Innocent man

Does anyone else think it’s wierd we essentially kill an innocent man? Uldren certainly wouldn’t be responsible for his actions in this situation no? But no trial. No jury.

The morality is actually kind of fucked up here.

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This is how we talk.

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This is how we talk.

But there is no reflection or emotional consequence to the decision. Our good guys are doing bad things without any sort of examination.

Also that line is not canon :-p

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This is how we talk.

But there is no reflection or emotional consequence to the decision. Our good guys are doing bad things without any sort of examination.

I'd have thought that Ghost's too-insistent exhortation that we are not a murderer in response to accusations from the Skorn qualify as reflection.

Also, about the jury trial thing? Pretty sure the entire solar system qualifies as a failed state since the Collapse. We're basically immortal knights errant committing war atrocities at will in the name of our religion.

The Traveler is our Halo, and we are the Covenant.

We even have our triumvirate, just as they did. Truth, Mercy, Regret. Zavala, Ikora, Cayde.

Although I guess Ikora is definitely not Mercy.

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Uldren was surely influenced and driven to partial madness, but he also made his own choices and decisions:

What future? After he finds and saves Mara? He realizes that he doesn't care. He's spent so many centuries stalking the perimeter of Awoken society, fighting off challengers, spying, sneaking, doing Mara's dirty work… Nothing has value except in its relation to Mara's plots.

Not even himself.

"They can die for all I care," he says, with a viciousness he never expected of himself. Didn't he want to save his people? No, no. Mara was willing to destroy them for her purposes—the Awoken have no value at all except in service of her design. "If some part of them survives… it will be the worthy part."

Mara sacrificed Awoken lives for a legitimate greater good. She and her Awoken put an end to Oryx, a being who had exterminated trillions and trillions of lives.

Uldren, in contrast, refused to come home. Refused to lead. The Awoken would have helped him in his efforts to find Mara, but instead he helped the House of Kings attack Awoken cities and settlements. He even personally betrayed the throne room guard by leading Fallen and Scorn onto Ceres and letting them slaughter Awoken who's first instinct was to trust him and protect him. He himself gunned down those who would have protected him:

Prince Uldren Sov saunters in like the belle of the ball, his cocked revolver aimed at the ceiling. "At ease," he says, with a little swish of his cloak, and everyone, Dinna included, responds. Just a moment's weakness. Just the subtlest flicker of deference, because he is the Prince and it feels so right to have royalty in this throne room again. Fingers off triggers, weapons skewed a few degrees off target—

The impulse is so strong because it jives with Dinna's discipline, which has already stepped in to crush the immediate instinct to blow Uldren away. Something's wrong. Something's off.

Baseline Humans can react to a visual stimulus in less than two hundred milliseconds. Awoken, less than a hundred. But there is a phenomenon Dinna and every other Royal Guard knows well, a trick of the mind called attentional blink. You are waiting for something to appear: a hostile, a gunshot, a loud noise. When it does appear, your attention blinks. You cannot detect a second event if it comes just after the first.

So it is with the blue flash of Arc-rifle fire behind Uldren's cloak.

It could go differently, still. But there is no one in this room who can easily sight in and fire on their Prince—and he has no such reciprocal inhibition.

Maybe in a court of law circumstances and madness might make for an interesting legal defense. But, realistically speaking, Uldren was nowhere near an innocent man when Petra and (perhaps) our Guardian killed him.

And that's fine, because now we know that Uldren's story is not over. And his not being innocent when he was killed will now (hopefully) be played against his innocent, memoryless new life as a Guardian. The dramatic tension of whether the Vanguard, or City, or our Guardians will accept him could be all kinds of delicious.

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And where is all that in the game?

That is relevant, critical information hidden away from informing the main narrative. The game has such a lack of dramatic clarity.

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But where is it presented in the narrative?

It isn’t.

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You’re right. It isn’t presented in a cutscene. That’s not automatically bad. It’s jist different. And I find it engaging, if you look at from our Guardian’s perspective. Our Guardian doesn’t know that Uldren was being manipulated. We were busy hunting down Barons when the story is showing us what Uldren is doing. Not everything needs to be spelled out explicitly.

Collecting the lore cards is like our Guardian conducting an investigation afterwards trying to figure out what the hell happened, what’s still happening in the Dreaming City.

