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[DocSeuss]

Apparently the story as it was, as written by Staten, was this-

The Travel brought light and an advance in technology to the planets it visited. Somewhere along the line it went dormant however. You start off with talking to the Speaker, connected to the traveler, who tells you about the plights of the Traveler-IE you have to collect some pieces of it.(In current Destiny, this is present in one of the missions on the moon where you have to 'uncorrupt' a shard of the traveler'.). However, you get kidnapped by the Crow, who with his group, have abandoned the Light and the traveler. They go look for somethings to stop the Darkness.

One way or another it's discovered that the Traveler was the one who gave birth to the darkness, and that whilst it provided a technological advance to the planets it visited it also brought the darkness towards them. The Speaker is revealed to not only know this, but he's trying to get you to activate the traveler again by recovering and 'saving' these shards. If the story is true, then this leads to you kinda exposing the Speaker and the Traveler sooner or later.

So it's possible he came up with the light and dark stuff. There's remnants in the form of Rasputin who defended earth against the darkness but somewhere along the line went rogue/deviated from it's programming(Leads into saving his avatar from the Dreadnought?), Charlemagne was supposed to be the Mars AI, the Fallen were escaping from the Darkness, another remnant civilization that became obsessed-and destroyed-with the traveler(Thus why they're on Earth), the Vex were trying to compress time and stop everything from happening/preventing the future from being expunged by the darkness, and the hive simply followed the darkness/tried to extinguish the light of the traveler to convert it to darkness all the time.

I mean, sure it may be a bit cliched, but it's alot more interesting than what we got. Before the game come out, people were wondering what connections Charlemagne would have with the player(As it was a running theme throughout Bungie games, having AIs related that run rampant of sorts, I'm sure there's image compilations here and there of how he was connected to Cortana and the AI from the Marathon series.).

That's what I can gather from the snips and pieces revealed about the original storyline.



Thanks alot for this! listening to it right now..
Edit-Christ calling Trautmann an idiot in meetings...
Edit Edit-He essentially helped create the idea of ODST? And Bungie was like 'That's just stupid'? Sheesh. Makes me think-That if the higher up thought Statens story was stupid-maybe it really wasn't(Seeing as how they're using things from the original story). ._.

Makes me really sad hearing trautmann talk about how he was treated.

I'm weird about Staten. ODST is one of the best stories we got, and that was his baby, if I remember right.

Overall, though... like... his book is the worst one in the series. For one thing, it had all these weird romance subplots. I think there was a Grunt Romance, Johnson's Romance, and an AI Romance thing sorta. None of 'em were very good, kinda like the weird Johnson/Keyes relationship in

In a way, it felt like a Bioware game--shlocky writing and all--by way of Aliens. It works. It's endearing, even when it's terrible.

Halo 1, which had guys like Trautmann on it, seemed to be way better than the later Halo stories, ODST aside. Reach felt like the most polished Halo story, but it also had some weird calls in it.

When you play Destiny, though, it doesn't sound like Staten's work, and it feels like it's... lost something. There's a campiness to some of his dialog that's just great.

That said?

The idea of the Traveler being a bad guy is very much a bad idea, for a lot of reasons. First, and most importantly, it's predictable. It's why just about every bad story idea on reddit that comes up is "what if it was a bad guy?" Go to any bad writing class on any campus in any university, and "...but what if the guy you trusted was actually the bad guy" is one of the most common suggestions by failing students. Heck, it's a common element of most bad movies.

It's a hollow, meaningless twist that doesn't make the story interesting or good.

More importantly, games are about doing things, and when a game wants you to "become legend," as Destiny does, then you should feel like a hero. Not all the time, of course--you should feel like you really earned your heroic-ness--but if suddenly the game goes "well, friend, you're actually AREN'T the hero. Actually, you're working for the villain, and, hey, the guys who you murder ceaslessly? They're actually not so bad. Some are actually victims of the real bad guy..." well, that just kinda makes you feel bad.

In a shooter where you are supposed to have fun, you should never feel bad about shooting your enemies, because, uh... then the game stops being fun. So if the Fallen are just the victims of the Traveler, or the Cabal are just some military force out to stop the Darkness, or whatever... then killing them is kinda... maybe not a good thing, and now the humans are the bad guys. You kinda have to hate yourself and your role, and there's nothing you can really do about it.

