Fascinating and engrossing (Destiny)

by nico, Sunday, August 02, 2015, 22:23 (3500 days ago) @ narcogen

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.

Which is weird because historically Bungie knows good writing and good acting. I remember being disappointed in Halo 2 that the Elites spoke English, I would have preferred the exotic unknown of the backwards gibberish with subtitles, and then I heard Keith David and I was like "oh, ok."

Compare Durandal as a character -- funny, diabolical, manipulative, confident, to the Ghost who by contrast feels sophomorically written, rushed and hurried - I think it was around level 18 that I couldn't stand it anymore and I turned the sound off -- and haven't turned it back on since then. I do keep subtitles on, and from those, I can't say I'll be turning the sound back on anytime soon.

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.

Back to why I think Marathon's writing is in a different league from Destiny's: a book (Marathon), because of the dialectic nature of the way the information is processed, will generally "hit harder" than a movie (or a cut scene), where a lot of the interpretation is gone, and it's more of a didactic experience, where the player is experiencing the director's vision of that writing. So maybe Marathon got so deep into my DNA that no other title could surpass it (and no other title has.)

Consider for example this (from Marathon 2):

Tycho's ship has been destroyed. The crater where it annihilated itself on Lh'owon's inner moon is still glowing. There were no survivors. With a focused message laser I burned his epitaph into the surface near the crash site, in letters three hundred meters high: "Fatum Iustum Stultorum."

That is good writing. It's grandiose. It's like reading Herodotus describing Xerxes ordering the river Hellespont to be whipped by his soldiers because a storm demolished his bridge.

It's also not something I would want to see in a cut scene, because I don't think there are many directors who could do it justice.

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.

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.