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You’re right. It isn’t presented in a cutscene. That’s not automatically bad. It’s jist different. And I find it engaging, if you look at from our Guardian’s perspective. Our Guardian doesn’t know that Uldren was being manipulated. We were busy hunting down Barons when the story is showing us what Uldren is doing. Not everything needs to be spelled out explicitly.

Collecting the lore cards is like our Guardian conducting an investigation afterwards trying to figure out what the hell happened, what’s still happening in the Dreaming City.

Which could all be part of the narrative and contextualized. Not asking for spoon feeding but for dramatic clarity in the narrative as presented.

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Because I am curious where those distinctions are for you. As I don’t hold the same opinion regarding it not being part of the narrative.

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Because I am curious where those distinctions are for you. As I don’t hold the same opinion regarding it not being part of the narrative.

I would guess that what Cody means is for it to be part of the text rather than metatext.

Grimoire cards and the Lore tab are more like footnotes-- they may be between the same set of covers, but they are less integrated into the "narrative".

There are lots of ways of putting material normally thought as narrative into games-- cutscenes, character dialogue interactions, interactive text terminals, audio logs, etc. Perhaps the lowest level of integration would be D1's grimoire cards-- material presented in a medium dramatically different from the rest of the game (written words, not cutscenes or recorded dialogue, not dramatized in any way, no audiovisual presentation) and actually physically outside the game-- you have to go to another device in order to access them.

The Lore tab is a single, small step upwards. It's just an in-game grimoire card. It still seems to me to be slightly less integrated than, say, a Fallout terminal.

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I had this discussion while playing with someone the other night.

I think bringing Uldren back is a great choice. Forsaken tries to present the question of why we’re hunting him down. Is it for revenge or justice? I don’t think it does a particularly good job of it, but it’s there. This could further that question, make our Guardians (and our Vanguard leaders) really evaluate their core values in that regard. Is he Uldren, the man who slaughtered the Awoken and killed Cayde, or is he a Guardian, his sins buried along with his memories?

And that’s without addressing what will happen when he learns who he was and what he did. His choices thereafter will define who he is at that point.

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I had this discussion while playing with someone the other night.

I think bringing Uldren back is a great choice. Forsaken tries to present the question of why we’re hunting him down. Is it for revenge or justice? I don’t think it does a particularly good job of it, but it’s there. This could further that question, make our Guardians (and our Vanguard leaders) really evaluate their core values in that regard. Is he Uldren, the man who slaughtered the Awoken and killed Cayde, or is he a Guardian, his sins buried along with his memories?

I also like this idea.

This is what I would want Bungie to do with it:

Give everybody an extra character slot... and let them play a sequence of missions as Uldren.

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That would be really cool.

Destiny 3 launches and it doesn’t give you your old characters, but instead just starts. You don’t know what’s going on, but you’ll know that you’re playing as Uldren pretty quickly. Do a series of missions, maybe Mara makes contact and sends you out to do stuff. Then travel to the Tower, witness the reaction to your presence.

After that, you get your other characters back and play through another set of missions and continue the Destiny experience as normal.

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Did we play a different game? I took it as they showed this being a moral issue and something we shouldn't be OK with. Revenge was the goal, but then we had second thoughts. Other parts of the game mention this back and forth, good vs evil, right vs wrong, justice vs vengeance in the game. The RAID does it a bit too (we don't kill the Techuen, we just shoot them so much they turn into themselves again....). I think you are missing the undertone and clear markers for this in game.

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The RAID does it a bit too (we don't kill the Techuen, we just shoot them so much they turn into themselves again....).

And THAT's an okay message :-p

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Petra was essentially acting warden of the prison of elders. Uldren was one of her charges. He escaped and killed a bunch of innocents. It was way past a courtroom at that point.

Questionable for our guardian? Yep. (And I still think Petra pulled the trigger) Questionable for Petra? Not really, she had plenty of justification that he was guilty. And expectations that he would continue to kill.

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Petra was essentially acting warden of the prison of elders. Uldren was one of her charges. He escaped and killed a bunch of innocents. It was way past a courtroom at that point.

Questionable for our guardian? Yep. (And I still think Petra pulled the trigger) Questionable for Petra? Not really, she had plenty of justification that he was guilty. And expectations that he would continue to kill.

I’m sorry maybe I am misremembering, but wasn’t he under the influence of Riven the whole time?

