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Reddit: The gutting of Destiny's story

K

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
JZA said:
I get the sense that when people criticize Dark Souls in any way, people respond with "oh is the game too hard for you? Developers shouldn't hold your hand, etc." That's another series, like Destiny, where constructive criticism is met with "the game's just not for you."
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Dark Souls fans were the first to viciously criticize its sequel, when that sequel suffered from an incoherent, incomplete plot like Destiny. The difference between Dark Souls 1 and Destiny is that DS is crammed with information and lore that the player stumbles over left and right. And in spite of the "figure the story out by observation" ethic, DS still has way more NPCs to speak with compared to Destiny, who lay out a relatively obvious story.
 
T

Twilight Gap

Member
Finaj said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyThe...someone_from_bungie_or_activision_who/ckvowy2

I assume this has been mentioned already?

"I can confirm that there were sudden and abrupt changes in the development of Destiny less than a year ago. There was tension between higher ups the entire time we were developing the title due to a lack of cohesion about the vision for the game. One side wanted this huge space epic, like an MMO Mass Effect and the other side was not convinced that would sell and wanted to pare things back to more "easily accessible" standards. They were afraid too much story elements and cut scenes would drive players off.

Then Joe left and everything just fell apart. By the time we were 7 months out to release, word came down that we were making massive revisions to the game's story. Huge portions of dialogue were excised and I think several recordings were redone to support the new narrative. Entire areas that would have been in the final game were removed, but some of the context wasn't, which explains weird reactions from NPCs and strange, unexplained motivations. We had a guy come in to write the grimoire cards who was given access to the original script with notations on what was cut and what needed to be revised in order to make this zombie of a game seem plausible.

All of the Last City factions had their storylines and dialogue cut, the Guardian's initial introduction to the Tower and the Last City was cut, and ALL the origins were homogenized down to the one originally used for Exo characters.

Most of what was cut was planned to be re-polished into DLC, but it's all there on the disc. Not all of it is live on the servers, but it's all there on the disc. Some last minute art assets needed to be remade, which is what you'll be downloading.

It's an embarrassing disaster and not the game I thought would be published."
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if true the answers in that thread make me sad.

wonder why they scraped the whole thing
 
N

NervousXtian

Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
theclosetfan said:
Honest question.

What's the difference between the minimalist/nonsensical story of Dark Souls and Destiny?

I enjoy both games, but nobody really hammers the Souls games for their lack of plot like what is happening now with Destiny. You could argue that they are similar games in the "shared universe" action RPG sense. They both start off with "you were dead, now you're awake, go do something." Both games have few characters with bad or odd voice-acting. Both rely on the player to analyze lore to find any true meaning in their actions.

Is the difference simply hype/budget/perception/marketing?
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Have you played both? Because yeah, there's legit criticism that can be lobbed at the Souls series as far as story.. its sparse.. very sparse.. and what back story stuff you can gather is through reading things... but on paper you can compare them but in actual reality the execution is completely different.

Souls did the open world hub system correctly.. I can pick and choose what to do a lot in Souls.. and in a way you can do that in Destiny. Yet in Souls you really took ownership of your character.. you felt like you were there for a reason, even if you were unsure exactly WHAT that reason was.. you felt you were still in for a journey worth taking.

Also, the world building is something Souls did mostly right.. as in the world felt like this dark, dreary, loathsome place that felt connected for reasons that made sense. It oozes atmosphere from every corner.. it felt alive even if that alive felt dead. Destiny's worlds just feel dead... static.. lifeless.. but not because they ARE lifeless. Souls felt lifeless because they WERE lifeless.. if that makes sense.

As far as story telling, Destiny attempted.. half-assedly to tell a story somewhat and failed. Beating Destiny doesn't make you feel like you accomplished something.. defeating Souls felt like you accomplished something story-wise.. not juts gameplay wise... hell Destiny doesn't even feel like you accomplished something gameplay wise either.

If you had poster children on how to tell a minimalist story you have the 2 sides of right and wrong right there...

Right way = Souls
Wrong way = Destiny

It is keen to note that both nailed the core mechanics of game play... but still even then Souls choices in character development feel so much more in-depth and change the core gameplay dynamics... whereas realistically all 3 classes and the weapon choices in Destiny feel the same essentially. The choice of class in Destiny hardly really changes the core experience at all... which really is a shame.. as that should really be the put in even doing 3 classes.

