There are also many things in the expansions that are starting to explore some of the hooks that were placed in the core games side missions. Those side missions specifically already giving broader strokes outside of the initial Black Garden arc. The Vault of Glass, Rasputin, and the Betrayal of the House of Wolves were all hinted toward and played with in the core game and have shown up later and expanded on.

I think that one of the issues with Destiny's story is that it is starting so much larger than Bungie's earlier efforts. Marathon and Halo both are very easily contained, but Destiny starts out by telling you this is a large world you won't understand at first.

And I imagine as time goes on those plot arcs will mingle and expand further. It's already been shown that the Cabal will feature more heavily in The Taken King than we've seen them in either of the prior expansions, even if it is ostensibly a Hive-focused expansion.

Man that was long. How many pages was that script? :P

4,300 words. Some got cut after it was recorded, as well. I use BBEdit for this sort of thing, and it doesn't paginate, so I don't know how many pages.

The main point was that the story of Destiny isn't complete. I think you're right, and I think you're also right that Bungie will elaborate on this in future games.

You didn't bring up the expansions very much, but they do tell a complete story. Find out hive are waking Crota under the control of Omnigul. You find some stuff out, go kill Crota's soul. Then you go kill Omnigul. Then you actually kill Crota. Find out the Fallen have gone rogue in the reef. Find out who's leading them. Figure shit out. Capture the dude. Then a side story in a strike and the POE.

I honestly don't think that's true, though, at least, not in the same sense that it's true of conclusions within the Halo series.

Part of it is that I never feel any emotional closure because none of these missions is ever done for good because all the activities recur, and unlike when you repeat a level in Halo, the world does not reset to its prior state. I kill Omnigul, get a neat new gun, and next week I can kill Omnigul with that gun. I can even kill Omnigul with that gun I got last week from killing Omnigul while talking to a fireteam member who helped me kill Omnigul last week. When we go back to the Tower and report to Eris, who do we say killed Omnigul, when, and with what gun?

The other part of it is that even when things do end they don't. Look at Skolas; he was in jail, he got out, we caught him, and he goes back to jail... where we can fight him again weekly. All of our effort was spent to restore the status quo (Skolas in jail) whereas most of the effort in Halo is spent disrupting the status quo.

The status quo in the Haloverse when we enter is:

Humanity and Covenant are at war
Covenant are looking for Halo installations to activate
The Flood are attempting to escape confinement and absorb all sentient life
Guilty Spark and other monitors are looking for a Reclaimer to activate the array

The nature and consequences of each of these is made clear at least at some point. We know about the war pretty early on in Halo 1, and the threat of the Flood by halfway.

By the time the series has ended, this has happened:

The Covenant breaks, as Elites join Humanity in fighting prophets/brutes
All three prophet hierarchs have been killed
Delta Halo's gravemind has been lured to the Ark and destroyed
Two halo installations, one monitor, and the Ark installation that maintains them has been destroyed

All of those events are pretty big, and the disruption from the status quo is significant.

It seems to me that the main story of Destiny is basically a framework right now for telling smaller stories in the expansions. Hopefully, Bungie does turn it into its own story outright soon.

I'd like to say that I don't have a problem with the Destiny story as presented in game. I would like the Grimoire to be there, like Marathon, but I don't have an inherent issue with it. I know more is coming. It's why I didn't have a problem with Halo 2. I was surprised when it ended, but it was clear there would be a Halo 3, so I didn't mind.

Right now, the story IN THE GAME is just enough to keep me interested. Hopefully, like you said, that's not by design, and just due to the nature of Destiny as a beginning.

I really think the expansions are the real stories in Destiny.

I thought so too until they announced Taken King. TDB is an enjoyable little ark, but to me the motivations of the Hive are probably the most inscrutable of all Destiny's enemies, and to be given a double dose of them so soon is disheartening. I also feel that the logic being followed leads to an infinite regress.

