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

by Old Fire Thief , Silverton, OR, Monday, February 09, 2015, 19:04 (3574 days ago) @ roland

I am pretty sure we have all missed the point here. We heard over and over in the literature leading up to the game release that this was going to be OUR STORY. I think that the lack of concrete narrative was intentional, to allow us, as the newest guardian, to write our own story from scratch. If you go back through the release videos and documents they constantly make reference creating our own destiny to "become legend". We were supposed to enhabit this world, MMO style, and interact with each other, and there by create our own legends. The whole concept of the raid (references to MMO's) notwithstanding) was to create an environment where we would be pushed, and therefore create memorible stories for ourselves.

They purposefully did not include a Master Chief type character in Destiny for the same reason that you never saw Master Chiefs face in Halo: to make your connection to the game avatar stronger. Instead they sought to create a world that had a huge backstory so it would feel like there was a setting on which you could play. In typical bungie fashon they hid much of this lore in hidden texts, so the more curious gamers could figure out the history as they desired, i.e. The librarian backstory.

The Halo games themselves followed a very similar story method, where there is a "front story" which is played out in real time. And a "hidden story" which was hidden in the terminals. The difference here is that We are supposed to be John.

What is interesting then is how well this has worked, and at the same time how poorly it has appealed to us. Every day on this forum I read pretty cool stories of someones "legend - wait for it - dary" game. That one time we all wiped just as The Archon Priest started melting. Or how someone finally got the Mythoclast. Or the team that killed Crota without firing a shot. Bungie executed their ideal perfectly, we just havent noticed its working because, lets face it, id rather be " the epic hero shooting the ultimate baddie who is going to end the world" then just being myself, but somewhere on mars, and with a cape, and space magic, and a gjallerhorn (oh wait, maybe that is pretty epic).