Published on: Oct 20, 2015 @ 13:15
Update: Supposedly ‘Destiny 2’ is being delayed until 2017.
Kotaku broke a story that gave us a peek behind the curtain on the development of Destiny’s storyline. The story we were served when the game launched was like cold leftovers from a meal that was sent back to the kitchen by senior staff, a year before launch.
In today’s Destiny, Rasputin doesn’t do much but listen to classical music in a steel bunker on Earth, but in the 2013 version, he would have starred in a more prominent role. Alien Hive would have kidnapped the machine and brought him to their Dreadnaught spaceship, which was later cut from vanilla Destiny and moved to The Taken King.
Originally, this Hive ship would have been part of the main story. “The entire last third of the game took place on the Dreadnaught with you rescuing Rasputin,” said one person who worked on the game.
[…] The team ultimately decided to focus it around a single major map—the Hive ship that had been cut from vanilla Destiny—as well as a new public space on Mars, complete with strikes and a new raid. That entire last Mars chunk was later cut and passed to Activision subsidiary High Moon Studios to develop for Destiny’s full-sized 2016 sequel.
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Does Story Matter?
One can only wonder what the game would have been if it had Taken King’s story at release. My personal experience with the story was “meh” at best, but it didn’t stop me from playing. I agreed that the story could be improved, but it’s not where my focus was. The gameplay was far from weak though, and many will tell you, great gameplay is better than a good story.
The question I would ask is, “Would a solid story have made Destiny a bigger success?”
The relatively low score Destiny on metacritic is often contributed to the weak narrative, and I believe that professional reviewers deducted points from their score because of promises that weren’t immediately met. If Bungie would have entered with a better emphasis on Destiny being a platform for new content and an expanding universe, that score may have be different. The promise from the Call of Duty franchise is clear: here is your improved platform to shoot other people. No questions asked.
Even the story in The Taken King, which is a huge improvement according to most, is just a necessary evil the second time and especially the third time around.
I think it is important to remember that even if Bungie had given us an epic story, it could also mean that the experience may have been narrower. The open-ended nature of the game and the functionality of repeating missions over and over, doesn’t give the writers a lot of room to control their story in the first place. The game is designed to drop you back in the world after you finish the story line and grind your characters to prepare for heroic strikes and the raid. In order for this to make sense, the game has to break your immersion intentionally to tell you, “Hey, here’s what’s next”.
The main story I am looking for in Destiny, is that of my Guardian, me. I personally don’t need Nathan Fillion to tell me how awesome it was that time that my buddy Vince jumped in front of my grenade, bouncing it back into my own face, which eventually caused a wipe in last week’s Nightfall. I also still like to tease my friend Candice about the Strike where she got 4 kills in total but over 88 assists!
This being said, nobody would argue that a better story in Destiny would have added to the experience. Judging by the improvements we got in The Taken King, I think it’s safe to say that Bungie is getting their story back on track, which is promising for future installments in the Travelers Saga.
According to Kotaku, it looks like we might have access to a new raid on Mars in 2016.
The team ultimately decided to focus it around a single major map—the Hive ship that had been cut from vanilla Destiny—as well as a new public space on Mars, complete with strikes and a new raid.
(That entire last Mars chunk was later cut and passed to Activision subsidiary High Moon Studios to develop for Destiny’s full-sized 2016 sequel, a source said. They’re helping Bungie make the game.)
Over the months, Bungie kept rescoping as they looked more realistically at what they could do, and the final version of The Taken King—the one that shipped last month—wound up focusing solely on the Dreadnaught.
Europa was also mentioned in Kotaku’s article. Europa is one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter.
[toggle title=”Jupiter Ghost Fragment Grimoire” state=”close” ]
The largest body lets itself be pushed where it needs to be, seduced into nice, warm loving orbits. Persistence is the key. Seafloors transform and then yank themselves skyward, shattering the icy crust. New worlds awaken in the swirling depths. You build homes around this half-born sun ripped by storms and supersonic wind.
I can’t wait to see what they have to tell in Destiny 2, I’m sure it will entertain me for a good 2% of my time with the game.
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