Destiny Ending Discussion only - SPOILERS

I will say I enjoyed the ending boss fight, the three statues coming to life and needing to be defeated was kind of fun, I know it was just going off of the 'boss as three forms' trope that is in games, but it's a fun trope and I felt very excited/nervous with each statue that came to life which is a nice feeling when it comes to a boss fight.
It is just that storyline wise it was all meaningless drivel "Oh hey, here is this evil thing, go kill it, oh what you killed it? Okay that's sweet here is a gun I guess."
Somewhere a writer for Mass Effect 3 is going 'Oh thank god, someone made a space game with an ending worse then ours!"

But were the forms even different? If so I couldn't tell. At that point I felt like it was riffing more on the Destiny "Bosses have a ton of health, are super repetitive, and take forever to kill" trope. Don't get me wrong, visually it was quite spectacular, and the fight had some intensity just because of the amount of stuff happening, but it frankly felt like something you'd see from a 2006 era game like Prey.

Except if I recall correctly, Prey's boss fights were more mechanically interesting.

Now that the queen's event details have been revealed cause i figured that would be free story content......man the story in this game is really disappointing. like i hope the next bit of story isnt just in the expansion pack.

@bigsocrates:Oh i totally agree the narrative of destiny is so disjointed it makes little to no lasting impression, which is fucked up for bungie game let alone a $60 product, I finished the game and have very little to no idea what that heart thing was.

I get this feeling they were trying for a Souls series style lore for their game. The difference being that they tried to give you the broader strokes of the story they and expected people to decipher the deeper details, but totally failed in execution, hiding that information on bungie.net was dumb

while i'm not defending their design decision a lot of cool shit is locked behind endgame content (exploding bullets, homing missiles etc).

This is my first experience with a Bungie game (crazy i know) and while i'm pretty disappointed in the games story, its sure as shit fun to play from a mechanics perspective.

If they were aiming for Dark Souls they missed pretty badly. Dark Souls doesn't explain its story in the way most games do but it creates a very specific atmosphere with a lot of weirdness. Destiny is pretty bog standard in terms of its locations. It's very pretty and well made but there's just a lot of...stuff. None of its is particularly remarkable or tells a story through elements of the environment. It's also made much worse by the repetitive grind of Destiny. Dark Souls is meant to be played once, maybe twice, (though some play it more) and there's some backtracking but it's constantly opening up new areas and exploring new ideas, with massive mechanically interesting bosses. Destiny makes you backtrack your first time through and then makes you grind, and all the bosses are the same and uninteresting. This is relevant to story because in Dark Souls the mechanics tell their own story and encourage memorable moments, while in Destiny it's more like "That Battletank in the Mars strike has a lot of health, huh?" "Yup. Lots of health." ALL the bosses have lots of health and powerful attacks, and that's it.

The mechanics of Destiny are very good as you say, but they're not one tenth as interesting or diverse as something like Dark Souls. They are a framework for the game to do something else with, but it doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. The shooting feels good and you can hop around a bunch, but that's it.

@mrfluke: Well they 're saying it has story missions, and they wouldn't be the first developer to have stuff tucked away in DLC and then when a full sequel came out say 'Aw it doesn't matter if you didn't see the extra story stuff!'.

the queen event thing next week? i read that its just bounty missions? i know they teased that they are going to open up more of the tower during the queen event though.

and as for the other part of what you said. i mean bungie has always done good by fans through the halo games... but then the way this game ends is just so anticlimatic......but they are out there reiterating "this is just the beginning" "we're just getting started"

so we'ill see.

I believe this fairly appropriate when discussing Destiny's story:

@zeroregistry: Spot on.

@zeroregistry: Fantastic stuff

edit. actually made me like the story a little more

Maybe someone else recalls better but I don't actually think they were all to different no. I had fun with it, but they were pretty much the same three dudes, maybe a skin/palette swap between them.

@zeroregistry: Haha, that sums it up pretty well. It's such a sham though, I like the look, sound and gameplay alot. If only this had more interesting content and story :'(. Ah well, I'll keep shooting shit I guess.

I thought it was weird that they never had you visit the Awoken after that one encounter. I thought they were going to have a bigger part to play in wrapping up the story. They had a chance to get away from the bland "light vs dark" thing with The Awoken. I was expecting some kind of grey area with them. Expecting them to show that things aren't as black and white as they seem in this universe. And nope... they did nothing with it. The point where I thought the story may start to pick up was at the very end of the game.

I was disappointed that that final boss fight of the story wasn't that interesting. There were no actual mechanics. Just more of the "shoot until your health turns red, hide, and shoot some more" that every encounter in the game is. I know it's possible to have interesting boss fights in a looter shooter, because Borderlands 2 had some interesting fights (with an equally useless a story).

In the end, I don't really care that the story was terrible. It's not why I'm here. Bungie is capable of creating a more interesting universe and story (not that Halo was very interesting story-wise either, but they at least tried). It feels like they abruptly ran out of time, to the point that they couldn't even put a database for the grimoire cards inside the game itself. The fact that they make the audience seek out the lore on the internet indicates to me that something major happened with development that prevented them from fleshing out the story or characters more. The ending of the game made me more interested in WTF was going on at Bungie than anything about the lore.

The thing with Destiny is that they don't really set up anything before executing a story driven event. It just happens and get's thinly explained by dialogue.

