Destiny as an Episodic Narrative

by Ser Jergen, Thursday, April 04, 2013, 15:29 (4040 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Ah, the whole episodes thing. Aren't we at the point where this has generally been proven to be ineffective? Spartan Ops tells the story much less effectively than a real campaign, and other genres that have tried episodic gaming either have episodes which don't reach critical mass for sufficient complexity, or the episodes take as long to develop as a full game proper. I can't really recall any episodic games that are significantly better than if they had been a single release or a series of larger releases.

I get what your saying to. When I first heard Destiny talk about episodic content I thought about Spartan Ops. I enjoyed the story but overall it was executed poorly. If they had injected more story into the game play and removed two of the five missions I think they might have had something. But that's not what happened. Instead you got repetitive game play and a story that didn't really necessitate you playing the actual game play.

The real question is how do they implement this into Destiny. I've got a similar feeling that the world will act as a combination of Skyrim and WoW. An epic scale with a huge amount of things to do. But, will the campaign come out over weeks at a time? Or will there be a sort of core campaign that you can complete while Bungie releases auxiliary content that's not required to complete the campaign but augments it to create a richer experience. And of course, at what point does episodic content turn into DLC? Based on current information I'm inclined to believe that any DLC that Destiny will have (i.e. the Comets seen in the early Activision contract) far reaching changes and new content similar to the WoW expansions that will maybe add new planets or drastically change the base locations.

No doubt Destiny is a huge project that aims to revolutionize video games and it's up to Bungie to craft it and it will either it will make a lasting impact that forever changes the way video games are made and played. Or, it will be a poorly crafted mess that set its sights to high and ultimately fails. Knowing Bungie my money's on the first option. Only time will tell...