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[Saganator]

Im going to have to say no. The story elements are weak as a whole, not structured as episodic content.

A good example is that two major plot characters dont even acknowledge my character is an awoken. Even my awoken character questions this. Very amateurish and painfully hard to watch during cutscenes.

Same with Exo's. Do they explain the Exo race at all in-game? I have no fucking clue who or why they're on earth fighting with us.

 

[jelly]

Didn't Joe Staten join Microsoft. Is that a good or a bad thing considering Destiny's story ?

 

[Daemul]

Great post, so disappointed in the story.

Get on this Keighley, find out what happened.

Yep, we need the Final Hours of Destiny asap.

 

[Limality]

Hugely disappointed in how the story got cut from this game. If it weren't for my friends who play Destiny every other evening, I would've put it into my trash bin by now.

Here's hoping that I'm still interested in the Destiny lore once "Episode 2" comes out with some actual story to it....

 

[Friction]

Same with Exo's. Do they explain the Exo race at all in-game? I have no fucking clue who or why they're on earth fighting with us.

Equally lacking for exo as well id imagine (didn't play as one) since there is an encounter with a fellow exo.

 

[FirewalkR]

Perhaps the story could be better explained in the current version of the game, which will certainly be expanded over time. Nonetheless, isn't still there the chance that some of these claims, especially the Traveler bringing the Darkness, being some sort of twist yet to be introduced in upcoming additions to the game?

 

[Friction]

Hugely disappointed in how the story got cut from this game. If it weren't for my friends who play Destiny every other evening, I would've put it into my trash bin by now.

Here's hoping that I'm still interested in the Destiny lore once "Episode 2" comes out with some actual story to it....

I dont think its even possible to fix the story with dlc. The main game narrative is flawed and needs to be fixed first (which we know will never happen).

 

[Ghost]

To be honest the only thing worse than the story we got would be a fully fleshed out arcing narrative that leads to you realising that the Traveller is the problem and the speaker is evil, followed by 20 hours of grinding bounties and strikes for them to get better gear.

 

[Canis lupus]

Perhaps the story could be better explained in the current version of the game, which will certainly be expanded over time. Nonetheless, isn't still there the chance that some of these claims, especially the Traveler bringing the Darkness, being some sort of twist yet to be introduced in upcoming additions to the game?

How? You go to a random spot and deploy Ghost, clear waves of enemies, Ghost reads some of his lines=better explanation?

Biggest disappointment in gaming since skyrim for me.

 

[funkystudent]

Didn't Joe Staten join Microsoft. Is that a good or a bad thing considering Destiny's story ?

There is a lot of good stuff in the cards in Destiny. None of it made it in the actual game.

Destiny seems like a project where they had a basic gameplay idea and a baclstory but had zero idea what to do with the campaign.

Maybe they wanted to go for a Left 4 Dead style minimalist story but failed? And wouldnt make sense because of all the interviews talking about them seeing the fiction as the next Star Wars or whatever dumb thing they said.


Does Destiny have a main director or did that person jumped ship to 343 as well? That guy should get some flack. Destiny has a lot of good ideas but whoever was in charge couldnt bring it together.

 

[Skele7on]

Grimoire cards are so boss, the story is amazing in those.

Which really annoys me as if all of this was in the game, then holy shit we'd have one heck of a story.

So annoying that they went on this quite frankly stupid route.

 

[Klyka]

I'm thinking about starting an LP of Destiny where I put up Grimoire cards for the locations/enemies/characters I interact with and try to put the story that is there together a bit.

Anyone interested in something like that? Is there a way for me to record gameplay on my PS4 and get it to my PC?

 

[MrAndySchneider]

Same with Exo's. Do they explain the Exo race at all in-game? I have no fucking clue who or why they're on earth fighting with us.

Well... this, they do. If you count Grimoire as "ingame". The description doesn't make much sense, though.

Here's the Grimoire entry:

"Ask yourself: what threatened your Golden Age ancestors so much that they constructed the Exos to defend themselves?"
Built for a long-forgotten struggle, Exos are self-aware war machines so advanced that nothing short of a Ghost can understand their inner functions. They remain ciphers, even to themselves: their origins and purpose lost to time.

Whoever built the Exos fashioned them in humanity's image, gifting them with diversity of mind and body. Many of the City's Exo citizens live and work alongside their organic brethren. But others fight again, re-forged in the Light of the Traveler to serve as Guardians.

