I do think senior management at Bungie deserves flack (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, November 05, 2014, 13:47 (3470 days ago) @ Kahzgul
edited by Kermit, Wednesday, November 05, 2014, 14:24

Either they're feckless rookies who made some mistakes or they're complicit vets who should have known better. Neither is a thing I'd want to be. Both are things that have sullied the Bungie name and tarnished their image.

Or maybe it's neither or some combination of things we don't know about. Maybe some things will gel later on, and we'll regard this first effort at Destiny's story differently.

I find the writing (and delivery) quirky. Quirky could be good and interesting, but unfortunately, Destiny's story is disjointed, too, so being quirky is a luxury they didn't quite earn.

I suspect the problem with Destiny's writing was a scaling issue, and I'm not really talking about staff, because I don't know about that. I suspect they wrote assuming that more content would make it into the first game, and scaled back such that what shipped didn't hang together as well as it might have had they'd known how much content they could deliver from the start. A ton of concept art was created and music was written before the actual game took form, and maybe it was the same for the writing, and finding the best way to use this content was the difficult part.

In a way, I think the ten-year-plan and ambition of the game hurt them because they could view this game as the foundation of what was to come, which enabled them to justify some deep cuts that hurt the first game's ability to exist as a stand-alone narrative.

Game development is hard. Bungie's games have come in hot before, and I think this was a bumpy landing for those of us who like story in their games. You don't always know, though. At Naughty dog they've said that The Last of Us didn't gel until the final weeks of development, and in retrospect that game seems pretty close to perfect to me--there's nothing I would change about it, but apparently important changes were made very late. Sometimes things come together. Destiny's story hasn't yet--for me, anyway. I'll say it again, though, the Grimoire cards are excellent.