Definitely Matt Soell's interview with Jen Taylor.

Aw, shucks. You are too kind.

–Matt

Just a conjecture, but I feel like the grimoire cards are what's left over from the story before it got overhauled... Probably remnants of what Staten was working on all that time.

It is a shame that a great story wasn't delivered, because the pieces are there. It just didn't happen for whatever reason.

I have to admit it rubs me the wrong way to see this time and again. We worked our asses off on those cards - I worked too hard, and it cost me a serious chunk of my mental health.

I wasn't cribbing from anyone's outline. We did the work.

e: I'm sorry if I sound snappy, I don't mean to be a grouch. I'm glad you appreciate them!

I think I'd be at least as snappy if I were you. I've said before that I don't care for this kind of conjecture, but I've also never been one to make the assumption that Staten was the fountainhead of all good storytelling from Bungie--what Ken Levine was to Irrational.* His ambition for Halo 2 almost wrecked the development of that game (not his fault alone, but Halo 2 is a flawed game). I might even say that the best writing from Bungie came before and after Staten's tenure.** I think writing for big games these days is much more akin to screenwriting--it's collaborative.

I hope you're in a good place now, Battuta.

Kermit

*Even Ken Levine delegated a lot at Irrational. I had a one-minute interaction with him at PAX, and I asked him about the nod to Frederick Law Olmsted at the beginning of BioShock Infinite. (Olmsted is considered the father of American landscape design, and was a primary character in THE DEVIL IN WHITE CITY, the non-fiction book about the Chicago World's Fair that Levine often cited as one of his inspirations for Columbia--great book!) He said, "Oh, that must have been Joe Fielder! He wrote all that incidental conversational stuff."

**I love Staten. I think he's a good writer, was a good spokesman for Bungie, and Bungie's loss was Microsoft's gain. I've thoroughly enjoyed the panels I've seen when he was there.

I mean Guilty Spark spends all his time being sycophantic. Durandal is flat out ominous and Machiavellian all the time.

I loved Guilty Sparks all the same though. Durandal was certainly threatening, but I got the sense from Guilty Spark that he could accidentally kill us and not think much of it, not because he was clumsy but because we were so insignificant to him. At least Durandal saw value in us, and we were a key part of his plan. Following Guilty Sparks felt more like an Ant following an elephant around. Dangerous, and you never know when you might be stepped on and forgotten.

I still like Durandal more though :)

Are we the good guys?

We rip the neural connector doo-dads out of our dead victims' skulls. We skin our victims and use it to fuel our ships. Our hangouts in the tower are decorated with skulls...

When the Queen wants some killing done she invites us across, well, to do some killing. She needed some cold blooded, steely eyed, merciless hit-men and opened her doors to us...

are we definitely the good guys?

Last time I checked, this solar system was our home turf. So, Yes.

We rip the neural connector doo-dads out of our dead victims' skulls. We skin our victims and use it to fuel our ships. Our hangouts in the tower are decorated with skulls...

When the Queen wants some killing done she invites us across, well, to do some killing. She needed some cold blooded, steely eyed, merciless hit-men and opened her doors to us...

are we definitely the good guys?

You and your team did excellent work and I thank you for it.

(PS: Thorn 3 is one of the most perfect short-short-stories I've ever read, and I've read A LOT of stories)

I really like how they handled telling the story from two different perspectives, as opposed to Halo 1 where the covenant are just alien bad guys.

That's part of why I'm so disappointed in Destiny's storytelling: The bad guys' motivations are really nebulous.

One of the problems with relying on the 'mystery' angle, as will be explained in my piece soon!

To be fair, I don't think that Destiny is relying on any mystery angle. The game just failed hard on narrative and story, and so we flat out don't really have anything to go off of. I don't know if I can even call the enemies' motivations nebulous, primarily because there are no real motivations. They're just sort of around, doing bad things, and needing to be stopped by us because we're the gamers, they're the bad guys, and much like how plenty of the bounties direct/tell us, the bad guys are just targets that need to be killed because they're there being bad guys that need to be killed. No real motivations to explore or even speculate at as far as Destiny's in-game writing goes, really. :P

Just a conjecture, but I feel like the grimoire cards are what's left over from the story before it got overhauled... Probably remnants of what Staten was working on all that time.

It is a shame that a great story wasn't delivered, because the pieces are there. It just didn't happen for whatever reason.

I have to admit it rubs me the wrong way to see this time and again. We worked our asses off on those cards - I worked too hard, and it cost me a serious chunk of my mental health.

I wasn't cribbing from anyone's outline. We did the work.

e: I'm sorry if I sound snappy, I don't mean to be a grouch. I'm glad you appreciate them!