It's really surprising that Bungie just missed on some many opportunities with this game by what were really poor choices that happened years ago in planning that honestly were just bad judgement calls.

Despite all that, Destiny is still a lot of fun to play.. even if I'm disappointed but a lot of the choices.. but damn... you can't help but think what they COULD have made with the basic premises of the game.
 
S

Steel

Banned
theclosetfan said:
Honest question.

What's the difference between the minimalist/nonsensical story of Dark Souls and Destiny?

I enjoy both games, but nobody really hammers the Souls games for their lack of plot like what is happening now with Destiny. You could argue that they are similar games in the "shared universe" action RPG sense. They both start off with "you were dead, now you're awake, go do something." Both games have few characters with bad or odd voice-acting. Both rely on the player to analyze lore to find any true meaning in their actions.

Is the difference simply hype/budget/perception/marketing?
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1. No matter how you look at it, Dark Souls is niche, and aimed at a niche audience. It might be selling well for a niche game, but it's still niche. Destiny is trying to be the opposite of niche.

2. There's lore in Dark Souls that uncovers some interesting bits of information hidden in various place, there are even hidden NPCs. Destiny has an in your face "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain" narrative. It's not mysterious, simply incoherent.

That being said, if someone is playing Dark Souls purely for the story, they're doing it wrong. I don't rank Dark Souls' story highly personally. Which brings me to my next point:

3. Dark Souls does not have repetitive enemy, weapon, level, and boss design. The only place where Destiny excels as a game is its gunplay, which is hampered by its severe lack of variety in weaponry. I seriously doubt people would care that much about the story if Destiny had an awesome gameplay loop.
 
T

Toa TAK

Banned
JetBlackPanda said:
if that 404 architect stuff is true. damn.

faction storylines, seperate intros for each race, player trading.. WTF happened.
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Higher ups it seems.

Damn, are the average gamers really turned off by heavy story elements? Is there proof of that in sales somewhere? Jesus.
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
JetBlackPanda said:
if that 404 architect stuff is true. damn.

faction storylines, seperate intros for each race, player trading.. WTF happened.
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You know the worst part?

I created a new character. Do you know how many story missions you have to complete to get from Earth to the Moon? 2. Restoration, and the...awoken the hive or something.

The mission with Rasputin? Completely optional. Doesn't even factor into the game.

It's worse than I thought.
 
S

Steel

Banned
Toa TAK said:
Higher ups it seems.

Damn, are the average gamers really turned off by heavy story elements? Is there proof of that in sales somewhere? Jesus.
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Well, the COD crowd doesn't play COD campaigns, so maybe it was Activision's idea? They also went out of their way for that T for teen rating.

That being said, games like TLOU sell pretty damn well. Mass Effect sells pretty decent. There's an audience for that type of thing.
 
T

Toa TAK

Banned
Steel said:
Well, the COD crowd doesn't play COD campaigns, so maybe it was Activision's idea? They also went out of their way for that T for teen rating.

That being said, games like TLOU sell pretty damn well. Mass Effect sells pretty decent. There's an audience for that type of thing.
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It has to be Activision, because that POV doesn't make sense.

And as a werido who buys COD for it's story, that sucks that they had little faith in the player's attention span.

It's like Prometheus, the film. They had a story set up, but cut it up so much because they thought it would confuse audiences, instead, the cut up story just confused them.

Gah.
 
O

Oozer3993

Member
The story definitely took some kind of big shift between when the game was revealed and when it was released. I did a little research and here's what I found:

There are four different reports from early play tests that have come out and all mention the game being quite different. A (since deleted) post on Reddit mentioned a character named the Crow who pops up early in the story (via Google cache).

The below I posted in a comment to a thread about an alternative story. Now seeing how most NDAs are invalid once the product has released I firmly believe I'm safe in sharing the Destiny story when I was invited to a User Research Case Study done by Bungie in early 2013.

Note: Test Group = the people in my testing session. Group = Crow's Group.

A run down of how the Destiny story was around early 2013.

Crow ends up being introduced earlier on in the story, in the place of the Exo Stranger, which is interesting to note. This story revolved around discovering that there was something wrong with the Speaker, and the Traveler. As a Guardian, you were abducted by this yet to be named group led by Crow.

