Maybe this is why Bungie hates story-telling now? (Destiny)

by roland , Friday, February 06, 2015, 09:38 (3577 days ago)

<ducks> Purposefully inflammatory subject line :)

I recently read this oral history of the making of the Halo 2 E3 Demo. Quotes from Bungie employees were used to reconstruct the history of its production and the aftermath.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=985145

I found this quote by Shi Kai Wang (from 2010) interesting:

Shi Kai Wang (from 2010): The New Mombasa e3 trailer was such a hack that we felt horrible after we came back from the show. It just showed us that we had nothing, and the amount of work that we had to make ahead of us was astounding. Everything from boarding, double wielding, jackals offense formation, insertion pods. Most of those were all done for the trailer, none of them were really implemented in the engine. With clever hackery it was IN the engine, just not Implemented.

The high from the trailer died down real quick and led to the monumental task that we had ahead of us, a story that we didn’t understand, and gameplay features that we weren’t 100% sure of.

That's interesting for many reasons, but "A story they didn't understand?" really stuck out. The way the quote reads it almost sounds like trying to implement a detailed, potentially complicated story actually influenced the production schedule, and the implementation of features in Halo 2. It could be that story problems ate into (or bled into) other aspects of the game which affected the final product. Since making a fun game is the primary goal, it seems like an obvious solution is to start making stories less complex (if the story complexity is affecting the fun). I disagree with this decision, and would point to a lot of other games that have successfully implemented great stories, but I can nevertheless understand why this might have been decided at the time.

If this type of thinking started to happen at Bungie during and after the production of Halo 2, then maybe Claude Errera and I were on to something in the last episode of Guardian Radio (Guardian Radio Episode 97) where we talked about how Bungie story telling has been on a downward slide since somewhere around the release of Halo, give or take a game.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be a flame starter. We all love Bungie. I'm sure they're working on improving the story-telling in Destiny, but I thought maybe this piece on neogaf might have shed a little bit of light on why they started to de-emphasize story in their games.

Or not... who knows? Maybe I just want another Marathon. Or maybe I should just go play Last of Us again. What do you guys think? Or maybe you disagree with Claude and I? Discuss.