We kill Sardon. Then a bunch more Hive. We kill Crota. That pisses off Oryx, who comes to get revenge. That means we need to kill DarkBlade (really, guys... DarkBlade? Somebody broke the imagination bank on that one.) and then probably a bunch of other Hive before a showdown with Oryx.

Will killing him off bring out his granddaddy? What about his granddaddy before him? And of course, even while the expansion launches that explains how angry Oryx is at killing Crota, some players are still killing Crota, some have yet to kill Crota. Some will kill Oryx before they get around to killing Crota, probably, and some will have a day where they kill Oryx before taking a break to go kill Crota. The sense of accomplishment comes from loot and advancement, rather than the in-game accomplishment, which contrasts with Halo because Halo didn't have loot or advancement.

I agree with a lot of what you said here. When the game first came out, I remember posting here that I thought it felt like a starter quest in a pen and paper RPG or a story-based tabletop game, where you're shown the ropes and introduced to all the factions with a little excitement sprinkled in. THEN you tell your own stories or buy new sourcebooks and expansions.

I like that you start discussing the changing model of play during our time hiding from Quodron in PoE. That room is a great example of "Wait, is this FUN?" ... After a few attempts, and a serious nerf/rethink of certain design elements, it is.

BTW, your description should include an "S" in SteelGaribaldi. :)

Oops! Fixed!

and Thanks!

The strongest writing in Destiny for me lies in the Grimoire cards -- but I feel they are a (brilliant) component that the gaming community isn't quite ready for yet. I think that will change in about 5-10 years, and people will look back on Destiny as being forward-thinking in that regard, sort of the way Apple lost tens of millions of dollars introducing the Apple Newton in the 90s, because they were satisfying a need consumers didn't know they had yet.

So here's the thing-

The Grimiore Cards basically fall into two categories- Ones that add detail to the world from an objective, basic informational standpoint (eg. Exotic Weapons, Faction Leaders), or ones that are snippets of conversations or character diaries (eg. Alpha Lupi, Ghost Fragments).

Neither of these are new concepts. Mass Effect has the Codex- An extensive library of knowledge that is updated and added to as the player discovers new things, accessible at any time by pausing the game. And games have been doing piecemeal audio logs for years- ODST's "Sadie's Story" and the Datapads in Reach, for example.

So when I read what you've written above- that people complain about the grimiore cards because they're this "new" concept that they aren't quite ready for yet- it comes off as you trying to brush off Bungie's blunders by making excuses.

Thanks Narcogen for that level-headed and thorough analysis of narrative within Bungie's games.

I'm of the opinion that at its core, the problem is that the writing just got bad.

It went from superb ('thon, Myth) to good (Halo), to where we are now.

I fear may be onto something there... and it's something I'm working on for another video.

[snip]

Not everyone cares for reading terminals, and I suspect that Bungie as a studio started feeling the pressure of "dumbing down" the story-telling (Halo) so that younger, and / or more impatient players could get story content without too much investment.

Sure, I get that, but I suppose now they've just decided that the younger, impatient players don't need or want the story at all, and that everybody else can go read a website?

With Destiny, however, it just feels like the story-telling has taken a back seat to a lot of other components of the game.

I do agree with you that the episodic nature of the gameplay creates an additional challenge to the story-telling, and maybe that's why it's not at the forefront of the studio's priorities.

When I actually suggested, back before ODST, that I would love Bungie to pursue an episodic model (it was not yet clear at that time, I think, how thoroughly Valve had failed with their experiment with it) it was because of the advantages that model has for storytelling. You can't honestly look, just to name very recent examples, at Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul, Mad Men, and quite a few others, and say that an episodic format is inherently detrimental to storytelling. Quite the opposite! I think the problem is that Bungie just really hasn't engaged on that level, in part because of the MMO design elements, and perhaps in part just as a knee-jerk reaction to the multimedia behemoth that Halo became, and perhaps in part because of the departure of key individuals.