In the second mission on Earth you got to a certain point, and he swooped down knocked you out, and brought you to this secret base on Mars. There you met with some Guardians that abandoned the Traveler, the Speaker, and the Light so to speak. It was led by Crow, a burly old human, the Exo Stranger (Who evidently in this variant of the story was male, but had relatively the same personality), and one or two Guardians who lost their Ghosts.

It had this predictable plot where the Traveler was the cause of the collapse of the Golden Age because this group found out through their travels that the Darkness was a spawn of the Traveler rather than it's rival. Essentially when the Traveler was brought to Earth it unleashed the Darkness and took over the majority of the technology that Humanity used, turned it against them and nearly wiped it out. As that happened centuries ago the truth was twisted through the speakers that the Traveler protected Earth in it's darkest moment rather than destroying it.

They send you to Venus to lure out a Gatekeeper, and steal it's core which supposedly held an AI that could help bring the truth to light about the Traveler, and the Speaker to the citizens of the City.

Around this point I recall going to Mars to retrieve the remains of another powerful AI that the Cabal was repurposing for their own use. Then at the end of that mission the test group was sent about 10 hours further into the game where we assaulted a Hive base on the Moon, after the group discovered from an AI that the Hellmouth (IIRC it was a different name then) was a housing for a super weapon that could revive the Traveler from it's dormant state so it could wreck havoc on Humanity again.

That's all I vividly remember from the story from that session. I wanted something different, but it felt like yet another halo game.

The planet progression was different too, it was Earth > Venus > Mars > Moon.

Also the deactivated Spider Walker near the start of the released game is a reference to the Spider Walker in the internal build I played where the Fallen dropped down a bunch of Shanks, Vandals, Driegs, and a.. spider walker. Luckily around mission 7 after returning from Venus to grab an old Starmap I could finally defeat the thing.
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The Crow was actually referenced in the very first Destiny ViDoc "Pathways Out of Darkness" from February 2013.

ycQQLJb.jpg


That matches up with the story progression detailed by the playtester (Earth first then being sent to Venus by the Crow early on). The Crow is actually the queen's brother. The official site for the brother's voice actor refers to him playing "Crow" and a Grimoire card refers to the Queen's Brother as "Master of Crows." The little snippet of a cutscene that Bungie shared in one of their videos from E3 2013 is probably from early in the game's original story, when Crow and his group kidnapped you.


EtOgbXl.jpg
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bJh3C9V.jpg
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Getting back to that screenshot of the phone, there's an interesting structure to the story. The story was going to be split into "Books" which would further be split into "Chapters." This sure seems to imply a bigger focus on story than what we got, even if this first game was only "Book 1." This structure was seen in the main menu as well.

pY3zD5f.jpg


An interesting note: the name of the Raid ("Depth of Darkness") is not one we've heard since. It could just be an early name for the Vault of Glass (I don't think we heard that name before E3 this year) or an early name of one of the forthcoming Raids, possibly "Crota's End" since the description of that ("He waits in the dark below") is awfully similar (and there appear to be a couple areas on the moon that were show in early videos that aren't in the game right now [look below for more]).

That first video also appeared to show a small glimpse of a cutscene not in the final game.

ptz3JHx.jpg


I don't remember ever seeing this old man in the game. It's possible he is the crazy scientist mentioned by one of the play test reports:

Some time later we meet a crazy scientist living in the middle of nowhere, when we tell him that the seraphim are still alive, he says thats impossible in a very dramatic way. Then we're told that if we find them we will "BECOME A LEGEND" in such an overly dramatic way I start to think the writer is trying to ham it up on purpose, maybe hoping I wouldn't notice the copy-paste of the borderlands plot that just happened. We now have an over arching quest to find the seraphim's vault/restingplace/mcguffin, whatever it is, this story is sparse on the details.
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The Seraphim Vault area is still in the game, but unused and inaccessible normally. We know that at one point the game included a group known as the Seven Seraphs, "seraphs" being essentially a synonym for seraphim. In medieval Christianity, the Seraphim were angels and were closely associated with light.

Another interesting side note about that very first ViDoc: some of the interviews were 2 years old and were done for the "O Brave New World" documentary that was released in August of 2011.

There's a single shot of a ship approaching Mercury that was shown in multiple official videos from 2013.

MmN5cyr.jpg
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While there is a PvP map set on Mercury in the final game, this shot was first shown during the E3 2013 trailer which only dealt with the story. There was no mention of PvP in it. And Mercury is referenced during the story in the game. At one point, your Ghost tells you that the Vex turned Mercury into a giant machine.

