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

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, 17:51 (3195 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...

But if this room were present without any of the journals to read you would think, "oh, someone was mining for gold, found it and was then crushed by a cave in." Not much of a story at all. You wouldn't think about the friend potentially hiding his find, or the tragedy of the partnership & lost friend. It wouldn't really have any impact without some other form of storytelling.

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.

Yeah, but the twist was only possible because the journals set it up.

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).

Again, the environment is supplemental to the audio (or vice versa). It doesn't truly tell a compelling story on its own. I don't disagree that environmental storytelling is a fantastic addition to a game, and creating environments with a story behind them really adds a lot, but it needs to be paired with something else, otherwise it's just that, environment and atmosphere. It's just a stage for a performance. Maybe, at the absolute most, a very simple story like what I see in that picture...

When I look at that picture all I see is "Oh, some human fought for its life with a gun and lost." I don't get any real story, just atmosphere and setting. I have no emotional connection, no reason to care about that headless skeleton sitting there. Now if that room were accompanied by something else (audio, text, cutscene) that gave me a reason to care by telling or setting up a story, then it could be moving.

Maybe we're debating semantics. Environment can tell a story, even part of a really great story, but it needs help.

Well that's the thing about it. You're not going to get a beginning, middle, and end neatly explained in environmental storytelling, but it helps supplement any story, any game, and any other form of storytelling. Left 4 Dead did a great job of this, with every area telling its own story of lost friends, safe houses, overrun barricades...

*Last of Us Minor Spoilers*
Another great example is The Last of Us, where you find a boat, and a nearby sewer system where you see that a community was thriving underground... Until it fell. Sure the notes that you can find explain exactly what happened at different points in time, but even without them, you can tell what happened everywhere (one room has an adult with children in a corner, and blankets over their heads). You can deduce what took place all around, even without the notes. In the end, you find out that the other side of the sewers lead to a suburban region, which is where all the people came from. The game is a tale of survival, and the sewers are a unique interpretation of that concept, indirectly supporting your story, and building the world around you.
*end spoils*

How boring would it be if the environments were lifeless, bland, and said nothing? That's an issue that I have with Destiny. If there aren't enemies, there's nothing interesting anywhere outside of the human bases on the moon, and even those don't really tell you anything about what might have happened...

I agree that environmental storytelling is, for the most part, not going to elicit as much of a response as another form of storytelling, but combined with ANY other form of storytelling, even in written form, it elevates that storytelling to a much more impactful thing than it would be otherwise.

In Bioshock, the tale of the family who's daughter was turned into a Little Sister is sad, but combine that with the fact that you find the couple in their bed, with pills and a picture of their daughter, and it hits you... Would you really need an audio log explaining the scene to understand that this couple lost their daughter, and decided to die than live without her? No. It's a small story told in a small room, among countless other small stories told all around that help the city that you're in tell its own story...

The room in the Lighthouse does this for me a bit. The two corpses and dead vex explain why the dropship sits there abandoned and unpacked. It explains the books and research materials. It reminds me of the fact that Mercury was turned into a machine in days, without letting people escape. Or maybe they hid down below, trying to figure out what was going on before the Vex finally found them.
Who knows? The possibilities are endless.