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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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  • If you mention a game beside Destiny it goes in #Gaming. If you mention just Destiny it goes in #Destiny. Anyways, Destiny was obviously trying to replicate FromSoft's brilliant story telling methods.. But they didn't do it right. Not only did they put it all [i]out of game[/i], but honestly their descriptions were really lackluster, and only hidden grimiore, like Dead Ghosts, gave you any real lore. And, they're biggest fault, I think; they gave us [i]too much[/i] information, and info [i]on the wrong stuff[/i]. They didn't explain in the least what the heck the Heart was. Heck! I still don't even know how killing those 3 Minotaurs killed it, or what significance killing it even had! Meanwhile, you're only at the Capra Demon. You aren't going to get lore until later on. But basically, Dark Souls is a story half told, and that's the glory about it! It gives you "this is how it started, this is how it ended, make up the rest". It gives you a sense of realism. You aren't going to know every single event of history just by talking to a few random folk. They gave us just enough info to know about the world, yet still conjure up our own theories about this & that. And they give you a way to look at extended item descriptions [i]in game[/i], so more people are willing to do it. I know the significance of every Soulsborne ending I've seen, and I don't know this because the ending outright says "this is what this'll do" I know because I read item descriptions. And that's a glorious feeling. I know the ending's significance not because the game said it, but because I understand the world. That being said, I actually love Destiny's world! If they showed it better, and it wasn't FPS, I'd probably still love Destiny, but alas.. (and of course, I do love Dark Souls! <3)

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