- See more at: http://destiny-grimoire.info/#sthash.lWQ467gF.dpuf

Also:

- which in the end is just a matter of substrate chauvinism. It doesn't matter if the system thinks with flesh or superconductor or topological braids in doped metallic hydrogen, as long as the logic is the same. And our logic is the same. Yours and mine.

If I am a machine then so are you. If you are not a machine then neither am I. Exo minds are human. It is incontrovertible.

You understand? I'm going to take that slack-jawed stare as understanding.

Now here's the real question. Why are Exo minds human? What's the design imperative? Why does a war machine - yes, absolutely, I am a war machine, built by human hands; and you are a survival machine built by the engine of evolution. Don't interrupt me.

Why does a war machine have emotions? Why should a war machine have awareness? These are not useful traits on the battlefield. Don't flatter yourself. They are not useful. So why should the Exo mind mimic the human architecture so closely?

You know what I smell on you? I smell the stink of anthropocentrism. I think you think that there's only one way to think. That's why the Exo mind is so human, you presume. Because all higher thought converges.

My friend, you should meet the Vex. There is nothing human in them.

Now. This is what I believe happened, back in the time before any Exo can remember. It explains everything.

I think someone wanted to live forever. - See more at: http://destiny-grimoire.info/#sthash.lWQ467gF.dpuf

And furthermore:

Hi. Thanks for your interest. I'm recording this for posterity.

Warlock thanatonauts die and come back with insight. I'm going to attempt the same process to get at buried memories. Specifically, I'm going to fire a charged particle beam into my head and see what comes out. We Exos have been around a very long time. I want to know what's in there.

My Ghost is standing by to repair me.

Okay. Three two one

STAG echo six SWORD sierra nine SERPENT

We are falling into the world. Everyone is on fire. There's a ship above us but it's coming apart just like a flower, alloy and fusion flash, pierced through and through -

The voice says Atmospheric interface. Trajectory nominal. Rabid two three you are outside the window. (I think I am the voice)

I can see the whole earth below me and the sky we are falling out of is black without stars.

Ghost, shoot me again.

RAPID four RAMPART four RATCHET tango eight zero

We are on the ice. This is elsewhere and elsewhen. There is a mighty aurora and it is reflected in the ice so I walk between two fires although the one below is cracked and full of corpses. I have and am a weapon.

Up in the sky there is a hole in Jupiter and it tears at me when I look at it. It tears at me. It is hungry. Maybe the hole is not in Jupiter but in me.

CROWN castle candor cobalt coral

Ghost bring me back.

serrate sulfur ANATHEMA amber actual aspen

Ghost bring me back now. - See more at: http://destiny-grimoire.info/#sthash.lWQ467gF.dpuf

 

[lifa-cobex]

I'm thinking about starting an LP of Destiny where I put up Grimoire cards for the locations/enemies/characters I interact with and try to put the story that is there together a bit.

Anyone interested in something like that? Is there a way for me to record gameplay on my PS4 and get it to my PC?

Would love that.

WTF is happening to this game.
It really wouldn't surprise me if this is all truth.
Got my moneys worth out of the game, but fuck it could have been so much more

 

[Jinjo]

He meant Dinklage was playing one of the characters.

Pretty sure he was referencing the Awoken Queen bit. Your character even says "Your Grace" as an obvious nod to GoT, it was painfully cringeworthy.

 

[Limality]

I dont think its even possible to fix the story with dlc. The main game narrative is flawed and needs to be fixed first (which we know will never happen).

I suppose you might be right about it not being fixed...ever. It's a huge shame, really

 

[Klyka]

Pretty sure he was referencing the Awoken Queen bit. Your character even says "Your Grace" as an obvious nod to GoT, it was painfully cringeworthy.

Uh, to be fair, that "Your Grace" was your Guardian being a smug little badass, thanking the Queen while completely ignoring her brother, shutting him down and reminding him of his place. Guy was a prick and your Guardian told him to fuck off.

 

[ValeYard]

Not a good comparison.

Using nondescriptive words (darkness) as proper nouns (The Darkness) is a little different than using geographic location as a means of describing their peoples.

This isn't just an issue of using the article "the" in front of something.