The early videos show several areas that seem to have been cut. There's multiple shots of the Reef as a playable area:

O4zJhF3.jpg
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TKO7NgR.jpg
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There's a place on Earth that does not appear to be Old Russia:

uqUIHjY.jpg
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(Old Russia isn't really forested and all the buildings in it are steel and concrete constructions and not grown over stone ones)

There's what appears to be a cut room (and possibly a cut enemy) from the moon:

MJM0cyA.jpg
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I don't recognize the room nor the enemy. It looks like Phogoth, but is much smaller.

And there's this, again possibly on the moon:

ZYrpF6s.jpg
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A head scratcher: in the "Out Here In The Wild" ViDoc, Technical Art Director Ryan Ellis said "You can go from Earth to Venus to Mars to the Moon to Saturn." The Reef is in the asteroid belt (according to a Grimoire card), not around Saturn. So what, exactly, would we be going to Saturn for? It was shown in several videos:

tkybTrw.jpg
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It could just be that originally the Reef was around Saturn but had it's location changed. That still raises to question as to why. The Grimoire card for Saturn does heavily hint at Saturn's moon Titan being playable at some point.

The story stuff may have been cut due to poor quality. Both Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade and another person who saw the game in 2013 viewed the story negatively. First Tycho:

I played Destiny a long time ago, and I’m fairly certain I signed a document that said I could not tell you what I had played. Let me see how I can say this. You are not playing what I played before. It coulda gone a lotta ways. That’s always the case with software, obviously. But I think they found the path.
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Gabe:

I have to say that despite the garbage story and the horrible voice acting I’m not having a terrible time in Destiny. In fact I like it a lot more now than when I first played it. There was a very early alpha phase that we played and it was pretty disheartening. I went back through my email and found the mail I sent to Jerry at the time. This is right after I had played Destiny for the very first time.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 11:56 AM, mike krahulik wrote:

They are fucked.
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And the other play tester:

I was shown cutscenes, very unfinished and some scenes were missing, but what matters is the dialog is the most boring drivel I've ever heard. During the opening credits some astronauts walk on mars, it starts raining, dramatic music plays, and the camera operator is trying quite hard to make it seem epic. The camera cuts between close ups of their feet, head, and the rain so often you'd think it was a sports drink commercial. Your character is a generic tough guy type with minimal dialog and zero personality. At an early point the first npc you meet acknowledges you know the background of the traveler and yet he proceeds to give a monologue about its history, clearly for the benefit of the player. A very clumsy way to give background info. To make it worse, the whole spiel can be reduced to "the traveler saved us, we don't know why, and we haven't learned anything about it since." So I have to listen to this monologue which doesn't tell me anything new, and doesn't even make sense in context, as the protagonist and every other human ingame seems to know it as well.

Eventually we meet an unnamed man who seems to have some authority, and get praised for our shooting skills in a way that makes feel like I'm being patted on the head like a child. I'll bet the praise is in that cutscene no matter how badly the player does in the proceeding section. So far the only way I know this isnt a mass effect sequel is the lack of dialog wheels.

Finally we're given a new ship, it looks pretty fast, but there no evidence that the player will ever be able to fly it. The player character says something gung ho, and we fly off.

Some time later we meet a crazy scientist living in the middle of nowhere, when we tell him that the seraphim are still alive, he says thats impossible in a very dramatic way. Then we're told that if we find them we will "BECOME A LEGEND" in such an overly dramatic way I start to think the writer is trying to ham it up on purpose, maybe hoping I wouldn't notice the copy-paste of the borderlands plot that just happened. We now have an over arching quest to find the seraphim's vault/restingplace/mcguffin, whatever it is, this story is sparse on the details.

That was the last mildly interesting thing I saw. I hope you enjoyed reading about how I wasted three hours of my life. (four if you count the drive into bellevue)

There was a small amount of gameplay footage that inculded npc's talking. Walking though a very dark, underground industrial area, with a very unsupriseing suprise attack, and a lobby in the human city, possibly a hub between missions. Also large humanoids with an energy shield floating infront of them, it only covers half of them although it moved to cover the part you shot. There was a hover bike the size of a halo ghost, a sniper rifle used by the friendly npc, and an assault rifle used by the player that functioned much like the one in halo reach. Overall gameplay looked like halo reach with a different coat of paint, biggest difference is the aliens don't fight together.


