I would have loved more mass effect in my destiny (Destiny)

by Jabberwok, Friday, September 26, 2014, 10:55 (3507 days ago) @ scarab

I have played, for example, Two Betrayals maybe hundreds of times more than any mission in Destiny. But I have never been bored doing it. I always knew the stakes and new the stakes mattered. I've never said to myself, "but I've saved the galaxy before".

Totally agree. I still have no idea what I accomplished in The Black Garden, or even at any point before that. Apparently, my wandering, rugged individualist Hunter just does whatever Peter Dinklage says, without question.

I remember Joe saying that he sat down and tried to write a real world explanation of why we could see fallen " souls" leave their bodies when shot. Maybe he wasn't comfortable with the genre.

So I think part of the problem is that they were trying to marry fantasy with science fiction. A lot of their early concept art is fantasy, then it gradually gets more futuristic. It's an interesting idea, but the execution is lackluster, IMO, because talking about swords, wizards, and darkness with no explanations has made the story airy and insubstantial. It needs to be grounded. Actual fantasy has the advantage of being easy to relate to real world things, because it's all low tech. Destiny is going to need much, much stronger character interaction if it wants to be relatable, and they also need to go a little more in-depth into the tech and their explanations (instead of just saying that the Hive are "waiting for their gods to return"). Star Wars drew heavily on fantasy tropes, but the technology also felt very earthy and mechanical, which helped ground it, and even The Force was well-explained. By contrast, Destiny contains a lot of talk about 'wielding the Traveler's light', but no one even asks what that means, much less attempts to explain it.

I wonder if Bungie actually wanted to make a fantasy game, but realized they would never be able to sell it to Activision if there was no shooting, and if it wasn't similar to Halo. The Sword of Crota could almost be an homage to the game that couldn't be.


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