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I think Destiny might be stealthily the worst sci-fi story on the planet. This is a piece of media in which everything is the most obvious slot-in cliche it could possibly be. The Guardians. The Light. The Darkness. Then they hire great voice actors to deliver the most cornball dialogue I've ever heard in my life, and the music and the visuals and these bombastic action sequences are trying their best to prop up this barebones, cut and paste plot, but look at the text of the thing and actually imagine it as a real text, and I think it might be the worst it has ever been. I've watched anime. I've played lots of video games. I've seen many cartoons. To my eye, this is worse than the prequels, worse than Twilight, worse than any cartoon I've ever seen. The following is said in this game like it's a serious, dramatic moment: quote:The Light lives in all places....In all things...you can block it...even try to trap it...but the Light always finds it's way.  This game is rated T for Teen, right? It's not made for extremely young children? Is it just me? Am I the crazy one? Is Destiny written in such a way that it just makes me roll my eyes harder than they've ever been before? I mean, I know the story is just there to hold the parts where you shoot guns at aliens together, but that's true of a lot of games, and to me, it's never been this bad.
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Nov 19, 2020 08:02
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If you think Destiny's bad wait till you hear about their child.
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Nov 19, 2020 08:56
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I won't diss it too hard because I didn't beat any of the Destiny games. Barely got more than 30 minutes in on destiny, but it kind of felt like it didn't really rock the boat conceptually and to me was just another first person shooter with a sci fi veneer over the top in a vast ocean of generic FPSes. So what you're saying, OP, is I should finally get around to playing it?
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Nov 19, 2020 09:10
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I had the same feeling after beating the Destiny 2 campaign at release. It's just loving embarrassing. Halo was one thing, but Destiny is just such a what the gently caress of blandness that I don't even know where to begin.
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Nov 19, 2020 14:24
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I booted up destiny 1 to play with my partner since she’s only played destiny 2, and yeah the story is painfully bad. I have put many hundreds of hours into these games despite the lovely story, time wasting grinds, and thousands of different currencies I can’t stop buying silver dust, help my family is dying I read that they had some cliche like the traveller was evil all along and changed it at the last minute, which is why all the poo poo is so disjointed and slapped into the lazy grimoire cards
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Nov 19, 2020 16:29
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Good ol' Dinklebot Destiny is serious case of executive meddling. A year before release they presented a supercut of the story to the CEO who hated it, had them trash the whole thing and stitch together the existing cutscenes into a completely new "story" which never quite came together. And then they just ran with it. The first game did have some cool bits in the text-based web companion you unlocked by finding things in game, but they never tied it back to the game itself in any substantial way. It really is amazing how much Destiny fails to rise above its own mediocrity on any front.
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Nov 19, 2020 16:31
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Some Goon posted:Good ol' Dinklebot Oh my god dinklebot ruled. I will miss you old friend
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Nov 19, 2020 17:12
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El Generico posted:The following is said in this game like it's a serious, dramatic moment: That's still not as bad as FF13 including the line "Your name is Hope, you give us hope."