I feel that was an uncharitable reading of my comment. Of course, I didn't JUST mean the use of the definite article in front of nouns, but I'm probably at fault myself posting in such a short, badly formatted manner. I'll elaborate on what motivated my post:

I think the criticism of the storytelling regarding the noun structure misses the mark. Firstly, it's unrealistic. The original wording actually is a criticism for using "nouns" to name things, which is difficult not to do unless using a language like Tagalog in which it is debatable whether there is a noun/verb differentiation due to a grammatical trigger function.

So nouns are a necessary evil of denoting things. You respecified the criticism as using abstract terms as proper nouns, which actually only applies to two of the six words listed in the original post. However, here I have to agree to with the other commenter's sentiment:

Except when you do a story about these factions they have actually characters. The story is not about The Allies. The Allies are backdrop. It's about Private Ryan, Captain Miller actual characters with interesting thoughts and motivations and stories. That's the problems with Destiny all of those nouns don't become anything at all. The Speaker has no internal life and no discernible motivations. You have no motivations. I mean really the only character in Destiny is Rahool and he has a very clear motivation: trolling you.

Destiny is a world populated by extras.

In a video game, nomen isn't omen, and you could call the enemy "The Abstract Evil Force You Will Eventually Face in a Disappointing Embodied Form." What matters is how you flesh it out. In Destiny, maybe due to cuts in the story, both storywise we learn little to nothing about the Darkness, neither does the VO do a good job of instilling any sense of what it is. Imagine if every time your ghost mentioned the Darkness, his reading gave you chills? That would give you less time to think about how generic the name is.

As someone who's enjoying Destiny but is worried that the coming DLC might not deliver at all on some more story due to the cuts rumored here, I just feel it is important to be accurate in our criticism. That they use nouns, won't help Bungie make it better, but that they need help in telling and delivering the story, might. Cheers.

 

[Straid]

This makes me sad, reminds me the dissapointment felt with Dragon's Dogma story.

 

[ForsakenLotus]

So, as conspiratorial as this all is, I do at least see how this could have truth behind it. The thing that I don't understand is why the missions are almost copy/paste. Sure, Activision wanted story content cut to be DLC, but it's not like Activision said cut mission/boss design and only implement interesting and varies mechanics in the one raid the game has.

I'm sure that SOMETHING happened at Bungie, but there are too many flaws with Destiny for me to not lay a lot of the blame squarely on their shoulders.

They dun fucked it up.

 

[Deku Tree]

I don't belIeve it.

 

[TyrantII]

Yeah, I read that. Seemed like Tales From Your Ass to me. 95% speculation.

Yup. For all we know they were going for the DeS/Dks style of lore / compartmentalized missions with no real character driven story and late in development Activision came in and said "Hey guys, for $500 million the game has to have a character driven story, period". They then shoehorned one in.

Looks like I can make up the insides info (100% warrantless speculation) as well.

 

[blazeuk]

Perhaps the story could be better explained in the current version of the game, which will certainly be expanded over time. Nonetheless, isn't still there the chance that some of these claims, especially the Traveler bringing the Darkness, being some sort of twist yet to be introduced in upcoming additions to the game?

They actually need a half decent basic story before they can expand on it and introduce twists. I actually couldn't tell you what the story was about which is the biggest problem, throwing in a twist on something no-one even followed in the first place is going to be met with another rather flat and confused reception. The entire story needs to be reworked, that's not going to happen at this point so I imagine when Destiny 2 arrives they're probably going to have to either have a long opening scene explaining everything properly (so a story based around the cards we have to read elsewhere) or just start all over again with some slight nods to the current version along the way.

The idea that the game was gutted of it's story really isn't that shocking, it feels like it and I'm honestly surprised someone didn't step in and tell them it needed to be fixed given how much time and money was spent on making sure this was the next big franchise.

 

[Kanyon]

Thinking about the current game more it seems to me that at some point Bungie decided that their goal did not require a traditional FPS narrative such as Halo sported. Instead there would just be a classic MMO context setting framework (Traveler, Golden Age, Darkness and so on) that would provide an expansive yet deliberately vague sense of purpose.

Into this simple lightly connected plot "vignettes" could easily be inserted over the life of the franchise. Some would be short term and vaguely connected to the background context and others a triffle more directly connected to implying slow progression to the vague background goals (heal the traveller, push back the darkness).

