Destiny as an Episodic Narrative

by TTL Demag0gue , Within the shadow of the Traveler, Thursday, April 04, 2013, 15:39 (4040 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I would submit that video games already employ episodic storytelling. The only difference is that the stories are generally disguised as missions or levels to be beaten, and either strung together linearly or spread out over an expansive world to be discovered and explored.

What makes episodic storytelling work (or not) in both TV and video games is twofold:

1) You have to have a team of writers who can spin a good yarn and write it competently. The stories have to be thought-out and well-written and be compelling enough to draw the viewer or player into the story. There are plenty of examples of both excellent and awful episodic storytelling, and the major separator between the two ends of that spectrum is usually the quality of the writing.

2) You have to have specific goals to meet in your writing process, places the story has to touch before arriving at its conclusion. One of the primary reason why, in my opinion, Spartan Ops fails to satisfy for a lot of gamers, for example, is that 343i basically admitted that they wrote the episodes with no (or, at the very least, little) clear idea of where the story was going. If you don't set specific goals along in your storytelling, the story itself is going to flop, no matter how good the writing is because the story will feel like its purposelessly meandering. Bungie has demonstrated over multiple franchises a strong ability to craft compelling tales that draw gamers into the story and make them want to be a part of that universe, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that Destiny will be equally fascinating.