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

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Friday, February 06, 2015, 11:58 (3577 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Good post, but I take issue with this.

You can't re-write a story 9 years into development and expect it to be good without having another 9 years to change the entire game to match the new story.

Call it luck or happenstance or something else, but some great stories in games had different narratives until late, at least so far as some narrative decisions that made all the difference were made late. I know this happens with my own writing. I have some nice pieces of writing but the story isn't working. I re-arrange, I change the focus, maybe I just include a new scene or lines of dialogue and suddenly everything gels, the story is bigger and better than it was.

You're right that game development doesn't provide the same flexibility and luxury to change things that you have in, say, fiction, but small changes can make a big difference, and oftentimes cutting big chunks of content makes a big difference, too.

What's so good that it seems obvious and inevitable in a story isn't always apparent when you're in the thick of creating it, and sometimes the line between evocative and not enough is hard to discern. The latter is part of what I think happened with Destiny.