I think you might be onto something here. Looking at Destiny in the traditional FPS sense yeah the story is shit, but looking at it from this point of view gives me a better perspective. You're dumped into a strange world with lore you don't quite understand, but you get snippets of it here and there and you are wanting to know more. Destiny seems like the kind of game that wants to tell the player so much, through immersion and chatter with Ghost.

If this approach is what Bungie were trying to do, I don't think they executed it very well. A poster in another thread created a great mockup of how in game story information could have been displayed (it was a bit like Metroid Prime.) Would have been great to have used Ghost as an information resource within the game, building the universe for the player through direct interaction with items or places.

I think giving the players the choice of diving into the lore within the in game universe, would have led to a better story outcome for players. We could have had threads on GAF discussing the rich lore and trying to piece things together based on in game information, which is one of the reasons I love this place - passionate and knowledgeable posters who know their shit and can explain it better for luddites like me.

 

[pixlexic]

Also just going by the areas and items in the you can tell a lot of stuff was cut. The grotto in Russia has no purpose. The item slots beside your ghost have no purpose so far as I can tell?

I still love the game but yeah it was mangled at some point.

 

[Forkball]

Yeah, all these nouns, totally unbelievable. The Guardians, the Traveler,..., The Germans, The Allies, The Nazis, The British, The Americans, The Vietcong,... Who comes up with this unbelievable fiction?

All those things you listed are actual proper nouns instead of random words with "The" in front of it.

I don't know much about Destiny's story, but the bad guy is called The Darkness. The Darkness. I wish I was at the roundtable when they decided on that.

Also the Destiny 2 script was recently leaked:

"It's you, The Legend! Allow me to introduce myself. I am The Sage. Your coming was foretold by The Knowledge. Quickly, you must travel to The Deep and defeat The Harbringer before he unleashes The Unleashed!"

 

[MrAndySchneider]

The item slots beside your ghost have no purpose so far as I can tell?

IIRC you can equip a different Ghost casing when you have the limited edition. Yes, it seems like there would be different Ghost models, like there are different ships or sparrows.

All of which are completely useless, though.

 

[Maulik]

The saddest part is how this game feels everything you are doing so small. I mean this is a narrative presumably of galactic proportions yet you end up feeling like you saved a few corridors from some mildly tall robots.

Hell in Halo you saw entire planets explode and fleets of ships decimated. You even get to fight a boss that's the size of a goddamn skyscraper. In Destiny, the closest you get is when a ship enters low orbit and destroys a few objects in the skybox. Not once did I feel that I was engaged in a galactic conflict.

 

[Mindwipe]

The saddest part is how this game feels everything you are doing so small. I mean this is a narrative presumably of galactic proportions yet you end up feeling like you saved a few corridors from some mildly tall robots.

Hell in Halo you saw entire planets explode and fleets of ships decimated. You even get to fight a boss that's the size of a goddamn skyscraper. In Destiny, the closest you get is when a ship enters low orbit and destroys a few objects in the skybox. Not once did I feel that I was engaged in a galactic conflict.

Yeah, there's no epic moments in it. That's the problem. It all feels so street level. There's nothing that helps the gameplay switch up like Halo had with it's vehicles or epic moments.

Halo was very good in each game at at least feeling like you started off somewhere and things built up to a crescendo.

 

[Klyka]

The saddest part is how this game feels everything you are doing so small. I mean this is a narrative presumably of galactic proportions yet you end up feeling like you saved a few corridors from some mildly tall robots.

Hell in Halo you saw entire planets explode and fleets of ships decimated. You even get to fight a boss that's the size of a goddamn skyscraper. In Destiny, the closest you get is when a ship enters low orbit and destroys a few objects in the skybox. Not once did I feel that I was engaged in a galactic conflict.

Well to be fair the "galactic conflict" has been over for centuries. Humanity lost. They don't have an army or anything they can lead "strikes" or "raids" against their enemies but nothing more. The only reason the last city still stands is because the Traveler still lets out some kind of protective field/force and because the Guardians have defended with tooth and nail against every assault so far.

Of course when you read the Grimoire cards and you suddenly find out what REALLY happened with the "collapse" and who the big bad is....things look very different all of a sudden. And no, not the Traveler.