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Nov 19, 2020 18:15
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Anthem was worse, but they're both Sci-fi By TV Executive Committee
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Nov 19, 2020 19:21
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it's not just the story, it's just about everything about the game, from the visuals, to the character design, to the gameplay design, both Destiny games are the most injection-molded poo poo I've ever seen and as a Good Opinions Haver and Part-Time Sex Haver I cannot in good conscience recommend them for anybody over the age of 16
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Nov 19, 2020 19:29
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The stuff about The Traveler is neat but it’s nowhere near the actual game. I did not play the first game, so starting out with D2 was insane. What the hell is anything in this game. Cosmodrome? Traveler? Wizards? It’s all played straight. They kept the dude who names things incredibly dramatically though. Whoever that is rules. All the proper nouns and locations are pleasant phrases. Their best work was in Halo with “Pillar of Autumn” and “Silent Cartographer”
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Nov 19, 2020 20:30
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Some Goon posted:Destiny is serious case of executive meddling. A year before release they presented a supercut of the story to the CEO who hated it, had them trash the whole thing and stitch together the existing cutscenes into a completely new "story" which never quite came together. And then they just ran with it. It's hard to overstate just how much lasting impact that that last-minute reconfigure apparently had. That change threw them into a story ("story") tailspin that they've never really managed to recover from; with this fall's expansion they've only now gotten around to reintroducing the Exo Stranger from D1's base campaign AND the whole "Is the Traveler really purely benevolent?" thread, 5 years after the fact. I don't think it's possible to tell a genuinely good or engaging story in an ongoing MMO-style game, though, and I also don't think you need to, largely because you've got players running the same missions and raids week after week, running on into years. They'll eventually just treat all of it as background noise. Whenever my radio crackles and a fuzzy disembodied voice starts spewing a Proper Noun Salad my eyes glaze over. (More accurately, I just ignore it entirely, because I'm typically listening to a podcast rather than the game.) The mechanics work for me first and foremost, with the setting a distant second. That's what keeps me coming back. But yes having your entire series be based around the conflict between The Light and The Darkness and having everybody speak those terms in every other sentence with Shakespearean gravitas is extremely goofy. Also The Hive completely suck, get them out of my game forever well why not posted:They kept the dude who names things incredibly dramatically though. Whoever that is rules. All the proper nouns and locations are pleasant phrases. Their best work was in Halo with “Pillar of Autumn” and “Silent Cartographer” "In Amber Clad"
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Nov 19, 2020 22:52
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Destiny 2 is crappier Warframe. Warframe isn't even like legit good, it's just very funny and fun. Destiny 2 is a dullness elemental.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:55
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destiny has some incredible lore (by goon author general battuta) but the whole game feels like they had this concept for a story-driven, cinematic sci-fi epic FPS... which they then had to force into a looter-shooter MMO game and it just doesn't work at all. i find the world interesting and the actual gunplay really fun but the game itself is just a slog. it doesn't help that they keep doing things like recasting characters. the biggest of these was the ghost which, sure, dinklage was pretty flat and monotone but he was playing a weird robot, and replaced him with nolan north who plays ghost like a cowardly, nerdy child. oh, and they also cut content from the game and do very little to handhold new players ever since they removed the red war campaign. it's just weird decision after weird decision. like, why do they have six different voice actors for the PC guardian when the character has maybe a dozen lines? it feels like destiny could've made a great halo-like or even a RPG, but what we got is this weird jury-rigged bastard child.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:07
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Sanguinia posted:Anthem was worse, but they're both Sci-fi By TV Executive Committee Anthem was almost a word for word Destiny rip-off. Like goddamn. You’re supposed to change someone of the answers before turning your work in, BioWare. And now Anthem 2.0 has just stolen Destiny’s UI. I saw it and I was loving howling through the walls.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:09
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Horizon Burning posted:destiny has some incredible lore (by goon author general battuta) but the whole game feels like they had this concept for a story-driven, cinematic sci-fi epic FPS... which they then had to force into a looter-shooter MMO game and it just doesn't work at all. i find the world interesting and the actual gunplay really fun but the game itself is just a slog. you literally have to google "how to play Destiny 2 story" to figure out that you need to speak to an NPC in a remote area of the game's base (which is the endgame hub, because the game assumes you want to start at the end). If you don't know what "The Red War" is, you might start one of the other four or so campaigns, which would make no sense. But, The Red War (the "main" campaign) doesn't have much intro, at all. It starts out like you're watching episode 8 of a 10 episode TV series. Context clues do not extend to what a Ghost is, what a Traveler is, who on earth the bad guy is, none of that. It's like starting Star Wars at "I Am Your Father". There's absolutely no information for people who haven't played Destiny 1. And to make it worse, D2 is on PC, while D1 is not. I played D2 at launch and was just baffled. There's a clear bad guy in the first few hours, but then you're hanging out with The Fallen (bugmen?) and the Vexx (robotomen) and The Hive (demons bugmen) and it's very, very confusing. Who are these haters? The Fallen and The Hive are also named very similarly. There's good story stuff in there, epic sci-fi space opera stuff. But it's just mired in Bungie being huge fans of their own poo poo and absolutely drenched in terrible MMO stuff. I just wanted to play the story parts but you basically don't progress unless you do MMO nonsense.
