why does Forsaken lack any of that?

When I launched Forsaken, the director had an icon for the reef. No explanation or lead up. Selecting it gives you a flash forward to Uldren killing Cayde. There is a reason that this flash forward technique is not used very commonly anymore, and that's because 99% of the time it blows and actually undercuts the drama. Rather than let the story unfold and trust that it will engage the audiences, you have to tease them of something happening. But you see it without context rendering all the drama inert. Why is Cayde where he is? Why is Uldren? How did they come into conflict? What are the stakes? You know nothing, and so the moment comes and goes with no emotional resonance. Doing this undercuts the drama of the moment.

We go back in time and join Cayde in the prison break. Again, why am I here? What are the stakes? Why does this prison break threaten anyone we care about? Why does Cayde feel like he needs to stop it? How did Cayde get a copy of Back to the Future to quote? None of this is addressed ever in the story. And so you are in a place doing a thing without any idea about why it's important. I literally had no clue what the fuck I was doing.

You cannot just put a character you think we like in mortal danger without dramatic context and expect us to care. Cayde's death was completely hollow, emotionless, and empty. The story has to make us care! Imagine for a second you had never played Destiny 1. You'd be like, who the fuck is Uldren and why should I care? It was completely squandered emotionally because Bungie does not know how to make the conflict compelling on a dramatic level.

Especially since this is a revenge plot, you need to contextualize the conflict for it to work. Cayde's death meant nothing, so why would my Guardian break her silence to announce vengeance?

Now this would have obviously been done best with some missions leading up to the prison break where we uncover shit and figure out what is going on. Even after We kill the Barons, Uldren's motive is still a mystery. Worse, we do not know what the stakes are! If he gets into the dreaming city, what does that mean? Why is that something we want to stop? No clue. We don't know. Until you read the lore after you've already been disappointed by the story.

I don't want to play the game of what should have happened or how they should have played the story… but I am wondering why the game's lore gets so much attention, but the narrative does not? It's been this way since the beginning. They've had opportunities to focus on this since Destiny was released… but there doesn't seem to be an improvement. Actually, I feel like this was a regression from Des2ny's story, which I felt at least gave us a sense of dramatic clarity for the most part (it had many many problems though).

Dramatic clarity does not prevent you from discovery or mystery in your story. It simply gives context to the conflicts and lets us care about shit.

One big interesting issue is that of the player knowing story their character does not. Does it break things to see Uldren do things our character cannot see? An interesting question that I don't know the answer to. But just note Naughty Dog, the kings of story right now, don't ever show you something your character can't also experience.