Halo's plots weren't exactly the best examples of video game storytelling, but at least you could tell what was going on in those games. It's a weird feeling to play through twenty hours of a story and literally have zero idea what actually happened. Yes, it's great that you can go on raids and get loot, but without a backdrop of an effective story, it's hollow. But it clearly wants to emulate MMOs in many, many ways, yet it's missing one of the most important aspects of the genre that's made a game like World of Warcraft so memorable.
It's like if Mass Effect tried to build its universe using codex entries alone.ĭestiny wants to say it isn't an MMO, simply a "shared world shooter," and I think it makes that claim so people can't try to pin it down into one genre, simply inventing one that doesn't really exist. The game makes some minor steps in the direction of universe building with dead Ghosts and Grimoire entries, but most of those aren't even accessible in-game for reasons I in no way understand, and it isn't enough anyway. There are no NPCs to find on patrol, and any secret areas you come across or bosses you fight don't have any solid lore attached to them. The game ignoring story means that there's nothing to discover in Patrol mode other than an endless string of sidequests that have no more than two lines of dialogue attached ("We need this stuff, find it!"). Even Diablo 3's blacksmith has a few interesting tales to tell, for example, despite that game's poor overall story. The only ones you can interact with are vendors, and you can't so much as even ask them about the universe. Not fellow players, given the game's lack of player-to-play communication, but there are also no conversable NPCs. The Tower, for example, is a social hub with no one to socialize with. It's not just that the few cutscenes we're treated too are mundane, and Peter Dinklage's constant rambling about nonsense tech in every new area is grating, it's that the lack of story makes the rest of the game just feel so empty. This seeps into the universe and gameplay as well.
DESTINY PATROL WITH IT SERIES
To see a series with a $500M budget spend so little of it crafting an effective narrative is disheartening. Perhaps I'm particularly troubled by this because I'm such a huge sci-fi fan, whether it's books, shows, movies, or even writing my own novel series.
I have never heard more nonsense sci-fi jargon and vagueries uttered than I have during my time spent with Destiny. But Destiny feels like it's taken several steps back in that department. Video game writing is constantly evolving into being able to tell better and better stories and create more memorable characters. Now that the game has arrived, I can't say I was wrong.Īnyone who has played through story mode in Destiny knows what I'm talking about. Everyone was just faceless helmets spouting sci-fi jargon. I said that from what I'd seen of Destiny, that was shaping up to be an issue in that game as well. Then was Watch Dogs, where Aiden Pearce proved to be one of the most bland, uninteresting leads in recent gaming memory. The first was Titanfall, devoid of any characters other than a few squawking at you on a radio. I previously wrote about how the biggest releases of the year were one by one showing up and failing to become "iconic." I cited a main reason for this as each of these games having a lack of compelling characters. That may sound strange to say, given that Destiny has probably ten times the activities of that game, but for me they both share a common problem of having a beautiful, seemingly interesting sci-fi setting, and doing absolutely nothing with it. Really, it has the central problem of Titanfall. Rather, the problem here is one I feared from a long while back, that Destiny, for all its talk of light and dark and good and evil, seems to lack a soul.