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Nov 20, 2020 00:54
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i went into destiny 2 blind and understood the initial set up well enough. i'm some kind of superpower dude who can't die and has space magic, the traveler gave me those powers, this space warthog dude wants those powers, i hate ghost and want him to go away forever, etc. but it was the moment you hit the EDZ that poo poo just went completely sideways. what's the deal with the fallen, what's life like on earth, what's the hive, what year is it, etc. then it adds in vex and taken and different planets and... previously, at launch, the game used to lock you into the red war and you had a different hub than the city. i tried to get some friends to play destiny 2 with me when it came onto steam, but simply getting them into the red war was way more difficult than it should've been. i don't have a clue why they also brought in what i think is the destiny 1 opening into destiny 2 which somehow explains even less and doesn't even have a hook like 'beat up the space warthog dudes and get your powers back.' just about every decision bungie makes with destiny baffles me on a level i've never quite experienced from a major game developer.
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Nov 20, 2020 01:05
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yeah the space warthog plot setup part is ok by itself but the extra factions are just ... chilling doing desthtmagicks on earth and it’s not particularly pressing? Until it is, sometimes. The minute to minute jumping shooting and looting is good. It looks and plays great. The music is good, the UI is nice. Everything is pretty well designed. I just wish they took all that great design and made it a shooter, rather than a shooter with Diablo grafted onto it. Titan, Mars, EDZ and the other planets all look great and unique. Shame it's an MMO basically. A great game is buried in there. I actually don't think OP is spot on that it's full of cliche. The setting is a bit of a mishmash, but the weird semi-religious sci-fi is relatively fresh, and the aesthetic is fairly distinct for the genre. You're not saving princesses or anything. The stuff they’re good at, they excel at. Namely, gun sounds and proper nouns. Whatever “New Pacific Arcology” is, it is pleasant to read as a phrase. Same as “Rasputin Protocol” or “Uninstall Destiny 2”. well why not fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 20, 2020 01:38
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My favorite D2 gun name is the "Byronic Hero" hand cannon, because the flavor text is simply "Brood, baby, brood."
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Nov 20, 2020 01:55
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well why not posted:yeah the space warthog plot setup part is ok by itself but the extra factions are just ... chilling doing desthtmagicks on earth and it’s not particularly pressing? Until it is, sometimes. pretty much, yeah. that's why i wonder what destiny originally began as. i know that the series had to jury rig together the story of the first game and i think the head writer's initial outline was vastly different (exo stranger worked for rasputin, who was an exo?) but i wonder what the original design was for the game itself. was it always intended to be this quasi-mmo looter shooter? i feel like it wasn't. feels like it should've been a halo-esque game with a robust multiplayer mode of co-op scenarios (strikes) and crazy dungeons (raids) and pvp (crucible) or something. i'm not sure the open world mmo elements really add anything to it at all. it's closely related to how most of the content is for up to four people, and then raids are six.
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Nov 20, 2020 02:28
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Tulip posted:Destiny 2 is crappier Warframe. The reveal at the end of Warframe's first cinematic quest was awesome in a way I'll remember for the rest of my life, and actually somewhat interesting science fiction IMO. Granted it's not exactly high art, but it managed to be so much more than any other multiplayer service-type game I've ever played. I also think Warframe's weird alien biotech aesthetic, despite its complete lack of aliens, is pretty neat. I only play it for a little while every few months when new content drops though. El Generico fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 20, 2020 02:40
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i've never understood the praise for warframe. the art direction is like this weird ugly anime mess. and the story and world is far more impenetrable than destiny's is.
