About the new raid... (Destiny)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Tuesday, December 04, 2018, 08:37 (2210 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Who knows, maybe ditching campaign means more resources going into the raid lair, which would upgrade it to proper Raid status, but considering the way those resources are being spread into three DLCs this time, instead of two, it may be smaller than usual.

I have mixed feelings on this.

Bungie ditching a campaign is good in the sense that their storytelling has been embarrassingly poor in general with the Destiny games. However, the campaigns do present the setting to you, which somewhat contextualizes all the truly fun activities.

A game that is just raids or other challenging activities that lack story would lose something I think. We are beyond the time when challenge alone was the dominant driving factor in immersion. This worked with older games because they were not as sophisticated in their audiovisual presentation to immerse through aesthetics. But games now are. In some sense aesthetics are more effective at immersion than pure challenge. But as the aesthetics of the game are very sophisticated, they feel hollow if not accompanied by some kind of contextualization for their existence.

It may make the game 'better', but the game would be better still if it utilized every avenue for immersion. You could get away with games of pure challenge back in the day because everything else was primitive. But now we have moved on and challenge is not the most important thing anymore.

It may be the best fix right now, but ultimately Destiny needs a solid campaign and narrative to really shine.

I don't think you actually need a full on campaign. As you said, you need context. Without knowing we are fighting a war (like the red one) the crucible doesn't make as much sense. Without seeing the queen and awoken and how prideful, reclusive and all that the dreaming city doesn't seem like a beautiful sanctuary. It all needs context and just seeing these people in the game and telling you clips of stuff doesn't do it all. You need missions that tell story. They don't need to be full on campaigns but we have to SEE these people and how they act to understand what this world is like.