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Bungie “Failed Many Times” With Destiny 2 Storytelling To Succeed In The Witch Queen

The Witch Queen Expansion, Fate 2The latest chapter of the chapter, is the culmination of the game’s story approach that developer Bungie has been honing for some time. Between the expansion and Destiny 2’s recent seasonal offerings, The game’s storytelling is the best it’s ever had. But the seven-year history of Life and Destiny 2 also had their share of narrative failures — and Bungie needed those failures to hit this point, the studio said.

In the past, Destiny 2 has seen the story of undead heroes battling god-like aliens split into discrete and mostly unrelated chapters. However, the Sorceress Queen was something else–a conclusion of the themes that the developer has woven throughout the game for many yearsand a story built through the development of seasonal episodes that have been present in the game since Fall 2020.

Now playing: Opinion: The Witch Queen’s best campaign is Destiny 2

Now in its fifth year, the current Destiny 2 story feels radically different from what was offered with just one expansion before. The seasons of Year 4 are thematically linked, the stories revolve around different aspects and characters of the game world, but ultimately all are pieces of the Queen’s in-building puzzle. Witch. Its story is like one that can only happen as a direct-serve game or MMO, where the game world changes and evolves over time, and the story evolves with it as well.

That hasn’t always been the case, however, and despite the vast, engaging, and well-written lore offerings in and out of the game, the narrative has long remained one of the key elements. weakest of the Destiny series. The series’ narrative improvement has steadily increased over time – especially with the original Destiny’s The Taken King expansion, which brings more lore to the forefront; with Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion, focusing heavily on the characters’ thoughts and feelings by telling a revenge story; and with the transition to seasonal storytelling, bringing weekly stories to the game. The most significant improvement came last year, with consistently strong seasonal stories and expansion in Beyond the light focuses on ideological conflict as much as military conflict.

“It took time for Destiny to understand what Destiny was to be, and then it took time to make Destiny what we knew it was supposed to be,” said Guillaume Colomb, senior narrative lead at Bungie, said in a recent roundtable interview that involved GameSpot and other outlets. “At first, the game went in a lot of different directions and I think in their hearts they knew that needed to be done, but there aren’t many other games like it, so it just takes time to get there.” And I think that’s why Destiny is so unique and special, because it’s not like we could take that idea and make the game right away.It took seven years, because it took seven years. to do something so nice – because we have to fail a few times to understand what’s the right way to do things.”

According to Colomb, what Destiny 2 players are seeing right now is the image the Bungie developers had in mind when they conceived the game nearly a decade ago. There have been successes along the way, he said, and those have helped Bungie chart a course in a largely unexplored format for telling stories in a video game.

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There’s also more going on as Destiny 2 developers and writers are trying different storytelling approaches, as Blake Battle, head of The Witch Queen project, explains. The story, like all aspects of Destiny, was refined through the developer’s intentions, as well as feedback from the player community.

“I certainly don’t think the story of Fate [as a game] It’s a plan at best, I think it’s an ongoing relationship story with our players, and it’s one of the key components of a live game,” he said. ” Starting at D1, we’ve continued to give feedback and see the game players want. “

There are other factors that are also working in Bungie’s favor. Over time, the studio has found better ways to tell Destiny 2’s story, especially with its episodic seasonal approach. Those things allow writers to tell more personal stories to the game’s characters, focusing on a few stories at a time. Narrative director Adam Grantham also said that setting an end date for Destiny 2’s current story – Bungie has announced two more expansions for the game, Lightfall and The Final Shape – has allowed the studio a lot of consideration. carefully about the location of the story. Part of what makes The Witch Queen feel impactful and important to Destiny 2’s overall story is that Bungie was able to set up a final confrontation with Savathun in over a year.

Bungie has been working on developing Savathun’s story for about 18 months, said Grantham, and that level of planning offers a lot of opportunity to lay the groundwork for the in-game expansion before it actually hits eye. But another key aspect of The Witch Queen’s story, which is slightly different from what Bungie has done in the past, is its ability to draw from story elements previously devoted to lore and bring them to the forefront. head. The Sorceress Queen’s campaign heavily deals with the origins of the Hive, lore elements introduced as far back as 2015’s The Taken King, but mostly existing in optional text that the player must learn and read. The story campaign makes those elements part of the main story, expanding the universe for players unfamiliar with the lore and drawing connections to the current story for those. That’s a big part of what makes The Witch Queen’s story meaningful to longtime players, says Battle.

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“We are fortunate enough to be in Destiny, where we have been able to reap so much of what has been learned over the past seven years,” Grantham said.

Pulling those lore strings has made Destiny 2’s world a little more cohesive, but while setting up for Savathun’s return to The Taken King and possibly related tidbits have been posted. loads during the vanilla release of Destiny 2, it doesn’t mean that lore was written with a future expansion in mind.

“Destiny is a live game, we always have to think about nurturing the lore, and we don’t necessarily have to create new lore thinking,” Oh, that thing in three years, it’s going to be. into a big release,” said Colomb. “We hope that it’s a pretty good lore, I hope we’ll use it, and sometimes we think it and we’re wrong. And sometimes something just doesn’t matter. at the time, but suddenly there’s a lot of relevance to the release that we’re working on as a theme that fits that. So we’re always looking at the lore that we have and we’re always trying to. trying to create new lore and introduce it in a way that expands the universe and other people might, in the future, learn the stories.”

Grantham likened Bungie’s approach to Destiny 2 to a quote by novelist George RR Martin, who says he thinks of writers as falling into two camps: gardeners and architects. Gardeners plant ideas and see what becomes of them; Architects build their stories to more rigid specifications. As for Destiny, both sides are right – The Sorceress Queen is a rebuilt, season-by-season set of stories that eventually culminate in the expansion. But it was also the product of seeds planted years earlier that became something the team might not have expected at the time.

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And that may be why Destiny 2’s story has taken so long to truly take off on its own – and why the outcome has been like nothing else in a video game. Every past failure is a learning experience, and ideas from Destiny’s past serve its future.

“We also needed time to understand the story we wanted to tell, and the world of Destiny is a place that we’re exploring, in a way – a little bit ahead of the players, but still not quite the same. we. understand everything,” Colomb said. “We’re still exploring, and there’s still a lot to discover.”

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