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Nov 20, 2020 02:53
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Look at all Bungie's games and they re-use the same themes. Myth has the light, the darkness, and even the nine. A lot of the warmind poo poo probably is related to Marathon. I played way too many hours of Destiny 1 and 2. Stopped caring since seasonal content (was the first forges? i forget) started being the norm.
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Nov 20, 2020 02:56
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Horizon Burning posted:i've never understood the praise for warframe. the art direction is like this weird ugly anime mess. and the story and world is far more impenetrable than destiny's is. I like my hard sci-fi weird and ugly, Warframe stuff looks genuinely alien in a way that's really cool to me (although, anime? I don't see that at all). And I'm also a sucker for impenetrable stories, the feeling that if you keep digging in deeper you'll uncover more about what's going on that's under the surface. So, Warframe is well suited to me, but I can totally see why lots of people wouldn't like it.
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Nov 20, 2020 03:19
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Sanguinia posted:Anthem was worse, but they're both Sci-fi By TV Executive Committee Part of me is morbidly fascinated by Anthem because it was the altar on which BioWare was forced to kill Mass Effect upon at the edict of EA when literally everything about it from its very inception was a blaring red light going BAD IDEA, namely how they were chasing the same rabbit that Destiny had already caught, killed, disemboweled and got bored of two years prior. Also all those videos Jim Sterling did dunking on what a piece of poo poo it was. I can't see the phrase "live service" without stretching it out in my head in a nasally annoying voice "liiiiiiive seeeeerviceeeeee".
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Nov 20, 2020 03:22
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Horizon Burning posted:i've never understood the praise for warframe. the art direction is like this weird ugly anime mess. and the story and world is far more impenetrable than destiny's is. Because it actually subverts a lot of expectations and norms almost as often as it just rolls with sci-fi cliches. It's absolutely convoluted and presented in a terrible way though. As the developers budgets and favorite way of telling stories shifted they went from 1. Dark Souls style incomplete story in a morally grey world where players fill in details based on item descriptions or hidden bits of lore from scanning items, to 2. Limited time events that added stuff to the solar map, to 3. Cinematic story missions with RPG style conversation trees, and finally to 4. Open world quest hubs where gaining faction rep unlocks things and changes the world, along with limited time 'season' stories. It has the weird sort of problem games like WoW ran into before they began vaulting older content, where to a new player some parts of the map unlocked from the beginning are set where the metaplot is 'now' others are various points in the past. Especially since they add the content to where it 'makes sense' so if something happened on Earth it goes on Earth, even though Earth is the starting zone. Edit But also it's just dumb goofy fun for when people enjoy mindlessly murdering a million aliens or space marines. I don't know where Destiny 2 stands now, but the game hypes you as some ultra powerful space wizard, and in the original story campaign the enemy grunts can outdo your every gimmick better than you except for health regen and unlimited respawns. The stealth mobs have cooler mobility and kung fu than hunters, wizards have more magic than warlocks, and that dude with a shield can block all damage when he has it up, strafe, rotate and even shoot while carrying his shield, unlike a Titan. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 20, 2020 04:07
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Horizon Burning posted:i've never understood the praise for warframe. the art direction is like this weird ugly anime mess. and the story and world is far more impenetrable than destiny's is. I brought up Warframe because it's not ultimately that good to emphasize that Destiny sucks. That said Warframe accomplishes two things that are genuinely great: 1. Movement, just moving through the world feels great 2. Optimization, game will look great on terrible specs It's a harder thing to say with like objectivity but at least one of the major story arcs (Fortuna) goes insanely hard about financial politics and classism and I love it. nine-gear crow posted:Part of me is morbidly fascinated by Anthem because it was the altar on which BioWare was forced to kill Mass Effect upon at the edict of EA when literally everything about it from its very inception was a blaring red light going BAD IDEA, namely how they were chasing the same rabbit that Destiny had already caught, killed, disemboweled and got bored of two years prior. Anthem rules as a history lesson because it's very clear that Bioware's management strategy of "if we ride all of our employees so hard they all quit, that means we got all the good juice out of them by release" had finally exhausted itself.
