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4/27/2016 10:56:38 AM
25

Souls/borne storytelling vs. Destiny storytelling

A lot of people originally heaped praise upon From's breakout RPGs for their minimalist and open-ended storytelling (among several things). I mean, sure, the cutscene for the Bell Gargoyle was entirely unnecessary, but otherwise, From uses minimal cinematics, and instead puts the bulk (if not all) of its written narrative into item descriptions and the occasional character interaction. That's fine, even if, from what I've experienced so far (I can't get past aforementioned -blam!-ing Bell Gargoyles, and am currently focusing on the Capra Demon) it's just a smattering of obvious descriptions - about functional stuff like weaponry or herbs or whatever - with very little actual world-building. What little world-building there is seems to be a collection of proper nouns plucked from thin air and strung together in some irrelevant little tale. Just like Destiny. So many items in Destiny are exactly the same. They'll throw random names or factions or events at you and expect them to mean something. They tend not to. Sure, Grimoire readers may connect the dots and understand more than the rest of us, but I'm sure Bungie is perfectly aware of how flawed an idea it was to put the bulk of the writing somewhere other than [i]in the game itself[/i]. This is, of course, disregarding Destiny's generally pointless, uninformative, and frequently tedious cutscenes. So let's ignore what Bungie gets wrong and focus on that shared method between Souls and Destiny, and why the hell From gets more praise for it than Bungie. I don't know, maybe I had a point earlier with the functional descriptions in Souls, compared with Bungie's attempts at poetry or badassery in many of their descriptions. What say you lot? Also, I don't know how to tag threads about Destiny [i]and[/i] other games... Is it #destiny, or is it #gaming? I imagine I'll just run into mostly fanboy responses in you-know-where.

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  • [quote]I imagine I'll just run into mostly fanboy responses in you-know-where[/quote] You mean here? But on-topic, I think Bungie's lore would have had much better reception if the grimoire cards had simply been in the actual game. That was one of my favorite parts of several different games was museum-style menus or interactive levels where I could goof around and learn more about the setting if I wanted. Forcing me to play on my phone to learn the story is a great way for me to get distracted and end up doing something else instead.

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