So we were playing some 6v6 yesterday and the topic of Grimoire came up and after we were done playing, I got a message from a guardian that my point on the Grimoire hadn't been something they'd thought of and I thought I'd post it here to see what everyone else thinks. We actually had an amazing discussion about this for a #destinytruthcast at one point, but sadly the audio was lost before we could put it up.
We all know that the lack of story in-game has been one of Destiny's greatest weaknesses since launch. TTK was an improvement, but most of the lore is locked away on the grimoire cards that only exist outside of the game. There have been many great ideas posted by guardians on the forums on how to go about getting that lore into the game, one of which is the idea of an in-game archive that we can go to and read or hear the lore of how we ended up in The Last City, battling the Darkness and trying to save humanity.
I've always loved this idea and still think it is something that Bungie should consider for Destiny 2, particularly since we actually battled through an archive on Venus. We've heard referenced the Archive on old Aggra, wouldn't that be a perfect opportunity to built an in-game Grimoire?
However, the Grimoire doesn't completely reside outside of the game. One of the defining moments of playing Destiny for me was running the Praedyth's Ghosts mission. Anyone who ran it knows that as you collect the ghost fragments, Praedyth speaks to you through time and tells you what became of he and Kabr's fireteam. It is completely the embodiment of the Grimoire in the game itself and it is spine chilling (or at least for me) chasing his ghost through the Vault.
And it's not the first time we experienced that in the game. The first moment of true grimoire history for me was in The Dark Below as we made our way across the moon and Eris told us of her Fireteam's ill-fated journey. Every time I played that misson, it always struck a chord with me as she told how they camped in the abandoned moon base before pressing on and it gave the moon a life and real history that to this day, I always think of that when I see that base.
That's how I think the grimoire could be implemented into Destiny 2. In the story missions themselves with characters giving us the history of what happened, but also give us more exploration and put things like the ghost fragments in all the zones and missions that we can search for and unlock the history of these places we go to now just to mindlessly kill enemies as we grind for gear.
Destiny 2 should be MUCH less about going to planets just to grind and forever searching for new gear to replace what we love and much more about having awesome things to do with the gear we have and planets that we WANT to go to because they're cool as -blam!- and there's so much story, history and mystery to go back and explore.
If every mission had the depth of content (both in size of the Vault itself and the richness of story) as Paradox when running the ghosts, there is no doubt in my mind Destiny 2 could be the greatest game ever made. And the story already exists, it just needs to be put into the game for us to search out :)
[spoiler]and less gravity on the moon[/spoiler]
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You mean like anyother game that has a story with cut scenes to explain the story? Too bad they lost Joe Staten! If they scrapped the supercut and didn't listen to Joe, what makes you think they'll listen to you or somehow develop simple/basic story telling/writing skills that so many other producers have been using since donkey kong!?