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Nov 20, 2020 05:37
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Played some more d1 last night and the weird structure of the story does super harm to how fun the game is. Go to orbit. Loading. Go to tower. Loading. Get some quest with a one liner and a sentence to read. Go to orbit. Loading. Select mission. Loading with some voiceover. Land. What the gently caress am I doing I guess I’ll follow the quest marker and just kill enemies in my way. This is the fun part. 5-10 minutes later the mission is done and you’re back in orbit after a few ghost lines about some random poo poo you just killed. Like nothing is connected! It’s so frustrating
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Nov 20, 2020 17:33
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This, to some degree, was a directive of the executive mandated re-write, which required players to be able to go through the planets/missions in a non-linear manner.
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Nov 20, 2020 18:48
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El Generico posted:I think Destiny might be stealthily the worst sci-fi story on the planet. This is a piece of media in which everything is the most obvious slot-in cliche it could possibly be. The Guardians. The Light. The Darkness. Then they hire great voice actors to deliver the most cornball dialogue I've ever heard in my life, and the music and the visuals and these bombastic action sequences are trying their best to prop up this barebones, cut and paste plot, but look at the text of the thing and actually imagine it as a real text, and I think it might be the worst it has ever been. I've watched anime. I've played lots of video games. I've seen many cartoons. To my eye, this is worse than the prequels, worse than Twilight, worse than any cartoon I've ever seen. Don't worry, you're not the only one. Some dude made an entire series on how the Destiny and everything released after the base game poo poo the bed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpFxsFNGsNU
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Nov 21, 2020 21:50
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I like Warframe cause one of the most powerful living beings is just a big shawarma tower that uses its magical powers to just regrow the parts of it that are cut off to feed a quaint tribal village. It also probably used to be human before becoming The Shawarma God-tower. That's kinda glossed over in the game's plot so it somewhat falls in to the same weird storytelling trap as Destiny but then you constantly have poo poo like a villain yelling at you that "your Lotus will never love you like I love my tube men!" I don't like Destiny cause I've heard some interesting things about its lore but the only interesting character I ever saw in game was a fat guy with a palace full of meaty boys.
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Nov 22, 2020 11:58
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OP you have to consider that video games break people's brains, making them believe even the most mediocre of trash is the best thing ever. As this is the august Star Wars forum, just look at what happened when KotOR came out. It was heralded as not just a great video game story but the best story ever told in any medium, even those movies it was based on. Is it? Well, let's consider the central plot twist: This mysteriously missing super-villain everyone's always talking about turns out to be the player character. Oh no! The horror! Or tragedy? Or what is it? How does the player character feel about this? We don't know. Probably nothing. Compare to the plot twist in the holy movie when Luke learns Vader is his dad, we can tell it's a pretty big deal for him. We can compare it to another movie with a big twist, The Others. They live in a haunted house but it turns out they were the ghosts all along. This happens to put the whole world of the movie into a new perspective, why everything is so strange, what it meant when the husband returned and left, etc. In KotOR we just get a flashback of people repeating the same things they previously said to make sure subtlety doesn't get in the way of us getting it, the cool twist. Not only isn't it a big deal for anyone else (many of whom already knew), we don't even know if it's a big deal for the player character. Despite being the protagonist, the player character for all intents and purposes is not a character at all. It doesn't make things better that it's a straight-forward amnesia plot, set in an ancient aliens story so cliche it had been done at least three times already just in the Star Wars universe. Then the whole "kick puppy/ But the question is why? Why do games have this effect on people? Well we could simply say it's because gamers are uncultured swine that at best only consume equally troperific comics and fantasy stories. But that's the boring answer. Perhaps it is because they have to put some effort into it. Maybe getting bite-sized bits of story portioned out to them as rewards makes them more invested in what the next bit will be. Perhaps the chicken that has to press a red button in an experiment to get a few seeds comes to love that button, even though its true purpose is to strip that chicken of its innermost secrets. Maybe less hilarious explanations are also possible. Mooey Cow fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 14:30
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I've always thought that the element where the player feels in control creates a level of narrative investment that just can't be beat. It's very easy in most passive media to create tension levels that cause the audience to just check out, either by going too high or too low, and even then the best you're really gonna get is "I am witnessing another person's actions" rather than "I am doing these actions."