It's like "hawhaw, ur so dumb, look at you, being tricked into being the bad guy."

And players hate feeling deceived. They get mad at games that do that, unless that game magically makes them feel smarter for it (hi, Bioshock).

Having a good cause and learning about space and growing your legend and becoming awesome? Good.

Discovering you were secretly the bad guy? Not so good. KOTOR 2's the only game that pulled that off, with you working for Kreia and all.

Plus, the whole "humanity is bad, and these fictional races that don't exist are all inherently good" is dumb and shows a bizarre self-loathing we need a lot less of in games.

So.

If the Traveler really was evil, I would definitely have demanded a rewrite. But, hey, if I were running things, I'd be working tight with the story guys (since games are about doing things, and the reason for doing things is motive, and motive comes from mechanics AND story), and this idea never would have gone past the initial idea pitch meeting.

I miss Staten's voice, not so much his plots.

Bit concerning that the Mars section cut from Taken King is being developed by someone other than Bungie for Destiny 2? WTF is that all about? How can we ensure its going to be good?

Apparently its a new 'public space', strikes and a raid!

Pretty sure they've been working with Bungie since House of Wolves. They definitely worked on Taken King.

Now, if they were the guys who designed the "wait a week" bounties, or the really crappy encounters like Black Spindle/No Time To Explain's final mission... then ew, gross. But if they were the guys who built, like, the campaign missions in the game, cool.

Charlemagne's Vault definitely exists in some form, if the original GI article is to be believed, since it was apparently playable then. A Bungie mailsack story talks about actually playing on Europa too.

 

[deleted]

No wonder the game didn't make it to PC, I guess they needed every possible man hour to fix the game and still need it to have development of 2 going with still fixing what went wrong with one.
Porting it to another platform has to at the very end of their list.

I hope they fix their stuff with 2 and don't do a Borderlands 1 -> 2 succession, which would be way too little. This needs at least the jump that D1 -> D2 got.
The universe they created is fascinating as is the idea of merging these genres. Their first step was a near miss, now fix it and deliver a full product - story and all.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

I hope they fix their stuff with 2 and don't do a Borderlands 1 -> 2 succession, which would be way too little.

Now wait a minute, no it wasn't -

This needs at least the jump that D1 -> D2 got.

Oh.

 

[KeRaSh]

So the original story draft focused on Rapsutin? Not on the Traveler? I really want to find out more about the Traveler. Hopefully they explore that avenue in Destiny 2. Dodn't really care about Rasputin but that feeling could have spawned from it not being fleshed out properly in the game we got on release...

I really wonder if they can work out the issues with their dev tools. I'm hoping they drop last gen support in Destiny 2 but that doesn't fix the issues on their end.

 

[mclem]

Probably the reason why Staten left

This is a fun thread to read in hindsight.

 

[mclem]

Uhhhh is this normal? I feel like "being able to adjust locations of geometry without loading in the entire volume of assets" should be a feature of an engine

“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.”

If this *is* real - and assuming the scale issues here can't be designed out - it sounds like the best solution is to have computers allocated per map - one map permanently loaded on each - and have designers visit the computer housing the map they currently need to work on.

That said, I'm not quite clear what the 'input their map' step actually represents, given it appears to be something different from 'open their map'

It all sounds very bizarre, and wildly different from any game map structure I've worked on - but that comes with the caveat that I've not worked on a game with a massive open world.

 

[Twilight Gap]

-snip-

I enjoyed reading this post. Thanks for the insight.

 

[PapaJustify]

A slight bit off topic, but HUGE kudos to jschreier for this marvelous piece of actual games JOURNALISM.

 

[TheChewyWaffles]

Their workflow is ABYSMAL. I can't even fathom it.

 

[mclem]

The vast majority of reviews were ragging on it for the story.
If they hadn't had to cut out and reboot the whole thing it wouldn't have seemed so disjointed, and everyone would have had plenty of time to make enjoyable and logical missions like the Halo games had.

They, Activision, were justified in expecting 90+, and Bungie deserved to lose the bonus.

Tying bonusses to metacritic - in this context, at least - strikes me as a sure-fire way to get the rank-and-file developers who have sweated over the game for several years to be really aggrieved at the higher-up decision makers.

 

[Razgreez]

The idea of the Traveler being a bad guy is very much a bad idea...