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Petra was essentially acting warden of the prison of elders. Uldren was one of her charges. He escaped and killed a bunch of innocents. It was way past a courtroom at that point.

Questionable for our guardian? Yep. (And I still think Petra pulled the trigger) Questionable for Petra? Not really, she had plenty of justification that he was guilty. And expectations that he would continue to kill.

I’m sorry maybe I am misremembering, but wasn’t he under the influence of Riven the whole time?

No. Riven was able to nudge him in a direction, but she did not control him or command him. She used his own tendencies and neediness against him to tragic, civilization murdering effect. But it was mostly Uldren and his tendencies spun out of control after the "death" of his sister.

Cody, there are several distinct stories tens of thousands of words long that came as a part of Forsaken. These things are explained. Dislike that they aren't part of a cutscene or in-mission dialog all you want, but most if not all of your questions have answers. Most of the motivations are more complex and interesting than is revealed in a simple play through of the game. It's kinda up to you to remain ignorant of the motivations or to seek out the stories.

If you actually want to know what happened, go here and read all the pages in each of the Book: categories. Then you won't have to "misremember" any more. There's some great storytelling and tension and heartbreak and betrayal there.

Frankly, whether you wanted it or not, we've stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars. So let's get to taking out their command, one by one. Valus Ta'aurc. From what I can gather he commands the Siege Dancers from an Imperial Land Tank outside of Rubicon. He's well protected, but with the right team, we can punch through those defenses, take this beast out, and break their grip on Freehold.

In the end, linking and referring to your own post about dramatic clarity is not going to help you understand the whole story of what happened in Forsaken. Instead of asking questions, go read the lore for yourself or watch some lore videos where people put in several hours of effort to break it down for you.

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That is my point. If you need to read the lore to fully understand then the narrative presentation failed. I’ll bet there are tons of answers in the lore. But that is outside the audiovisual experience of playing.

You can play Bioshock Infinite or Halo ODST or Last of Us without reading journal entries or listening to audio logs to understand the motivations in the narrative. They are bonus.

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Um. No. Playing Bioshock Infinite while ignoring the audio logs leaves you with a very incomplete understanding of motivations.

Sure, more people would have a better understanding of the story if more of it was directly in the path of gameplay. But, if at the end of the day you start trying to talk about story without knowing all the context you're gonna come out factually wrong on key story points like you were in your initial post.

No matter how good or bad your points on dramatic clarity are, you were flat out wrong to suggest that Uldren was an innocent man.

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Um. No. Playing Bioshock Infinite while ignoring the audio logs leaves you with a very incomplete understanding of motivations.

Sure, more people would have a better understanding of the story if more of it was directly in the path of gameplay. But, if at the end of the day you start trying to talk about story without knowing all the context you're gonna come out factually wrong on key story points like you were in your initial post.

No matter how good or bad your points on dramatic clarity are, you were flat out wrong to suggest that Uldren was an innocent man.

Why was I wrong?

Because the game sucked at presenting me the information while telling its story…

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Um. No. Playing Bioshock Infinite while ignoring the audio logs leaves you with a very incomplete understanding of motivations.

Sure, more people would have a better understanding of the story if more of it was directly in the path of gameplay. But, if at the end of the day you start trying to talk about story without knowing all the context you're gonna come out factually wrong on key story points like you were in your initial post.

No matter how good or bad your points on dramatic clarity are, you were flat out wrong to suggest that Uldren was an innocent man.

Why was I wrong?

Because the game sucked at presenting me the information while telling its story…

You’re right. It sucked at presenting it to you, Cody Miller, in specific. Everyone else in this thread seemed to get it. So yeah, the game may not be presenting a narrative that you can digest easily, but plently of others have not found that to be the case. Some people may even prefer a different delivery. Conversations would be much easier if you gave up the tendency to universalize your experience. Raga just gave you ground and acknowledged some of your points from the clarity thread. It would be courteous to take a bit of ownership of your own unique experience.

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We are talking about different things. He is correct in that the answers are there. But I am correct in saying they are given outside of the narrative, after the fact.

I don’t find it satisfying. Maybe he does.

I am not saying they don’t explain. I am saying it’s bad storytelling to put critical information in lore tabs.

