Mythic Sci-Fi: does it work for you? RNA (Destiny)

by scarab , Sunday, November 30, 2014, 04:29 (3444 days ago)
edited by scarab, Sunday, November 30, 2014, 05:03

Star Wars was mythic sci-fi and that worked for me. (Greedo-shot-first and anything after doesn't count - in case I need to state the obvious. La, La, la, can't hear you, didn't happen.)

But Destiny's take on it? I don't think so. Yet.

Was the story a damp squib because the writer's were incompetent? Or was the subject matter/ genre the problem?

Most film/tv/game sci-fi is unscientific. It doesn't get science and doesn't care. Science is magic. Who cares how it works?

Add actual magic on top and what is left is just made up shit that nobody has taken the time to work out how it works.

One example: the glimmer drill. WTF is a glimmer drill? Why is glimmer a currency if you can dig it out of the ground so easily? We can't say for sure that you can't mine glimmer because we have no idea what glimmer is. Yes we mine for gold but that is rare and difficult to get. Glimmer mining seems easy. (part from the being killed by: psycho zombie Guardians!)

Can we mine glimmer? If so why are we bothering to collect it from chests and shooting people? Can we steal a glimmer drill from the Fallen? Or we could do a deal - you mine without being killed - you give us 50% Does it harm the soil to extract glimmer from it? Do we care about the soil in the Cosmodrome?

But, anyway, that is a digression... Except: I do wonder why we don't talk to the Fallen, do deals, come to arrangements, find out what they know of the Darkness, the rest of the galaxy...

Back to the genre being a problem...

The names! God the names. Nigel the knickerless, Morag the unlovable. Can you imagine having to come up with that lot? A story for every exotic weapon, "there was an elf who lived in a shoe and he??? made a weapon that does stuff. I think he made it out of bones or something" I couldn't do it. I would be so depressed if that was my job.

Do you remember the presentation where Joe Staten said that we tried to come up with a real-world based explanation for why souls shoot out of Fallen when you headshot them. I think in the end he just gave up and went with it: souls fly out of Fallen when you shoot them.

Do you think this happened to all the writer? Who cares how it works: just write it.

Maybe they were all thinking, "Why am I doing this? What has my life come to?"

I mean, WTF does restoring a priest's soul actually mean? Is there a person alive who cares?

We pondered and debated the Halo story because we could relate to it and thought we had a chance of understanding the world enough to form opinions and have some confidence that we could reason correctly about it.

How do we reason about machines that feed off souls? What is a soul? Is it energy? Can you grow a new one?

And what is the motivation of the Fallen? are they really just dogs? Wolves? Pirate doggies that follow the pack leader and have poor skills at assessing risk (mine worlds that are swarming with psycho zombies that WILL kill you dead in under 2 minutes).

Of all the races I think that I understand the Cabal the best. The ones we see are soldiers working for a very large, militaristic, empire. Mars to them is a shitty backwater that they have been unfortunate enough to have been posted to. The grunts we kill didn't choose to be there. Their situation makes sense to me. The higher ups don't care if the rank and file are being slaughtered in their hundreds. They probably have a multi-world empire with a population in the trillions (or hundreds of billions). They have enough hormonal young men that need military discipline that they just wont miss the ones we kill. The ones that live will have been toughened by being under live fire during their tour of duty.

I suppose the Hive have a cunning plan that we will see in the DLC.

Maybe Vex don't consider the individual unit. But why don't they just teleport inside the exclusion zone? What is with that? Can the cabal block teleportation inside certain areas?

What do walls and trenches do in a world where teleportaion and air travel are common place? I love the look of the trenches and the general Cabal art design. Love Mars to bits. But does it make sense?

Anyway, just wanted to talk story and world. Just wanted to share. Thank you for your time. Refunds not available ;-)