Even in, what we know of, the original plot the traveler was not "the bad guy". The only clear cut antagonist was (and still is) "the darkness". The rest are all grey (even the hive). This is in stark contrast to the black and white version of good and bad you've chosen as fact and then gone on a pretentious rant about...

 

[Mindwipe]

I haven't read it but 'The Book of Sorrow' which you get by collecting calcified fragments (or by reading online) supposedly has a real interesting, lore creating story so they know how to make one, just right now it is so poorly implemented into the game that many people are going to miss it.

Yup.

And again, feels like a fairly easy fix given the tools available - if the Guardians have a beachhead on the Dreadnaught why isn't it the spawn point a small command and control area, with a variety of information coming in *in game* that you can access using Ghost scanning, and would explain it to you? Maybe a few NPCs.

It wouldn't require huge toolset changes. They've already written the lore. It would require a bit of voice acting, but the game has apparently binned much more for no benefit already.

Just seems pretty obvious, over yet more grimoire cards.

 

[DocSeuss]

I enjoyed reading this post. Thanks for the insight.

Thanks! I think about Destiny a lot. Really wish I could go face-to-face with some of Bungie's folks sometimes. My job is telling people how to make games better, so it'd be nice if I could actually do some on-site work with Bungie.

I suppose a shorter version of my post could have been "imagine Star Wars where it turns out the rebels are bad and Obi Wan is a war criminal and the empire is good."

Like, the entire movie starts out with this ominous space ship. It dwarfs the rebels. We meet Luke. We see how his life isn't exciting, but he wants it to be. We see the Empire destroy his family's home. We're invested in that. So the film can never really betray that without upsetting us.

If we go "well, actually the Big Empire Ship was actually not bad," or "Darth Vader looked imposing but he wasn't, really," or "Obi Wan Kenobi seemed nice but clearly he was evil," or "actually, the farm was torched by Obi Wan's friends..."

It just wouldn't be as interesting a story.

So the Traveler can't be evil because then it says "your time invested in Destiny--the fun you had shooting dudes--that's not valid now. Gameplay under false pretenses is almost impossible to pull off, because the audience DID THINGS and they don't want their reasons changed after the fact."

I guess that's actually me getting long. I've been writing all evening about horror games and I'm kinda stuck in a writerspiral now.

Even in, what we know of, the original plot the traveler was not "the bad guy". The only clear cut antagonist was (and still is) "the darkness". The rest are all grey (even the hive). This is in stark contrast to the black and white version of good and bad you've chosen as fact and then gone on a pretentious rant about...

Pretentious?

bro, this is literally my job.

Anywho:

1) go read this again:

The Speaker is revealed to not only know this, but he's trying to get you to activate the traveler again by recovering and 'saving' these shards. If the story is true, then this leads to you kinda exposing the Speaker and the Traveler sooner or later.

You don't expose a good guy. You expose a bad guy.

2) most fan theories about the traveler are that it's evil, and it's a stupid theory, so I felt like talking about it, because I like talking about how stories make mechanics work.

3) seriously. This is actually my job. Pretension would be unwarranted self importance. I criticize games and consult on AAA games for a living now. Sure, I'm not Bleszinski or someone, but, I mean, I'm not just some random forum dude either. I talk about this stuff because I enjoy talking shop.

 

[CecilRousso]

Haven't played a second of Destiny, have no interest in the game at all, since I try to stay away from all games that builds on grind. But it sure is fascinating to read about it.

I don't think I've seen such as succesful failed game as this. It seems to have countless of faults, and yet people play it for hundreds of hours. It seems to get gradually better all the time, and yet the future for the game seems to be very grim.

When you look at the game and everything surrounding it, from a distance, it sure looks weird.

 

[DocSeuss]

Haven't played a second of Destiny, have no interest in the game at all, since I try to stay away from all games that builds on grind. But it sure is fascinating to read about it.

I don't think I've seen such as succesful failed game as this. It seems to have countless of faults, and yet people play it for hundreds of hours. It seems to get gradually better all the time, and yet the future for the game seems to be very grim.

When you look at the game and everything surrounding it, from a distance, it sure looks weird.

It has some of the best gunplay anyone will ever experience, ever.

Well, until HoW guns started coming out. TTK's are even worse.

Yeah. In the ARG or whatever Bungie had in the beginning, Charlemagne was a much bigger deal. It was supposed to be Mars' Ai(Charlemagnes vault is mentioned various times in various articles.