 

[Mindwipe]

They actually need a half decent basic story before they can expand on it and introduce twists. I actually couldn't tell you what the story was about which is the biggest problem, throwing in a twist on something no-one even followed in the first place is going to be met with another rather flat and confused reception. The entire story needs to be reworked, that's not going to happen at this point so I imagine when Destiny 2 arrives they're probably going to have to either have a long opening scene explaining everything properly (so a story based around the cards we have to read elsewhere) or just start all over again with some slight nods to the current version along the way.

The idea that the game was gutted of it's story really isn't that shocking, it feels like it and I'm honestly surprised someone didn't step in and tell them it needed to be fixed given how much time and money was spent on making sure this was the next big franchise.

Or they need to release what would effectively be a campaign DLC with half a dozen missions plus.

 

[Japanmanx3]

Just like the game's actual narrative then.

 

[Card Boy]

Every single Bungie comment on the story is hilarious looking back. They talked about being up there with universes like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. When the game comes out they couldn't even get their quality up to Call of Duty standards. The modern warfare stories are infinitely superior to Destiny's. That's when you know you have absolutely failed.

I had to think about this and yeah I agree, even the shitest COD has a better story and campaign mode than Destiny. W@W is a masterpiece compared to Destiny.

 

[Sevenfold]

Destiny's story in 3 words:

Aliens need shooting.

Appplies to every alien game before Isolation.

 

[LiK]

Fake or real, it's more interesting than what we got.

 

[TheLostBigBoss]

So it seems like they have a pretty decent story with all the lore set, but they couldn't make a game that actually held the story any good with the mission layout they picked.

They completely lack creative ambition, or they tried and failed many times, giving us this scrapped together mess of nothing for the actual story with extremely important story elements explained outside of the game.

 

[MrAndySchneider]

Well to be fair the "galactic conflict" has been over for centuries. Humanity lost. They don't have an army or anything they can lead "strikes" or "raids" against their enemies but nothing more. The only reason the last city still stands is because the Traveler still lets out some kind of protective field/force and because the Guardians have defended with tooth and nail against every assault so far.

Of course when you read the Grimoire cards and you suddenly find out what REALLY happened with the "collapse" and who the big bad is....things look very different all of a sudden. And no, not the Traveler.

Can you point me to these Grimoire cards? I skimmed them all, on the highly awesome http://destiny-grimoire.info/, and didn't see anything like a deeper insight into the Collapse and the identity of the Traveller.

 

[Novel Mike]

Yeah I really don't believe anything that Reddit post is suggesting. In the end I think of this like I do most conspiracy theories...

It's easier to blame what happened on outside circumstances and think someone higher up decided to change the way it was going to be then admit that likely Bungie just didn't know how to tell the story they wanted and screwed up.

Personally I'm not surprised I always thought that Halo has a great expanded universe but the story told within the games alone isn't anywhere near as interesting, much like Destiny.

 

[Omnistalgic]

So what your telling me is Destiny will never be anything close to Halo...

Oh well, I have almost everything I want with PS4/3DS, might as well add one more console to the mix when Halo releases. I do love the shooting in Destiny and that's what makes Halo so much fun, add on good story and truly skill based and better designed levels seems pretty awesome to me.

Destiny is like my Halo warm-up lol..

Cool story bro..

 

[RMI]

Put me in the "i'm having fun with the game but wish the story wasn't lacking so much" camp.

Same, I hope they put the grimoire cards into an in game menu in the future, or maybe just work the info into the story. Wishful thinking, I know.

 

[PanicFreak]

My problem with the story was that the conflicts with the Fallen and the Hive are halted to deal with the Vex.

They didn't need either of those races in the game and the story could have been the same.

 

[PrivateWHudson]

I'm thinking about starting an LP of Destiny where I put up Grimoire cards for the locations/enemies/characters I interact with and try to put the story that is there together a bit.

Anyone interested in something like that? Is there a way for me to record gameplay on my PS4 and get it to my PC?

Seriously, if you think you will really do this and read all of the Grimoire cards, you should find a way to isolate just the readings. A database with someone reading the cards so players can just click a link and listen to the card they just picked up as they are playing would be fantastic.

 

[Twilight Gap]

My problem with the story was that the conflicts with the Fallen and the Hive are halted to deal with the Vex.