My best guess is Bungie is aiming for a mass effect, reach, borderlands hybrid with drop-in drop-out co-op.

Even so my biggest concern is the script, I don't think bungie would do any major rewrites after starting cutscene work.
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His last sentence is... interesting.
 
G

Gherid__lacksGPS

Banned
Finaj said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyThe...someone_from_bungie_or_activision_who/ckvowy2

I assume this has been mentioned already?

"I can confirm that there were sudden and abrupt changes in the development of Destiny less than a year ago. There was tension between higher ups the entire time we were developing the title due to a lack of cohesion about the vision for the game. One side wanted this huge space epic, like an MMO Mass Effect and the other side was not convinced that would sell and wanted to pare things back to more "easily accessible" standards. They were afraid too much story elements and cut scenes would drive players off.

Then Joe left and everything just fell apart. By the time we were 7 months out to release, word came down that we were making massive revisions to the game's story. Huge portions of dialogue were excised and I think several recordings were redone to support the new narrative. Entire areas that would have been in the final game were removed, but some of the context wasn't, which explains weird reactions from NPCs and strange, unexplained motivations. We had a guy come in to write the grimoire cards who was given access to the original script with notations on what was cut and what needed to be revised in order to make this zombie of a game seem plausible.

All of the Last City factions had their storylines and dialogue cut, the Guardian's initial introduction to the Tower and the Last City was cut, and ALL the origins were homogenized down to the one originally used for Exo characters.

Most of what was cut was planned to be re-polished into DLC, but it's all there on the disc. Not all of it is live on the servers, but it's all there on the disc. Some last minute art assets needed to be remade, which is what you'll be downloading.

It's an embarrassing disaster and not the game I thought would be published."
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Thanks for sharing this, hadn't seen it before. If true, and it holds a lot of things in context and is consistent with the issues at hand, it's a damn shame. How out of touch are execs and suites? And to think, Bungie is stuck in this, contractually? Sad.

I'm really considering just trading in this week. I love the actual mechanics, but I'm conflicted supporting this direction and ideology.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
It's all speculation, so I want to be careful in how seriously I take it, but it's clear the story got gutted at some point. Even going from the pre-release Destiny trailers to the end product, we saw a lot of story elements, characters and cinematics disappear. But I'm still skeptical this is the real story vs. someone just filling in the blanks.

That said, it feels like there are elements of truth in there somewhere. Halo 3 went through a similar arc, where the story was really overhauled during production and then patched back up late in production, into a much simpler story than was originally intended. With Destiny they couldn't even tie up the loose ends in time. It makes me wonder if that's part of why Staten left, seeing the story get the shaft again as development went on.
 
Z

zonezeus

Member
Finaj said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyThe...someone_from_bungie_or_activision_who/ckvowy2

I assume this has been mentioned already?
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So, moustache-twirling Activision bigwig capitalist comes in less than a year before launch, says "this story is too amazing, people hate amazing stories, jeopardize the whole project to make it dumber and signficantly worse than even the stories in our own games that we publish!", lead writer quits, the rest of Bungie toils and sweats making the game they now hate.

I don't know whether it's bullshit or not, but it sure sounds like some fantasy players would love to hear.
 
J

Jarmel

Banned
Finaj said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyThe...someone_from_bungie_or_activision_who/ckvowy2
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Sounds about right now that we know Staten was getting stonewalled by his boss and his arguments with the art director. I don't knoe if Staten leaving was due to his faction seemingly losing or whether he got sick of the infighting and left and that caused the cuts.

It honestly seems like there might not even be a head writer at this point.

Also fuck the side that didn't want a Mass Effect MMO. They can shove it straight up their ass.
 
G

GuitarAtomik

Member
All of the Last City factions had their storylines and dialogue cut, the Guardian's initial introduction to the Tower and the Last City was cut, and ALL the origins were homogenized down to the one originally used for Exo characters.
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What's this in reference to? The beginning when Dinklage ressurects you?

On a slightly different but related note, I'm also curious what the larger context of the Crucible is. The grimoire cards confirm it's not taking place in a simulator. Was there a larger Faction War plot that was supposed to give this more context? Are these Guardians killing and resurrecting each other largely for fun? Can a Ghost resurrect you infinitely and so it's not a big deal? If so, doesn't that take a lot of the tension out of the story if all the Guardians are effectively immortal?
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
Whoa, alotta information.

ycQQLJb.jpg
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And holy crap I forgot about this. This pretty much verifies alot of the information...well, until light sheds otherwise. Edit-Like Ghaleon said, yeah, it's speculation but hell, this story about the overhaul and what happened to Bungie is more interesting than Destinys.