Hell, Bungie themselves said you were going to get something from Charlemagnes vault! This was in 2013, presumably before the complete rework-



Instead they scrapped Charlemagne and made Rasputin the commanding warmind in Mars. This was also integral for getting 'Thorn', which as you know turned into a year 1 bounty.

Also, from the same link, from one of the devs-

Forgot to reply to this earlier.

Rasputin isn't the warmind on mars, though. We interact with him once there, which is weird. If you do the Sleeper quest, the warsat is tied to CHLM. There are other references to him throughout indicating he's possibly the only other active warmind there is.

We know from the GI article, iirc, that revealed Destiny that Charlemagne's Vault is where players picked up Thorn originally.

 

[GlamFM]

Haven't played a second of Destiny, have no interest in the game at all, since I try to stay away from all games that builds on grind. But it sure is fascinating to read about it.

I don't think I've seen such as succesful failed game as this. It seems to have countless of faults, and yet people play it for hundreds of hours. It seems to get gradually better all the time, and yet the future for the game seems to be very grim.

When you look at the game and everything surrounding it, from a distance, it sure looks weird.

What makes the future look grim?

 

[MindGamingMantis]

Good job Jason. Now find out what happened with MGSV.

Was gonna say the same thing.

 

[mclem]

I wonder if Destiny 2 being only on XB1/ PS4 will help their shitty tools? I mean no way in hell major AAA studios are wasting time on the 360 and PS3 in 2016 right?? I sure as shit hope not.

The quality of tools - at least in the context shown here - should never have anything to do with the development targets.

 

[Zocano]

In a shooter where you are supposed to have fun, you should never feel bad about shooting your enemies, because, uh... then the game stops being fun. So if the Fallen are just the victims of the Traveler, or the Cabal are just some military force out to stop the Darkness, or whatever... then killing them is kinda... maybe not a good thing, and now the humans are the bad guys. You kinda have to hate yourself and your role, and there's nothing you can really do about it.

They actually are slowly feeding in more empathy for the Cabal and Fallen within the grimiore. Both are just races that had the Traveler and the Traveler's a wuss and ran away and let them fall apart and nearly go extinct. I definitely see there being some sort of fragile alliance with both races down the line. Very different from "YOU ARE EVIL! FEEL BAD!" but not too far apart.

The Hive and Vex are pretty clearly just megalomaniac monster races.

 

[CecilRousso]

What makes the future look grim?

People talking about it on Neogaf, in this thread and others.

 

[Bold One]

Fuuuuuuuuuuck this game, fuck it for breaking my heart.



Here you go: http://imgur.com/a/ksfWL

you do realise that majority of concept art don't make it into the final game?

or do people not know what 'concept' means?

 

[Carn82]

you do realise that majority of concept art don't make it into the final game?

or do people not know what 'concept' means?

This. Tons of concept art never ends up in a game. Its there to help the proces of getting to a certain style and atmosphere, etc. Actually, in Destiny, a lot of conceptart ended up in the game.

 

[GlamFM]

People talking about it on Neogaf, in this thread and others.

Oh yeah, that´s just the usual bullshit. Don´t use NeoGAF, Reddid or Youtube comments as a metric for anything.

TTKs success makes Destiny future look bright. Jasons article also does.

Bungie knows. It will only get better from here - and it´s already fucking good.

 

[BenjaminBirdie]

People talking about it on Neogaf, in this thread and others.

So not the hundreds of hours people pour into the actual and the responsive attitude of the developers to practically every concern raised within a matter of days?

lmao even the people talking about it, even the loudest of "fuck offs" are usually from people who will sit down to play destiny within an hour of that post.

 

[Diablohead]

I thought destiny was gonna have like a 10 year life span supported by additional content, I guess that changed?

it is but not as one single game, for what I understand you keep your character between games similar to mass effect, but who knows what has changed over the last year or two at bungie.

 

[GlamFM]

I thought destiny was gonna have like a 10 year life span supported by additional content, I guess that changed?

It has, but for some reason people thought it was Destiny - the game, while in reality it was Destiny - the franchise.

 

[Caja 117]

Uh, I'm not saying any of that.

Buy what you want. And Activision/Bungie knew you'd buy what they shipped.

They knew they didn't need Staten's story (or any story really). They knew they didn't need O'Donnell's music. They knew they could release a game with questionable content as long it had solid gunplay and gamers would jump on their treadmill. And lots did and let them know they made the correct choices.

