The way the story is told in this game is ridiculously bad. And I'm not referring to the script.
Let's take a look this mission briefing early in the game:
Tyrion: Listen to this... from an old warlock, Osiris.
Old Warlock: Every End crawls from the same pit. Rising from the schism to swallow matter, light and life. It will not be stopped, but here... it can be slowed. The Shrines of Oryx must be destroyed!
As confusing as that sounds, these lines could've carried some weight if the concepts spoken of had been introduced elegantly before. This however is not the case. Prior to this briefing, there is no mention of what the "Shrines of Oryx" are or how they affect the player's path through the story. Osiris is literally introduced as a character in this briefing, with a voice actor that sounds confusingly similar to pretty much every generic patrol briefing that came before. The atrocious metaphorical mumbo jumbo that introduces this new threat is as abstract as the unexplained concepts of Light and Darkness. As the lines are uttered ominously in the game, they invoke nothing but laughter from me and my friends as we play through the game. There is no context, little build-up and no connective tissue between these missions.
"Well, many players don't care about the story. It shouldn't get in the way of the gameplay."
No, it shouldn't in a game like this. But for a game that borrows so much from established classics, why not tell the story the way it's told in some of the best games out there?
Metroid Prime had a beautiful way of telling its story without relying on secondary characters. The scanning mechanic told the story of an ancient race and its downfall in a subtle, engaging way that was welded into the rest of the gameplay seamlessly. Destiny would benefit from the concept of scanning lore throughout its worlds, as opposed to randomly placing props with no context. The scenery ends up feeling like a movie set, where everything is there to look cool and not much else.
Dark Souls showed us how a cryptic narrative could be woven through a loot game (which is what Destiny is). Having deep story bits tied to much of its loot, the player had a puzzle to put together which pretty much united the internet in search for meaning. Yes, I know the Grimoires draw from this, but instead of prompting me to go to bungie.net to read what the fuck is up with what I just found, why not have a system where a player could go to the cryptoarch and have him tell me how that item advances to story in the game? Instead, the cryptoarch right now just says generic archeology sound bites that have nothing to do with what you just traded him.
Yes, the game is abundant in sci-fi cheese, but so is most of sci-fi. What sets those other sci-fi stories apart is how they tell the story in an engaging way. In the end, Destiny doesn't seem to know how to tell it's story.
