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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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  • Having read all of the destiny Lore, and all of the dark souls lore, having really taken a look at the story that is blatantly presented in both games I feel that I can say that Destiny tried to do what Fromsoft does but implemented it horribly, with a world that isn't built for any sort of environmental story telling. The Story in Dark Souls is told to you by the environment, NPCs, and Item descriptions. All of these provide context for actions, and give you a great sense of what's going on, why it's going on and whose involved by basically straight up telling you. [spoiler]For instance in dark souls 3 I figured out that Aldritch ate the remaining Gods of Anor Londo before I even read his item descriptions and boss name. Because A) I spoke to Hawkwood until he started repeating, and B) I paid attention to the changed design of Anor Londo. What really fermented what Aldritch did was when I found Gwyndolin's chambers empty, except for an over turned chair with some black sludge around it. [/spoiler] Destiny never did anything like that. "Go kill the heart of the Garden" why? "THE DARKNESS" That was the extent of the in game answers. As for the lore well, all the cards say is "What ever it is the vex found that the only logical solution was to praise it as a god, now that is truly terrifying." Okay how is that relevant to what it is and why we have to kill it? It's powerful and in the hands of the bad guy, can't we capture it? Do anything else then send a one guardian against an army of vex? The same race that's known for wiping out entire fireteams of legend? We're never given any reason beyond "It's bad so kill it" Dark souls spoilers ahead [spoiler]I knew Gwyndoline very well from the first game, he was the God of the moon and punishment, hell I served him as a blade of the Darkmoon. I also know everything he did in order to try and keep the peace, he had to hide the fact that gods had abandoned humanity, because he still believed that his father's Plan to save the age of fire would work. So when I found out that Aldritch had eaten my favorite character, you bet I cared! Destiny never did that![/spoiler]

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