On the topic of 'Tiny' Joe Staten (Destiny)

by Riceamike, Friday, September 26, 2014, 04:53 (3948 days ago) @ car15

I had this discussion with Korny whilst playing Destiny, and we debated a bit and I ultimately ended up agreeing with him that Joe Staten doesn't write good stories, but is excellent at world building. When people talk about Halo's story, people rarely actually talk about the games.

Joe Staten wrote Halo. A series with a lot of ambiguity and a main character that over three games accomplishes little to nothing of import. The Master Chief does one thing, and that is blow things up. However, Halo 2 with all the ambition Bungie could ever muster introduced an at-the-time fan hated character with the Arbiter, and so far in the series of games The Arbiter is the only person to actually have a personal arc. Sure, one can say the Master Chief is supposed to be this avatar for the player, but that doesn't excuse sloppy writing and elimination of character arcs.

Now, this isn't a problem with Bungie alone. Halo 4 tried to do a Master Chief story and the most he actually does to save Cortana is literally saying a couple of sentences and then continuing the blow things up.

Now, for Destiny.. At one point, I'm sure that Destiny had a standard 'Go here, shoot things, blow up giant alien artifacts and save the world' plot. That's what Joe Staten can do. At some point, the game just disappeared from that plot.

Whether it was cut out to sell DLC or what, we won't know until December.