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Nov 22, 2020 17:48
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My favorite bit is how the game opens with some astronauts taking humanity's first steps onto Mars... carrying vaguely AK-47ish looking rifles. I suppose to be fair that actually would be justified in the world of Destiny where Mars turns out to be overrun by monsters, but it's still a ridiculously goofy note to start the game on. Destiny kind of reminds me of some scifi/fantasy 80s cartoon with a super descriptive opening song that makes you think there's this huge detailed world with a Tolkienesque library of lore underpinning it just waiting to be discovered, but it turns out that the opening song is literally all there is to it. The 3-5 protagonists fight the monster of the week each using their own toyetic weapon/vehicle while the overarching plot against the evil Lord Butthole is never advanced an inch. JethroMcB posted:I don't think it's possible to tell a genuinely good or engaging story in an ongoing MMO-style game, though, Careful with that kind of talk, lest you summon The Accursed Ones.
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Nov 23, 2020 00:54
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Tulip posted:I've always thought that the element where the player feels in control creates a level of narrative investment that just can't be beat. It's very easy in most passive media to create tension levels that cause the audience to just check out, either by going too high or too low, and even then the best you're really gonna get is "I am witnessing another person's actions" rather than "I am doing these actions." That was one of my original big complaints with Destiny 2. They went 'hey we have Nathan Fillion, let's slap him everywhere" while the plot kinda just happened around your now-mute character who just did whatever they were told, the hired gun for the vanguard's will.
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Nov 23, 2020 20:28
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The weird lore snippets are the only good thing about Destiny as a whole and much of that is thanks to the longtime Bungie head writer and his team, all of who got pushed out of the company over the course of the game's 2013 reboot/rework and the development of D1's expansions... but Bungie sure did coast on that material for years afterwards - right up until the point where it became very clear that the game's story will never live up to the promise of all that background world-building and teasing. What that specific point is will vary from person to person, but everyone will eventually reach it. What's left, then, other than a tediously grindy lite-MMO that has good shooting mechanics but constantly gets sabotaged by its own developers on an almost clockwork-like schedule?
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Nov 27, 2020 12:18
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I heard about the new raid in destiny 2 and it sounds amazing and cool. Too bad bingos (this was autocorrect from bungie and I’m leaving it) puts all its effort into making these cool raids dripping with big mood energy instead of making the base experience fun and engaging for everyone.
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Nov 27, 2020 12:53
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If Destiny really was a bunch of cartoonish and embarrassing tropes then maybe it wouldn't be so boring.
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Nov 27, 2020 19:10
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Tulip posted:Warframe isn't even like legit good This is one of the wrongest posts ever made on these dead gay forums. Warframe is good and it gets better with each update
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Nov 28, 2020 03:23
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Bogus Adventure posted:This is one of the wrongest posts ever made on these dead gay forums. tbf the mechanics are pretty impenetrable to a new player and if no one tells you to rush to the basic mods, or gifts them to you and explains that you wanna ditch the mk1s asap it can be very boring to play, especially if you do the logical thing and start on all those quests you get right at earth and mars or go into the open world stuff early.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:31
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