The Messy Story Behind the Making of “Destiny”
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Marathon has my favourite video game storyline ever. Told mostly through text in 'terminals', they had all sort of literary tools at their disposal. From journal entries to concrete poetry.
Halo had a wonderful story and universe. But it also had incredibly cheesy cut-scenes. The real quality in Halo's story was to be found in the plot and the hidden terminals, plus much of fiction and accompanying material they published.
Destiny has incredible textual and visual story-telling. All very mysterious like Marathon - it's still unfolding, and many things are unclear. But between things like the grimoire cards and the item descriptions, and the appearances of the ruins in which the game is set, your imagination can run wild.
There were some rough edges, sure, but I'm glad about the way it's turning out.
The part where I gave up on the story was when you were being told that there's no time to explain anything, yet here you are, inside a hub area and without any urgency at all to proceed with the story line. It felt like they had to explain why they couldn't tell you about the background story with a nonsensical reason.
I've enjoyed the gameplay, but just couldn't be bothered to keep up with the story due to the cards and odd in-game explanations.
On a deeper level I thought they added a great deal to the immersion. You have to hunt for scraps of information and try to piece together what happened in past events. You have to go on the Bungie website and discuss theories with rest of the community. Some fans even made voice acted recordings of the cards. Overall it led to much more investment of thought into the story (which remember is supposed to stretch for ten years) which I think is a greater type of immersion than what you get from pretty cut scenes that tell the story like a movie.
Maybe I'm too stuck thinking about it from a technical point of view, where it just doesn't make sense to me why this information couldn't be made available in-game somehow. However, looking at it from a hunt for information point of view and hearing that there's quite a bit of community discussion going on actually makes me a bit curious again. It's a shame, and in a way my own fault then, that all of this went over my head, as the in-game narrative put me off enough not follow up on the grimoire.
It'll be interesting to see how they are going to handle the story in the next iterations of the series. I haven't played it myself, but heard that The Taken King supposedly has a lot more in-game narrative and cut scenes, compared to the original release version. I'm not asking for a movie, but a little kick in the right direction to get me curious enough about the backstory (like your comment) and make me interact with the grimoire would be nice.
What?
>Let’s say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches,” said one person familiar with the engine. “They go into the editor. First they have to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. They get [into the office] in the morning. If their importer didn’t fail, they open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that node two feet. And then they’d do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a half-second change.”
the first time we finished the vault of glass raid, I was ecstatic. The next time we pushed Atheon off a cliff due to a damage-avoidance bug in the enemy ai, it was hilarious. After the 10th time it just became work - you wanted to just get it over with to get that last piece of gear for max level.
At each loot point you have a chance of getting loot or not. Fine, that's just like the previous raids. But now instead of getting max level gear, you get gear between (MAX-10, MAX). It's double randomness, and it sucks.
Introducing a bunch of quest based loot items was great. But you can't actually use most of the items until you're blessed with MAX level gear from the raid that you can then dump into this special item you just received.
Oh, and if you want to level up more than 1 piece of gear? You need to throw the dice multiple times for chances at MAX.
It's like they listen and react correctly on one hand, and then completely forget the point. Either that, or they just want a farmville like experience.
Maybe some will, but the idea of a 10 year deal being signed for something like this as the end result is a bit of a jaw dropper for me.
The gun play is second to none. The graphics are amazing. The missions themselves are ok, but lack the story needed to fully immerse you. The other thing is, the worlds feel so empty. There's just big open desserted areas with a few enemies here and there. Some NPC alias throughout the world will help that.
Leaving behind last gen is also necessary. But that should be a given. I won't buy the game if it's also available on last gen.
Is the editors always that tight coupled with the rendering engine or can it be used by different map editors?
2) I was asked to repost this by the moderation team.
This is important, because otherwise far too many good stories fall through the cracks without having been noticed. I wrote about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818.
The repost invitations we've been sending out (including to minimaxir to repost this one!) are the latest in a series of experiments to find a solution to this problem.