Great post. Not sure if I should reply to the whole thing.. (Fan Creations)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, September 08, 2015, 19:14 (3362 days ago) @ uberfoop

The lack of big setpieces in most of the game, the incredible repetition of player tasks (defend the door! Now defend another door! Hey, look, one more door...), and the fact that bounties are pretty much entirely text based tells me that the tools team didn't give the scripters much to play with. Furthermore, the fact that events have to be hard-coded with patches is further evidence to me of a poor scripting environment.

I wonder if this was at least partly influenced by the networking model. According to Bungie's presentation on the matter, Destiny uses peer-to-peer for managing the heavy-duty physics and gunplay, but has ultra-low-bandwidth server-side script hosts intended to make sure that mission objectives and such will function in a stable way even with things like host migrations.

This is a sort of weird configuration, and has potential for a lot of stuff to interact with a lot of other stuff in a number of relevant complicating ways. Setting up a scripting system to be maintainable, versatile, and enjoy smooth execution may have posed some big challenges.

Totally possible, except it's weird because the few setpiece animations that exist in the game do not effect the actual playspace in any meaningful way - they're just art animations in the background or in an area that you can't access. Given that, why not script them to run and animate locally? It doesn't really matter if they're not in perfect sync at all.