Why are we going were we are going? It gets kind of explained on the way there (loading screen), but that was after I clicked the icon. Never did it make me want to click the icon to get things going. Mass effect did a far better job with this for instance. I wanted to visit that planet because I want to find out about the ancient relic that is there or help the colony in distress.
Why not have other NPC humans or guardians have a camp on Venus that could explain what the heck is going on in there. On Mars the Cabal fight the Vex, I killed thousands of them and still don't know why either of them are there or fighting. It would help if some NPC said "We have to drive them back, else they'll steal our supplies and kill our children, chaaaarge!".

After killing the enemies occupieing that space, you'd spawn in a different world where the guardians set up camp there and ofcourse are still threatened by invading aliens, because you have to grind for rep later :).

That final celebration scene is the most bizarre thing. I didn't really understand what was being celebrated. I destroyed some black heart thing that didn't seem like a big deal (just another inconsequential boss in the long succession of boss things to kill), then people were super happy. Way more happy then they were about all my previous efforts. It feels like Bungie playtested the final sequence, was given the response of 'that doesn't feel like an ending,' then haphazardly threw together the most inoffensive and generic closing to a piece of action-oriented narrative.

Now excuse me while I log into bungie.net to see if I can fumble around with these dumb cards to contextualize why I shot some robot things a bunch of times.

It certainly could've used more Ewok music.

hehe, yeah, apparently the Grimoire cards get better upon more kills or more uses of an NPC. Because on their default set is a vague ambiguous text meant to excite you about the character..... which it doesn't. And apparently you have to go something like a good 200 since you beat the game and never looked at them before hand, by the first 3 I'd imagine you had enough over how bad it's written...... way to go all 12 writers.

Sounds like I'm never getting this game. Thanks everybody. Hope they can fix this mess with the next one.

Yep. I've said it before but the entire story just seems like a setup for something else, which would've been really good if that thing happened in the story.

or even just a hint of that greater incoming event would have been nice, only bit of foreshadowing they done was on the moon, but thats clearly setup for the moon expansion in december.

@thatonedudenick:

Hey, you visit the Awoken twice. Once to meet the Queen and his brother, who didn't seem interested in my character at all even though he's awoken, and once to show them the gate keeper's eye, and then they tell you where the black garden is. I think the second is just a cutscene without you getting to click on the map and launch, but you do go back.

It feels like something out of a different game that did have a story, though not a particularly great one, but at least the Queen and her brother are characters and they talk to you and seem to have their own motivations, thoughts, and knowledge. Otherwise Destiny might be the story of a deluded mass murderer and the voice in his head.

Well I read somewhere 'story missions' for the December dlc. Looking at the official posting though all I see is 'challenging mission modes', which isn't quite the same thing. Also since the Awoken on the reef supposedly stay neutral in the war I'm not sure it makes much sense having her send us off to kill. Unless it takes place on the reef, which I bet it's not.

To be fair @bigsocrates they do say that Awoken not born in the reef find no welcome if they make the trek there.

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU COMING BACK FROM THE DEAD AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME!?

Ending made me feel like I just bought Destiny Early Access.

That will be made clear at the real ending of Destiny...
... 10 years from now!! (Oh god, I'm 40 by then o_O)

@spraynardtatum: Because the Ghosts are searching for people that carried the Traveler's light, or however they put it. Presumably they can't just rez anyone.

Each Ghost goes off and searched for a suitable partner.

@crash_happy:

Why? How? What does it mean to have "carried the traveler's light." There's no context for any of it.

How come all the guardians are buried in a Russian Cosmodrome?

@crash_happy: Since when!?! Did they say that in the game?

@spraynardtatum: Well it's made clear that all the Guardians are people that are able to wield the light as a weapon at least. And that the ghosts find their partners/guardians and seek them out. Though I don't recall the phrasing they used, I believe mr Crash Happy is right about that.

Don't know what that means though!

Isn't it just 3 of the same mini-boss you fought in one of the missions leading up to the final one? The Black Garden area looked great, like all areas of the game, but man, what a snoozer of a climactic level.

@spraynardtatum: Since when what?

All the Guardians come from the Cosmodrome because Bungie only made the Cosmodrome. There is some throw away line in the mission where you go back (again) and fetch an NLS drive for your ship about that area still having some stuff to salvage so maybe that applies to potential Guardians too? Dunno.

The Speaker says that the ghosts seek out those that can wield it's (Traveller) light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWGbMLw52Ug

They super duper didn't build up to anything in those last few missions/the whole game. A couple of sentences mumbled by The Dinklage do not a powerful, driving, endgame foray into The Garden Of A Dark God, make.

See: Bungie's previous work in Halo 1, Halo 2 (yes, I know, but the lead up to that non-ending is quite a ride), Halo 3, ODST and Reach.

They painted a wondrous work of art but then proceeded to slash the canvas apart with razors. Glimpses of a beautiful painting are still visible, but the piece is no longer cohesive as a whole, or detailed enough in the specifics.

Most of the story is simply world building. It's no surprise to me when you consider the westernised MMO roots of the core gameplay systems.

Haha yes! As soon as he said that I muttered to myself "I'm glad you know what's going on, 'cause I haven't got a fucking clue."

I just beat the game.

I'm being completely honest here, I wasn't actually sure I had finished it for like a solid few minutes after it was over.