Well the game still used his music, tough

 

[Spades]

Once Destiny launched in September 2014, Bungie’s staff didn’t have much time to celebrate. Over the next few months, the developers had to grind constantly.

 

[fastmower]

snip

Out of curiosity, can you say what games you have worked on?

 

[Razgreez]

They actually are slowly feeding in more empathy for the Cabal and Fallen within the grimiore. Both are just races that had the Traveler and the Traveler's a wuss and ran away and let them fall apart and nearly go extinct. I definitely see there being some sort of fragile alliance with both races down the line. Very different from "YOU ARE EVIL! FEEL BAD!" but not too far apart.

The Hive and Vex are pretty clearly just megalomaniac monster races.

On the contrary if you read the book of sorrows (which reads more like Aurash/Auryx/Oryx's memoirs) you find the Hive to be another race which wen't from prey to predator by seemingly giving in to elements of the darkness. The vex have not been fleshed out as much as they do not appear to exhibit proper sentience nor personality.

So once again the only "bad guy" here is the darkness - both in the existing story and, evidently, in the remnants of the original story

 

[Dangansona]

It has, but for some reason people thought it was Destiny - the game, while in reality it was Destiny - the franchise.

I thought this was obvious from the start and thank God or panned out to be true.

Anyways you know what else is a campy story? Star Wars and Star Trek. I hear they are doing pretty well.

 

[fastmower]

It has some of the best gunplay anyone will ever experience, ever.

Well, until HoW guns started coming out. TTK's are even worse.

Is there a way to turn off aim assist? During the alpha, I found the gunplay to be average because of that.

 

[Bold One]

So who wrote the grimoire cards and the ghost fragments, the story of Dredgen yor, the last word, Shin Malfor, the story of the Gjallahorn and the thorn etc

it wasn't Stanton?

 

[GlamFM]

So who wrote the grimoire cards and the ghost fragments, the story of Dredgen yor, the last word, Shin Malfor, the story of the Gjallahorn and the thorn etc

it wasn't Stanton?

It´s right there in the article:

Joe Staten left the company during the mid-summer reboot, although Bungie didn’t announce his departure until September, 2013. Two sources say the parting was not amicable, and when I reached out to him, Staten declined to comment for this article. Although the story he directed is no longer part of Destiny, much of his mythology remains, and even after the reboot, many of the writers Staten had hired stayed at Bungie to work on dialogue, flavor text, and what they call grimoire cards—a large library of rich, interesting lore that’s only accessible outside of the game, on Bungie’s website.

 

[Kill3r7]

Is there a way to turn off aim assist? During the alpha, I found the gunplay to be average because of that.

Nope.

 

[AgentOtaku]

Utterly fascinating read and sincerely thanks to Jason

 

[SomTervo]

They also hoped to add a totally new feature called multiple fireteam activities, which a source described like this: “Imagine like you and I are in a fireteam, and we’re fighting down this one path that converges with two other paths and you get three fireteams all fighting together against a boss, or against some sort of mobs.

Shit... This sounds awesome. What an utter disappointment we didn't get any of this.

That said?

The idea of the Traveler being a bad guy is very much a bad idea, for a lot of reasons. First, and most importantly, it's predictable. It's why just about every bad story idea on reddit that comes up is "what if it was a bad guy?" Go to any bad writing class on any campus in any university, and "...but what if the guy you trusted was actually the bad guy" is one of the most common suggestions by failing students. Heck, it's a common element of most bad movies.

It's a hollow, meaningless twist that doesn't make the story interesting or good.

I think you're misunderstanding the story here. The plot wasn't that the Traveller was 'the bad guy', as a twist. The plot was that the Traveller was a Ying/Yang - it had the good in it, but you didn't get the good without the bad. And the involved alien races were trying to mess this balance up for their own gains.

But even if the Traveller was the ubiquitous bad guy, IMO your analysis is only right if this was a late-plot twist.

It wasn't. The whole 'the Traveller is linked with the bad guys' thing sounded like an early narrative development. I think you're being too elitist about the 'good guy is actually the bad guy' twist. It's a fine development when it happens early in a story, because it means there's still an entire narrative to follow, examining the fallout of this revelation and how it impacts the whole universe. Rather than just 'you were betrayed! Haha! The end.' Which is what you're suggesting.

