Narrative may be the issue. (Destiny)

by iconicbanana, C2-H5-OH + NAD, Portland, OR, Friday, December 12, 2014, 11:23 (3875 days ago) @ Leviathan

So I don't believe Destiny's universe is poor or in need of more answers. I even think most of the cinematics were pretty intriguing. There's simply not enough of them (or another method of storytelling) to give us engaging characters that breath more life and a flowing narrative into what's there. In short: we need cool characters doing things.

Since I am still hopeful of an improving narrative and still find the universe fun, I'd rather speculate on what we do have instead of just throwing it out.

The issue may come down to rhetorical device for Bungie. They used narrative to exceeding effect in Halo; so much so that, when approaching Destiny, they may have assumed that storytelling (their bread-and-butter) would be almost a non-issue.

The problem that they ultimately ran into is, in a persistent world such as Destiny's, narrative isn't necessarily applicable. There is a lot of exposition in Destiny: the game feels, for all intents and purposes, completely timeless. Change doesn't occur. The entire experience is static; you end at the same place you begin.

What we end up with is a lot of characters telling us about things and not events. And when we do get events, they have no effect; they become items in a list instead of changes in a sequence. Bungie may have realized half way through their development that cause and effect had no place in Destiny, and abandoned it. Why this change happened can be mooted but ultimately, I think it's irrelevant.

What we have is something different from most stories you can experience linearly: it's a half-baked attempt at the epic that can't deliver because the design of the universe itself hamstrings its inability to evolve. It's a picture of a universe: insanely detailed, and unchanging. A postcard of an epic. A good launching point, but not something you expect to walk away changed from. It would require a significant design change for narrative to play a part, and it remains to be seen if Bungie plans to abandon a persistent world in order to give us a dynamic story. That may not be their goal, and if not, we might have to create our own narratives inside the exposition they've heaped on us.