Why Bungie is getting better at visual storytelling... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, 16:50 (3406 days ago) @ dogcow

This whole room. Environmental storytelling is the best form of visual storytelling.

Environmental storytelling is great and really helps out the ... environment, feel, setting. But, it's quite difficult to fully communicate a story just through the environment. You can relay a very basic story, but there certainly aren't going to be any plot twists, it's basic & straightforward.

I disagree. A great example is in Skyrim. You find a cave in one point, and a journal that talks about how two guys bought it hoping for riches. When you go in and explore, you see a campsite in a room with a waterfall, and evidence that they dug multiple long tunnels before giving up on one. The table has a journal about how they found nothing, and the writer felt ripped off. The last page tells about how he went to town for a few days to buy some supplies, and when he came back, his friend had disappeared. Feeling betrayed and broke, he cursed his friend and left the cave.

And that's pretty much it. Evidence of their stay is all around... But if you explore, you'll see that beyond the pool and behind the waterfall, there's a hidden cave. If you go into it, you'll find some mining equipment, and a skeleton half crushed under some fallen rocks... Revealing a large vein of gold...

Sure the journal helped remove all ambiguity, but the environment did a great job of telling a story, AND including a twist for you to discover.

Another example is "Der Reise" in the first Black Ops. The map's environment tells a story that can be explained by the audio records that you find, explaining the zombie dogs, the reason there are so many zombies, and the fate of Samantha (who controls the zombies). It's not spelled out for you, but there was enough in the environment to see the twist (one dog was teleported, but multiple dog tracks are seen leaving the teleporters).