You're not wrong (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Friday, June 26, 2015, 18:54 (3674 days ago) @ Kahzgul
edited by General Vagueness, Friday, June 26, 2015, 19:07

This is the only example I can remember of a game advert showing obvious in-game footage that never actually was part of the game. I've seen adverts with pre-renders and the like, but those were always obvious and usually had a disclaimer such as "*not actual game footage" at the bottom of the screen.

Well you must have a short memory because it happened with Bungie's previous game, Halo: Reach. There was a trailer where Halsey was going over the Spartan-IIIs and it featured scenes for each one that didn't end up in the game. For that matter, I'm pretty sure every Halo game was shown off with things that ended up not making it into the final game. That doesn't make it a good thing to do, but it happens.

As for the "you can go there" I took it to mean that they actually built massive worlds to explore in the vein of World of Warcraft.

Why? They kept saying it wasn't an MMO. Obviously they didn't and wouldn't say "it's not an MMO because it's too small", but it's not a big leap to think "oh they're saying it's not an MMO, I shouldn't be expecting things that I expect from MMOs, like a fuck-ton of space to walk around in".

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the advertising, I have not "become legend" either in the meta scope of the game or in the plot element of the game, either. The amazing legendary act I performed was, per the Speaker, worth only a single mote of light. No one in the tower recognizes me as "that Legend" but rather I'm just another Guardian. And how many times has Deej said that our gear would tell our tale? What's the tale of your Gjallerhorn? I bet it's along the lines of "I killed Phogoth 500 times and then I finally got this" or maybe, like mine, "My friend had a saved checkpoint at the harpy chest in VoG, so I joined him and opened the chest on all of my characters. Did that for weeks before I got it." Those are stories, so Deej wasn't lying when he said my gear would have a story, but they're terribly boring stories.

I sympathize and mostly agree with you there. The "make your story through your possessions" element is there but it's sparse and you have to work to make it not be so sparse. I have a story behind my copy of The Last Word, but a lot of people just had some coins lying around and bought it or got it as a drop for doing some unremarkable thing.

Okay, so what about the E3 presentation that started with "today we're going to explore The Wall outside Old Russia and see if we can't make it to the other side." That sets up that you had some kind of choice about where to go and that it wasn't part of a wholly linear story.

I'm not sure where you're getting that expectation from in that presentation or those words. Where did they say or show anything about a branching story or a choice of what to do?

Technically you can replay the first mission, but the presentation of it at E3 was that this was standard gameplay - there's areas you haven't explored that you can choose to explore. Presumably lots of them.

I think I'm not picking up on what you mean, because that's true until you've explored everything, just like every game I know of.

Wow, see the spaceship fall over when that alien ship warped in?! Oh man, look how much cool stuff is in Destiny. Except there's almost no big set piece action like that ever again. The satellite dish opens up in one later mission and.... yeah, that's it. For the whole game.

I don't understand why people are actually concerned about these things. Set pieces are not interactive and don't do anything for the story once you've seen them for the first time. They're nice to look at, but so is any work of art.

See what I mean about it's not an out and out lie but the implication that this is representative of what the experience of playing the game will be like is throughout the presentation?

That's my problem though, people keep claiming they did lie. I don't have much of a problem with people being displeased or complaining, but I take issue with anyone that accuses a person or group of something they didn't do.

Sure, in my mind I built these expectations, but every single thing they showed me prior to launch was consistent with those expectations. They never took any steps to temper those expectations, nor did they ever show us any part of the game that went counter to their main advertising goals of selling this massive, epic, incredible space adventure where you "Become Legend."

I'm not sure what you'd prefer for them to have said, "This is big, but don't get your hopes up, it's not actually that big"? There's no easy way to say how big a game world is. You can look at the playable area through in-engine numbers and you can convert that to something equivalent in real measurements, but that doesn't tell you how big it feels or how much of that area is interesting, because those things are subjective.

I mean... do you feel like your character has become legend? I don't.

That's a tagline, it means roughly nothing.

I feel like my actions have had zero impact on the game world and that I'm just one of hundreds of Guardians who are all basically the same.

That, finally, is a good point. All I can say is that I never expected it to be any other way, even though they implied (usually not even that strongly) that you could have individual impact or renown, because that's how games with shared worlds tend to be.