They didn't need either of those races in the game and the story could have been the same.

oh no, the fallen are doing something bad
forget the fallen, the hive are doing something worse
forget the fallen and hive, the vex are going to consume the galaxy
forget the vex for a minute while we fight the cabal so that we can fight the vex again later

nothing wrong with multiple races of course, but there was hardly any mesh or motivation that strung the shifting encounters together in a meaningful way.

 

[MrDanger88]

This sounds like a bunch of speculation.

Speculation or not, Destiny's story is still a forgettable pile of cards no one will go to a website and read.

 

[Badlucktroll]

I remember seeing a cutscene (its even in the Angry Joe review) (jump to 12:18 to see it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzopWRXK_r4

This isn't even in the final game is it? The character says "Why is the city breathing down my neck). Why the hell did they cut this stuff out?

 

[McLargepants]

Pretty sure he was referencing the Awoken Queen bit. Your character even says "Your Grace" as an obvious nod to GoT, it was painfully cringeworthy.

"Your Grace" is the way you address the King or Queen orally in at least the United Kingdom, so definitely not a GoT reference.

 

[Hindle]

I'm off the theory that Bungie came up with a load of great ideas, dreams and concepts, and for a while Bungie kept trying to incorporate these ideas into a cohesive whole. So anyway it gets to May 2013 and they realise shit, we still don't have any idea how to fit everything in. Jan 2014 comes along and they start to panic and cut a tonne of content.

All speculation just like the article, but hey.

 

[Klyka]

Can you point me to these Grimoire cards? I skimmed them all, on the highly awesome http://destiny-grimoire.info/, and didn't see anything like a deeper insight into the Collapse and the identity of the Traveller.

I'm at work so I can't really look for all of them but this one right here http://destiny-grimoire.info/#Card-106050 is

Spoiler

actually Rasputin talking. Basically he saw that he could not defeat the Darkness if he had to care about also protecting humanity, so he actually started the collapse to give himself time and to get rid of his burden. "The Gardener" is the Traveler, who was found on Mars above the Black Garden, hence "The Gardener". There's also another card from Old Russia I think where the AI mind of the colony ship there talks about "The Tyrant" who is supposed to be Rasputin. And on Mars in the missions "The Buried City" at the end you find an AI that is immediately taken over by Rasputin at the end of the mission and he basically silences it and takes full control of it.

 

[Klyka]

Seriously, if you think you will really do this and read all of the Grimoire cards, you should find a way to isolate just the readings. A database with someone reading the cards so players can just click a link and listen to the card they just picked up as they are playing would be fantastic.

Well I don't know if I have the voice for it, but if I had someone who knows how to do that database/website stuff, I wouldn't mind reading things.

 

[EGM1966]

I think you might be onto something here. Looking at Destiny in the traditional FPS sense yeah the story is shit, but looking at it from this point of view gives me a better perspective. You're dumped into a strange world with lore you don't quite understand, but you get snippets of it here and there and you are wanting to know more. Destiny seems like the kind of game that wants to tell the player so much, through immersion and chatter with Ghost.

If this approach is what Bungie were trying to do, I don't think they executed it very well. A poster in another thread created a great mockup of how in game story information could have been displayed (it was a bit like Metroid Prime.) Would have been great to have used Ghost as an information resource within the game, building the universe for the player through direct interaction with items or places.

I think giving the players the choice of diving into the lore within the in game universe, would have led to a better story outcome for players. We could have had threads on GAF discussing the rich lore and trying to piece things together based on in game information, which is one of the reasons I love this place - passionate and knowledgeable posters who know their shit and can explain it better for luddites like me.

Yeah it's the execution that's the issue (either way).

I pretty much believe they did deliberately take this route thinking it would work better with their goal to have a very long running franchise and gameplay that whether solo, coop or competitive was based on repeatable individual elements with levelling and loot being the real goals.

Ultimately the game clearly invites you to replay everything at increasingly harder levels to level up so you can repeat the cycle.

But I think the execution is weak. They could have presented more in game vs offline and yeah I saw the examples you note; that would have been better than the app.

It's interesting though: they clearly did try and design something they thought would work well in the heavy online console market post Halo, COD and others and clearly noting the MMO design ethos underpinning stuff like WoW and Guild Wars. Borderlands and Team Fortress 2 were also clearly considered.

I don't think they nailed it by any stretch but I don't think they failed to deliver a classic plot such as Halo had either (outside MP) because I don't think that was the goal in the end; and you can't fail at something you're not attempting really.