"Players help shape the world"? (Destiny)

by car15, Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:37 (3721 days ago) @ kidtsunami
edited by car15, Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:45

I didn't mean that. Destiny was advertised as a huge epic experience focused on exploration. We were told that the Solar System was our sandbox and shown concept art of several locations on Earth, along with Saturn, Europa, and derelict ships. I'm sure we'll visit all of those places eventually, but showing them to us as part of the marketing for this game heavily implied that they would be included in this game. And that's what a lot of the marketing was like, in retrospect; Bungie heavily implied many things without directly stating them. I guess they figured they could get away with implying things and then, when people complained about the missing content, they could point back and say "We never actually promised any of that!"

(Okay, I'm being slightly unfair. It wasn't all Bungie. A lot of it was Activision.)

The final game provides four playable spaces and offers mostly linear (and mostly identical) Dinklebot escort missions. It feels small. In fact, it has about as much content as a standard FPS game, not the epic quantity that was heavily implied in the marketing. It is not the experience that was advertised.

I never expected an epic Mass Effect style narrative, especially not with the open mission structure that I envisioned for the game. I suspected that much of the "meat" of the story would be told in supplemental media (i.e. the Grimoire). However, I did think we were going to get something more complete than what we ended up with. Almost every story point of interest, along with all of the back story and character motivations, is buried in the Grimoire.