And I just realized, the steelbook of Destiny has '1' on the side...tying to the 'Book 1' theme they were going with the story originally? Hrm. Damn, this game could've been a whole different beast. It's not even but things from the story, it's completely different...it'd make sense why the story we got is....substandard.
 
A

Absoludacrous

Member
zonezeus said:
So, moustache-twirling Activision bigwig capitalist comes in less than a year before launch, says "this story is too amazing, people hate amazing stories, jeopardize the whole project to make it dumber and signficantly worse than even the stories in our own games that we publish!", lead writer quits, the rest of Bungie toils and sweats making the game they now hate.

I don't know whether it's bullshit or not, but it sure sounds like some fantasy players would love to hear.
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They could have just as easily been Bungie higher ups. The only knock he gives against Activision is that they pressured them to reach the deadline, which is definitely likely.
 
J

Jarmel

Banned
zonezeus said:
So, moustache-twirling Activision bigwig capitalist comes in less than a year before launch, says "this story is too amazing, people hate amazing stories, jeopardize the whole project to make it dumber and signficantly worse than even the stories in our own games that we publish!", lead writer quits, the rest of Bungie toils and sweats making the game they now hate.

I don't know whether it's bullshit or not, but it sure sounds like some fantasy players would love to hear.
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Well there was that GDC(?) video that had Staten explaining that the art director wanted this minimalist story while he wanted something more traditional and his boss was siding with the art director. So that reddit post is actually very likely to be the case.
 
C

Chaos2Frozen

Member
theclosetfan said:
Honest question.

What's the difference between the minimalist/nonsensical story of Dark Souls and Destiny?

I enjoy both games, but nobody really hammers the Souls games for their lack of plot like what is happening now with Destiny. You could argue that they are similar games in the "shared universe" action RPG sense. They both start off with "you were dead, now you're awake, go do something." Both games have few characters with bad or odd voice-acting. Both rely on the player to analyze lore to find any true meaning in their actions.

Is the difference simply hype/budget/perception/marketing?
Click to expand...

Guess what? The lore in Dark Souls is actually in the game! You find item with descriptions that clue you in about what happened and who's who in this place you're adventuring through- Who would have thunk it right?

Dark Souls have everything you need in the game to tell it's story (external websites are just an aid) Destiny requires you to get out of the game and find out on the website and like what Angry Joe said that means you don't care about shit when you're doing it.

And in Dark Souls, the environments and enemies tell a story about who they are- you have unique monsters native to certain locations because they have a reason to be there, bosses have a reason to be there. Hell, even if you never actually met some of these characters from lore, there's more than enough for you to actually know who they are. Even the bosses, who your only interaction is fighting them, you learn a lot from their actions, equipment and locations.

Playing Dark Souls is like being a detective or an archaeologist- you stumble into a incident and have to make sense of the clues presented to you, and while you may not be able to figure everything out, you definitely learn things.
 
T

Toa TAK

Banned
Jarmel said:
Well there was that GDC(?) video that had Staten explaining that the art director wanted this minimalist story while he wanted something more traditional and his boss was siding with the art director. So that reddit post is actually very likely to be the case.
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Link?
 
M

Meier

Member
TheVisualizer said:
I've read most of the thread and am in the camp that believes the stories mentioned regarding cut content.

Most of the discussion about "why" revolved around the writer leaving, which makes some sense, but my thoughts immediately turned to "cross gen" as probably a bigger reason.

I can't remember which platform was the lead, but for all they were promising I can see how last gen platforms would not be able to handle larger open worlds without crippling loading. The lack of exploration and available "land" could have been the primary reason for so many shared mission routes and overall cut content.
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Good post. I'm sure there is some accuracy in this as well. Cross-gen stuff can be very limiting.. I'd imagine if Destiny 2 is "next-gen" only, we'll see a much more expansive game. It could be we have to wait until 3 though which might end up being cross-gen again, haha.
 