For instance, this stuff:

the Fallen were escaping from the Darkness, another remnant civilization that became obsessed-and destroyed-with the traveler(Thus why they're on Earth), the Vex were trying to compress time and stop everything from happening/preventing the future from being expunged by the darkness, and the hive simply followed the darkness/tried to extinguish the light of the traveler to convert it to darkness all the time.

- sounds absolutely fantastic, and is 100% dependant on finding out the Traveller is 'bad' early on. Giving all the aliens unique motives and later plot developments as a consequence of the Traveller being a bad/problematic thing is great. It's not like 'the Traveller was bad all along - now kill it! Woo, you did it, game over!' It's like 'the Traveller was bad all along - shit, we better start waging a war against it. You go to a place and fight some aliens - oh, it turns out they were actually against it too. You go and fight some evil robots - oh, it turns out they were trying to save everyone. You go and fight some other aliens - ah, these guys really are the bad guys and they're way worse than the Traveller.'

PS if you're right and the twist came at the end of the game like 'omg the Traveller is evil' - then yes that is shit, high-school tier writing

 

[Twilight Gap]

I think the point was that if we're fighting Cabal and Fallen and then find out that they're not our enemies, we'll feel bad about killing them.

So unless Bungie adds playable Fallen in Destiny 2, the game is still going to involve killing Fallen. And we're going to feel like assholes.

 

[BokehKing]

So the original story draft focused on Rapsutin? Not on the Traveler? I really want to find out more about the Traveler. Hopefully they explore that avenue in Destiny 2. Dodn't really care about Rasputin but that feeling could have spawned from it not being fleshed out properly in the game we got on release...

I really wonder if they can work out the issues with their dev tools. I'm hoping they drop last gen support in Destiny 2 but that doesn't fix the issues on their end.

Unfortunately, you would have to read the grimoire cards to realize a few very interesting things about Rasputin

 

[foxuzamaki]

Oh wow, 8 hours just to get the editor booted up...

 

[Garlador]

Their workflow is ABYSMAL. I can't even fathom it.

I'm not sure I'd call that a "flow". That's a work JAM.

Their whole process needs a technical enema.

 

[Twilight Gap]

Oh wow, 8 hours just to get the editor booted up...

8 minutes is too long.

 

[SomTervo]

It has some of the best gunplay anyone will ever experience, ever.

Well, until HoW guns started coming out. TTK's are even worse.

See, while Destiny has great, solid gunplay, I still think it doesn't hold a candle to FEAR, Max Payne 2 or Killzone 2, and I would 100% rather play those games with their intelligent level and encounter design than Destiny again. I haven't played Destiny in almost a year since I finished the 'story', but I've played those games consistently for more than a decade.

 

[Kill3r7]

Shit... This sounds awesome. What an utter disappointment we didn't get any of this.

This sounds like a total pipe dream given current console limitations. I would absolutely love it but I doubt they could achieve this. The Division I think made some similar claims at E3 a couple of years back and I don't see them pulling it off either.

 

[Kor of Memory]

I think the point was that if we're fighting Cabal and Fallen and then find out that they're not our enemies, we'll feel bad about killing them.

So unless Bungie adds playable Fallen in Destiny 2, the game is still going to involve killing Fallen. And we're going to feel like assholes.

Exactly. Even after digging into the Grimoire after House of Wolves, my wife found herself sympathizing with the Fallen already.

She still kills them, but she talks like she wish she didn't have to.

Same thing with the Cabal at the start of TTK. She wants to personally broker some kind of peace treaty or alliance with these other species.

 

[gatti-man]

Thanks! I think about Destiny a lot. Really wish I could go face-to-face with some of Bungie's folks sometimes. My job is telling people how to make games better, so it'd be nice if I could actually do some on-site work with Bungie.

I suppose a shorter version of my post could have been "imagine Star Wars where it turns out the rebels are bad and Obi Wan is a war criminal and the empire is good."

Like, the entire movie starts out with this ominous space ship. It dwarfs the rebels. We meet Luke. We see how his life isn't exciting, but he wants it to be. We see the Empire destroy his family's home. We're invested in that. So the film can never really betray that without upsetting us.

If we go "well, actually the Big Empire Ship was actually not bad," or "Darth Vader looked imposing but he wasn't, really," or "Obi Wan Kenobi seemed nice but clearly he was evil," or "actually, the farm was torched by Obi Wan's friends..."