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Is it really critical information, though? The story works well enough on its own. Uldren’s state of mind don’t really have much relevance to the core story of our Guardian hunting down the man that killed Cayde. That stuff certainly matters for the overall continual story of the Destiny universe.

I’d argue that the way it’s presented is more interesting. The narrative asks the moral question about justice vs revenge, and then the lore cards slowly fill in Uldren’s story and make us potentially reevaluate our position after the fact.

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Um. No. Playing Bioshock Infinite while ignoring the audio logs leaves you with a very incomplete understanding of motivations.

And you can say the same about The Last of Us if you fail to read found notes or recordings.

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Um. No. Playing Bioshock Infinite while ignoring the audio logs leaves you with a very incomplete understanding of motivations.

And you can say the same about The Last of Us if you fail to read found notes or recordings.

I read none and listened to none, and I understood everything as presented perfectly.

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Petra was essentially acting warden of the prison of elders. Uldren was one of her charges. He escaped and killed a bunch of innocents. It was way past a courtroom at that point.

Questionable for our guardian? Yep. (And I still think Petra pulled the trigger) Questionable for Petra? Not really, she had plenty of justification that he was guilty. And expectations that he would continue to kill.

I’m sorry maybe I am misremembering, but wasn’t he under the influence of Riven the whole time?

No. Riven was able to nudge him in a direction, but she did not control him or command him. She used his own tendencies and neediness against him to tragic, civilization murdering effect. But it was mostly Uldren and his tendencies spun out of control after the "death" of his sister.

Plus, there's no reason to believe that either Petra or our Guardian know about this. The player sees those cutscenes, not the character.

This has kind of been a problem for me with Destiny cutscenes since Eris took the shard out of Oryx's sword.

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Frankly, whether you wanted it or not, we've stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars. So let's get to taking out their command, one by one. Valus Ta'aurc. From what I can gather he commands the Siege Dancers from an Imperial Land Tank outside of Rubicon. He's well protected, but with the right team, we can punch through those defenses, take this beast out, and break their grip on Freehold.

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Does anyone else think it’s wierd we essentially kill an innocent man? Uldren certainly wouldn’t be responsible for his actions in this situation no? But no trial. No jury.

I didn't. Did you?

The morality is actually kind of fucked up here.

See: videogames.

That's not an excuse, it's just that this crap literally goes on everywhere.

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are we all seriously ignoring Uldren's last words? He states flat out he isn't innocent, even after realizing Riven tricked him.

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are we all seriously ignoring Uldren's last words? He states flat out he isn't innocent, even after realizing Riven tricked him.

I couldn't remember the specifics of his last scene, but I vaguely remembered my feelings during the first playthrough going something like this:

1) Need to find and kill Uldren.
2) Find out he's being controlled by Riven. I guess we can't really blame him for the Cayde thing.
3) Oh, yeah. Riven has made him Mayor of Crazy Town. He's definitely not in control of himself. We're probably going to end up forgiving him. Maybe he'll even team up with the Guardians.
4) Huh. Never mind. He really was just an asshole. I'm going to enjoy killing him.
5) I REALLY hope I was the one who pulled the trigger.

Now I need to play that last mission again to see what made me change my mind at 4.

-Disciple

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Innocent man (Destiny)

Out here in the wild...

Out here in the wild...

Out here in the wild...

Innocent man

The Lore Tab.

The Lore Tab.

The Lore Tab.

The Lore Tab.

How is it not part of the narrative?

How is it not part of the narrative?

Bingo.

What I want

What I want

Innocent man

Innocent man

disagree with the premise.

+1

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

+1

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

"as presented"

disagree with the premise.

Damn you, Raga

I loved that. :D

:)

Innocent man

All this thread and...

That's kind of what I was thinking

DBO Forums

Innocent man (Destiny)

Out here in the wild...

Out here in the wild...

Out here in the wild...

Innocent man

Innocent man

The Lore Tab.

The Lore Tab.

The Lore Tab.

The Lore Tab.

How is it *not* part of the narrative?

How is it *not* part of the narrative?

Bingo.

What I want

What I want

Innocent man

Innocent man

disagree with the premise.

+1

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

+1

disagree with the premise.

disagree with the premise.

"as presented"

disagree with the premise.

Damn you, Raga

I loved that. :D

:)

Innocent man

All this thread and...

That's kind of what I was thinking

How is it not part of the narrative?

How is it not part of the narrative?