S

simplythebest

Banned
Net_Wrecker said:
They could tell you of a great development cycle, years ago...how Bungie was crippled. They could tell you about the power of Activision, the industry's ancient enemy. There are many tales told throughout the internet to frustrated gamers. Lately those tales have stopped. Now... the gamers are frustrated anyway.
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HQiB05c.gif
 
J

JumpJeff84

Member
Wow, so it turns out that the story of what happened to Destiny's story is actually way more interesting than Destiny's story could have ever hoped to be. What a twist!

Are we sure that this isn't some elaborate ARG on Bungie's part?
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
Chaos2Frozen said:
Playing Dark Souls is like being a detective or an archaeologist- you stumble into a incident and have to make sense of the clues presented to you, and while you may not be able to figure everything out, you definitely learn things.
Click to expand...

To add onto this, Dark Souls treats you like an intelligent being-That is, if you don't care about the story, it won't beat you over the head with it, and it certainly won't detract from your experience. But if you do explore it, then it's there. In a subtle way, it's there, and it rewards you for it. Suddenly items share an existence, and they're linked to areas or enemies.

Destiny is different. If you don't care about the story, not only does it bash you over the head with multiple terms and various unskippable cutscenes, but it treats you like an idiot and doesn't explain anything. And when you do try to find out what happened, it treats you like an even bigger idiot and makes you jump through hoops to get the actual story behind it, and even then it's more like an explanation of what a person/thing is. Who is the Queen? Why is she helping you? Fuck if I know. Her grimoire card? Oh look who the fuck knows, secrets and cities falling, who the hell is the Queen? I still don't know.
 
JetBlackPanda

JetBlackPanda

Member
Im pretty much convinced at this point.

From Dinklage phoning it in, probably literally did last minute re-writes, to things going nowhere in the story to areas of old russia that go nowhere, trailers that refrence things that are missing and multiple play testers confirming story changes.

very very sad.

I still love the gameplay and what we have is enough to get me to check out the next few DLC's but if they don't start making this game a cohesive narrative I am out.
 
midasmulligan

midasmulligan

Member
GuitarAtomik said:
What's this in reference to? The beginning when Dinklage ressurects you?

On a slightly different but related note, I'm also curious what the larger context of the Crucible is. The grimoire cards confirm it's not taking place in a simulator. Was there a larger Faction War plot that was supposed to give this more context? Are these Guardians killing and resurrecting each other largely for fun? Can a Ghost resurrect you infinitely and so it's not a big deal? If so, doesn't that take a lot of the tension out of the story if all the Guardians are effectively immortal?
Click to expand...
Per the grimoire, the crucible is live fire, with the ghosts constantly reviving iirc
 
T

Teremap

Banned
Whoompthereitis said:
Wow, so it turns out that the story of what happened to Destiny's story is actually way more interesting than Destiny's story could have ever hoped to be. What a twist!

Are we sure that this isn't some elaborate ARG on Bungie's part?
Click to expand...
Haha, right? This stuff is crazy to read about.

I'm kind of hoping this blows up in Activision's face. This shit ain't cool, man.
 
P

PanicFreak

Member
RalchAC said:
Oh, maybe I misunderstood you. Sorry if that's the case.

I kind of feel in the same way, but at the same time I may buy the Season Pass in the end. The game kind of fills my MMO itch and gameplay feels new enough (I haven't played Borderlands all that much) to me. At the same time I'm not much into PvP (I was for a while during my WoW days though) but I enjoy occasionally doing some matches. The fact that the teams are small kind of makes it more enjoyable to me that other games and it feels less overwhelming than COD, where most people have memorised the maps in 3 weeks after launch.

I'll probably decide once I finish the current content (didn't touch the raid yet) and/or the first expansion launches.
Click to expand...

Well, you were partly correct. I was complaining about the price but it's more that a game made by Bungie failed to make me want to purchase the season pass. I'm a big Halo fan and was really looking forward to this game. To make matters worse, I don't like the PvP at all.
 
J

JZA

Member
Jarmel said:
Also fuck the side that didn't want a Mass Effect MMO. They can shove it straight up their ass.
Click to expand...

YES. I'd like to see what salient points they could come up with to support that an ME MMO would not sell. I seriously can't wait until the current generation of management and executives dies out, because it seems like a lot of them are still from a generation where a videogame has never captured their imagination.
 
M

Murder. She Wrote

Member
Worst case scenario: Bungie becomes like Blizzard, losing that spark of greatness and just churning out good games.

Best case scenario: Destiny is like Assassin's Creed and Destiny 2 will be like Assassin's Creed 2, improving upon the original idea to create an awesome game.
 
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