It just wouldn't be as interesting a story.

So the Traveler can't be evil because then it says "your time invested in Destiny--the fun you had shooting dudes--that's not valid now. Gameplay under false pretenses is almost impossible to pull off, because the audience DID THINGS and they don't want their reasons changed after the fact."

I guess that's actually me getting long. I've been writing all evening about horror games and I'm kinda stuck in a writerspiral now.



Pretentious?

bro, this is literally my job.

Anywho:

1) go read this again:



You don't expose a good guy. You expose a bad guy.

2) most fan theories about the traveler are that it's evil, and it's a stupid theory, so I felt like talking about it, because I like talking about how stories make mechanics work.

3) seriously. This is actually my job. Pretension would be unwarranted self importance. I criticize games and consult on AAA games for a living now. Sure, I'm not Bleszinski or someone, but, I mean, I'm not just some random forum dude either. I talk about this stuff because I enjoy talking shop.

Have you read the book of sorrows yet? In it Bungie basically confirms the traveler is a true good guy. Totally agree with your posts btw. Making the traveler a bad guy would be totally weird for the game. Would make no sense.

Exactly. Even after digging into the Grimoire after House of Wolves, my wife found herself sympathizing with the Fallen already.

She still kills them, but she talks like she wish she didn't have to.

Same thing with the Cabal at the start of TTK. She wants to personally broker some kind of peace treaty or alliance with these other species.

Playable Fallen would be sweet but we would still most likely be killing Fallen. They are divided and leaderless. Fallen currently war with Fallen anyways. I sympathize with the Fallen but don't feel bad killing them. Their motivations are varied depending on which group you're shooting.

 

[Interfectum]

The engine being such a headache to use is probably the reason why we'll never see a PC version.

 

[AgentOtaku]

Part of the problem is that while TTK has a reasonable (though hardly stunning) internal story, the actual world itself is still a mess that doesn't make a lot of sense. And not in a "exciting mystery" way, but in a "who the fuck are these people and why am I supposed to care" (including about my own character).

It still has huge amounts of lore that are needed to make the setting actually work buried in file based cards on an external website.

Destiny might not need cutscenes around it's old missions, but it needs legions more worldbuilding content in it's existing locations - there's now a mechanism for viewing trivia with the ghost, so putting in 100+ such bits of recorded, voiced descriptions of what the hell is going on in the Tower and the Reef would help *a lot*.

NAILED IT

 

[KrM DeLorean]

So this confirms the theory that Bungie totally shredded the original plot and why final game basically didn't have one

Just want to give a big THANK YOU to the employees who posted anonymously A YEAR AGO trying to tell people what happened to the game we thought we were getting, and got bashed and insulted and downvoted to hell.

Shout out to Deej calling said employee a troll when he was basically saying everything Jason's article is saying LAST YEAR.

GG.

Excellent article. According to Bungie.net I have 1,300 hours put into Destiny since release. I got my moneys worth. I really am just baffled by the choices they keep making and like someone said earlier, it really does feel like I'm playing against the developers everytime a new "Balance Patch" gets released. I think bottom line is things change and I'm not really a fan of this Bungie that is directing where Destiny is going.

Much respect to Joe Staten and Marty O'Donnell and the other true Artists who refused to just sit there and accept a paycheck when they felt their talent wasn't being appreciated.

 

[SomTervo]

This sounds like a total pipe dream given current console limitations. I would absolutely love it but I doubt they could achieve this. The Division I think made some similar claims at E3 a couple of years back and I don't see them pulling it off either.

Very true. It sounds like it was probably scrapped while it was still only on paper, though, which probably goes for a lot of Destiny's potential.

Just want to give a big THANK YOU to the employees who posted anonymously A YEAR AGO trying to tell people what happened to the game we thought we were getting, and got bashed and insulted and downvoted to hell.

Shout out to Deej calling said employee a troll when he was basically saying everything Jason's article is saying LAST YEAR.

GG.

Damn!

For the record, I saw Bungie/Activision's ethos, and how they would inevitably develop it, from a mile away, and I promptly stopped playing a month or two after release. Haven't looked back. Very happy with my decision. Incredibly flawed title.

TTK sounds good, but I won't be getting it until I can find a code on the cheap (eg on CDKeys.com)