Let me ask you both a question (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Sunday, July 20, 2014, 18:30 (3570 days ago) @ Kermit

I'll answer. I explained this a long time ago, but I'll apply my thinking to this new context. These are cards, which implies a degree of portability. The object could exist in the game and in real life, much like Halsey's Journal actually does appear in the game and in real life. The cards' existence inside the game is believable.

A machine you can use to watch or download video is hardly unbelievable.

It is when it shows you a cutscene. If you're going to take me out of the game to give me more narrative from an external perspective, don't pretend that this is part of the game world. Just give me a cutscene.

The thought I was responding to wasn't that they were bad game design (I agree they were), but that they were unrealistic (I maintain they weren't).

Why would you open a terminal except to view it in the moment?

Why does that not apply to cards?

The cards are acquired in the course of playing the game, but there is no specific action in Destiny that is the equivalent of walking up to a terminal and opening it.

fair enough

And why would a terminal in the game world present an omniscient perspective?

It's fairly clear it's because they were made by the Forerunners and/or their machinery. It says when you get them they're tied to the Domain, which is supposed to be this nearly omnipresent, highly capable, possibly intelligent data network, although from what I remember the game never actually tells you what it is or what it's like.

Bull crap. I'm going to quote myself again. "The terminals seem to be following a Halo tradition, but they’re really an awkward hybrid of what has been three separate Halo traditions: Easter eggs (extra, fun stuff you find in the game world that intentionally breaks immersion), terminals (extra narrative you find in the game world that deepens immersion), and cutscenes ( [mostly] third-person narrative triggered to serve a necessary dramatic purpose)." Saying that they're products of the Forerunners is just more window dressing that is of a piece with calling them "terminals"--as if saying that makes it believable. Are the cutscenes in Halo CE created by the Forerunners? Of course not. They are narrative content supplied by the game creators to further the narrative, and 343's terminals are exactly the same.

That was referring to the Halo Anniversary terminals, I was referring to Halo 4's terminals (and I should've specified that). Even so, your further explanation seems to mostly be that you don't like the presentation, framing, and content of Halo Anniversary's terminals, and how the content and presentation fit into the game world, and not so much about the delivery (in-game cutscene versus out-of-game cutscene or in-game text or out-of-game text) and not all about the game integration (physical objects in the game), and delivery and game integration were the points of what I was saying.
To address what you said, I don't know what Halo Anniversary's terminals could be other than 343 Guilty Spark's logs (except the first one, which seems to be a message, and the one on Keyes, which is a whole different animal), and as for fitting into the game world, I think they do a good job (other than, again, the first one, which is frankly abysmal at fitting in or being believable or conveying anything useful or interesting or emotionally impactful).

Also, why would they have cards with this information? A database, a book, heck even a scroll I might buy, but now that you got me to think about it, using cards seems unrealistic, they don't even have holes where you could bind them loose-leaf.
Back to the first point, it looks like you get Grimoire cards for killing things and completing objectives and missions, and I haven't heard of anyone just finding them, which brings up the question of why that is the way it is, in-universe, and moreover you don't even see the cards in the game except as a little icon. So yes, they could exist in the game world and the real world, but as it stands they don't, in the game world they exist in name only.

You're proving my point. If there was animation that showed our characters picking up cards, I'd expect to be able to read them.

That's not the point I was contesting, I was contesting the point that they're well-integrated into the game world.

Conversely, it seems more realistic to me that a character in a game might read Grimoire cards in a moment of leisure and not in a hostile environment.

Conversely to that, I feel confident in saying watching a video (actually watching it, not just looking in its general direction and listening) takes more attention than reading something, and can make it harder to hear other things, so someone in a combat situation would be more likely to wait to watch a video than to read something (though to be fair I would think they'd wait to watch or read anything that isn't very important to their survival).

I'm not a fan of non-text terminals in the first place. It seems to me that 343 just decided that they were going to make terminals "better" without really understanding what made terminals cool and interesting to begin with.

If I can go off to the side a little here, it seems to me that, despite usually being pretty open-minded, on this (and maybe a handful of other things) you've decided what is better and that anyone who disagrees with you just doesn't know enough or hasn't really thought about it-- which puts you in good company, namely in the company of one Mr. Cody Miller.

343's "terminals" would be fine if they weren't called terminals and they didn't use the game's mechanic of "accessing terminals" to unlock them.

This is a good point too, except the first time you access one Cortana says she's downloading the data for later review, and, again, there's no good reason to require the cards to be accessed separately from the game.

Yes, there is. What others have said, but also just content-wise. Gameplay isn't interrupted to provide background information about the world. You could say the same about the Halo 4 terminals, except it's obvious they would've rather included them in the game. By calling them terminals, they've created that expectation. They've screwed up the concept, though, and now they're stuck with it.

I honestly don't know if you didn't get this or not. I'm not asking for them to force us to read them, I'm not asking for them to only be available in the game, I'm asking for some possible way to read them in the game and not have to leave or close the game, go to another device or my consol's dashboard area, fire up an app or browser, go to b.net and the Grimoire, and go to the thing I just got, just to read the frickin' two paragraphs I just unlocked.