Is Destiny not going to be canon too? (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, August 16, 2014, 12:29 (3541 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Ragashingo, Saturday, August 16, 2014, 12:33

Ok... a lot of problems here both with the article and your post.

The article annoys me because it's written from an apathetic and almost lazy point of view. Games like Halo, Mass Effect, and Destiny take some time and dedication to uncovering their lore. You don't play the first missions of Mass Effect 1 and instantly know who the Geth or Turians are or what their relationships to the Humans and Quarians were. You learn almost nothing of Elites, Grunts, Jackals, the Covenant, or the Master Chief in the first levels of Halo 1. In Destiny we run into a pair of races that don't like us and don't like each other but we're suppose to know their histories and motivations? Why?

It's ok to say you don't know a race's motivations yet, before a game is even released. It's also ok to admit you don't remember everything from the early games in a series has stretched over a decade... so far. But to criticize the beta of an as yet unreleased new series when no other series conveyed as much information with the speed you claim is necessary. That seems way overly harsh.

Complaining about terms being reused across series? That pushes straight on into either apathy or intentional goading of a series' fans. For instance, the author is confused about the different between a Ghost (a purple hover bike introduced more than a decade ago) and a Ghost (a floating helper / narrative character introduced recently)? Does he also get confused about the differences between Halo and Call of Duty's Ghosts? How about Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon teams? Those are floaty AIs, right? As a game journalist it is your job to keep series, sometimes even similar series, distinct in your mind.

Complaining about Destiny's quick story intro and opening cutscene where we don't know a lot about what is going on... Again, how much did we know about Mass Effect in its first three minutes besides the small wall of text that told us Humanity had discovered the mass effect? How much did we know of Halo by the time the Master Chief was going through his wake up diagnostics? It's just another short sighted complaint by this author. A series like Destiny, which was said on day one to have a ten year plan, is not going to cram all its story into the first cutscene. Doubly so when that cutscene is explaining that most of the good guy's civilization and history was wiped out... Now he's wanting to go against good story telling in general and specifically against the story of the game he's playing.

In the end, this author got very few terms from any game correct even though he starts out by claiming he's used to sci-fi stories revolving around named characters and locations that don't really exist. Maybe I'm too much of a story person. Maybe the fact that I can, with ease tell, you the histories of Aiur, Palaven, Onyx, Epsilon 3, Risa, Persephone, Tatooine and at least a dozen distinctly different Earth's makes me unusal, but I don't go around knocking betas of brand new video game series for not reinforcing characters the same way a multipart, several thousand page book series has over the past twenty years.

One other thing. I think it's both lazy and insulting to story tellers to fall back on a character's voice actor rather than it's in game name when talking about that character. Claudia Christian is all over Skyrim, but I never referr to any of her generic or named characters as Claudia or Susan Ivanova (the character she played on Babylon 5 two decades ago). Keith David is in both Halo and Mass Effect, but I don't call Captain Anderson or the Arbiter "Keith"... Why do so many people insist on referring to Destiny's Ghost(s) as Dinklage? Yes, I get it, he's a well known actor from a well known series. But he's not playing himself or his Game of Thrones character in Destiny, so cut it out... That's my take on it anyway.

As for you, Cody. Not canon? Really? We've had co-op in Bungie games since 2001 and now missing a line of dialogue because a friend talks to you pushes Destiny's story to not canon status? Give us a break.