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.
The Crow was actually referenced in the very first Destiny ViDoc "Pathways Out of Darkness" from February 2013.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
There's a place on Earth that does not appear to be Old Russia:
(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:
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:
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:
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 Im 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. Thats always the case with software, obviously. But I think they found the path.
Gabe:
I have to say that despite the garbage story and the horrible voice acting Im 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.
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.
His last sentence is... interesting.