Destiny 2 is the sequel to newest franchise of Bungie, the creators of Halo. Published by Activision, a publisher with big games under their care, like Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot. Bungie was a ten year deal with Activision to publish Destiny. We can take Call of Duty as an example and we can say that Destiny is here to stay.
Destiny has been really popular with fans of first person shooters and rpg fans. By mixing this to genres together, Bungie has made a total of 417k physical sales in 3 years on their first game, and with 1.2 Million active players in their console launch. They have created a polished games in many ways, the sound, music and shooter mechanics are one of the finest in the videogame industry. This doesn’t mean that they created a perfect game.
https://twitter.com/Bungie/status/906584133874335745
- Bungie
We can sit down and talk about the many way that Destiny 2 come short, from the end game to the dumb down loot grind to appeal to a wider audience. But I want to focus on something I believe is really interesting and something that in my opinion is one of the biggest flaws of this game in an attempt to fix one of the most criticized features of the first game the main story of Destiny 2, miss used a really interesting character.
Storytelling:
Stories isn’t the easiest components to make in video games, this is because of the interactivity aspect of the medium. There is many ways that one may try to do in a video game, to tell a compelling story. Destiny one tried to be heavy in gameplay, and deliver a story through a combination of environmental story, lore (given by cards outside the game called grimoire cards), dialogue while we were playing, scannables and cutscenes.
This combination was messy, the in game story was vague, delivered by bad dialogue and uninteresting cutscenes (as we can see in the video below), an excuse to make level up our character. But the grimoire cards was different, the lore told amazing stories about the universe of Destiny, like the epic Book of Sorrows a comprehensive story about the main antagonist of one the big expansions Orix , it was full of death, betrayal and sex changes(yeah you read that correctly). But for you to be able to enjoy had to go outside the game take several cards and put the pieces together to understand better the world.
This frustrated the fans of the game (including me), because we knew that the Destiny team was able to tell really interesting stories but they weren’t doing it in game, or in appealing way.
Now that we have that background we can talk in detail about Destiny 2 story. I’m going to talk spoil the whole campaign, so if you don’t want to be spoiled please let this be a warning.
Spoilers Ahead!
Let me saw that there is not much to spoil in this story. This story is really basic story that you may have already seen or read, there isn’t any particular twist, not compared to the well written and interesting story of The Taken King (the third expansion of Destiny one). Let me give you a really short summary:
The Red Legion (a subsection of the army of the Cabal) has invaded the last safe city on earth, leaded by Ghaul (more on him later), their ultimate goal is to steal our light (the main source of our power, think of it like the force), and take it to become immortal like us. We loss our powers and the last city, after this the campaign main goal is to reclaim this two things. And we do. We kill Gaul, we lose one “important” character, and some unnamed characters, but by the end there is no character growth, of our character and other characters in the story.
The main story goes beat by beat in a predictable way. This time they decided to tell it through a lot of cutscenes, dialogue while playing in more straightforward way, there is no longer vague dialogue. This was the the response of Bungie to all of the criticisms from Destiny one. But this doesn’t mean we don’t have great characters in this story.
Ghaul:
The commander of the Red Legion, an orphan turned into a emperor and almost a god. This is a simple way of describing Ghaul, but he is more than that. Ghaul has a lot of backstory,a new baby cabal exiled since birth because of his skin, but was adopted by another cabal, The Consul.
To explain better Ghaul we need to explain this character a little bit more. As his name implies this cabal was a really important part of the Cabal Empire, he was part of the senate of the empire before, Calus the emperor took leadership. After Calus took power, his first command was to exile The Consul and made sure that he didn’t have the option to have a children. This made the Consul bitter and revengeful. From this point he started a way to destroy Calus, and Ghaul was the key to all.
The Consul took Ghaul as his adopted son, teaching him how to fight, and the art of war. He implanted the idea that the Traveler (the “God” who provides us with light in the game) was wrong to choose earth, and that we didn’t sacrifice anything to gain the power that was given to us. He made Ghaul as bitter as he was and one of the most powerful cabal, powerful enough to overthrow Calus and his empire. And so they did.
The influence of The Consul, the rejection of his own kind, jealousy and the approaching destruction of the Cabal Empire made Ghaul determined to take the empire and made his mission to save his kind, by taking the light and The Traveler away from us. But he didn’t want to take it by force he wanted to show The Traveler he was worth it, that he was stronger than us.
I hope that I showed you why Ghaul is a tragic character, manipulated by politics, and searching for validation of a high authority. This makes him in my opinion in a complex and relatable character. Making it really interesting to fight. But how was he potrait in game?
As I mentioned before, Destiny 2 takes the liberty to present its story in a more straightforward way, it uses cutscenes as its main source of storytelling. In story based video games this is used, in some in greater effect than others. In my opinion, this made Ghaul seems a boring character.
In all the cutscenes when we see Ghaul, we see him inside of his ship, either having conversation only with The Consul and The Speaker. This makes him a passive character, he doesn’t makes any decision, other than speak and tell his story. Through this dialogue and this cutscenes we understand different aspects of Ghaul. I’m going to name the more interesting parts of his persona and how can we go deeper through gameplay variety.
How to fix the big monologues, and give them context, through gameplay:
In the third cutscene of Ghaul cutscenes we see a conversation between The Speaker and himl about what makes a guardian a guardian. This makes Ghaul to go into monologue (an interesting one), about his history, he explains himself to The Speaker and the player. With this dialogue we know why we thinks he is deserves The Travelers light and acknowledgement. The fatal flaw for me in this case is that with this cutscenes the characters say to much but they don’t show. We don’t interact with the story but we watch it unfold. We don’t get to know Ghaul we only watch him talk about himself. I encourage you to watch it by yourself and come back after, the scene starts at the 7min 21s mark :
I wouldn’t change a thing in the dialogue and the performance of the actors, Neil Kaplan (Ghauls actor) performs the dialogue as intended, we understand how high Ghaul thinks of himself. But what I would have change is that, we don’t listen to this monologue on the ship of Red Legion, but we get teletransported to the Cabal Empire through a flashback, not only is a flashback as a cutscene but is a gameplay as well.
In the first shot we see Ghaul in the changing chambers of a colosseum, we see him putting armor, but no the same armor that we see him in previous cutscenes, it is really bad armor we can see a lot of scars on his white body, but we can see how strong he seems, when he finishes putting it on we can control him third person. When we move him forward the walk animation is slow and confident show no fear. He is surrounded by other cabal some of them bigger than him, give him disgusting looks. We as Ghaul walk to one big Cabal with shining armor that is walking in the same direction as we do, he hits Ghaul with his shoulder slowly, Ghaul doesn’t seem to be affected by the hit and we can move him forward with ease, but he spits and says a slur at Ghaul. We still can hear Ghaul delivering the monologue that it’s in the cutscene, but we are living it.
We could stop in this part just to show how bad Ghaul was discriminated, but we can put him in battle scenario, where we can see his strength and motivation, and we can make the player learn about the overall gameplay, like the critical point in the jetpack or a key weakness of Ghaul in this sequence.
Either way, at the end I wanted to say that Ghaul is a great character and villain, full of interesting motives. But falls flat because of a choice of storytelling, lazy and boring, not suited for a videogame, not either for a movie. But this is my opinion, you can see that Bungie and Activision doesn’t take storytelling as a priority, and making this extra part could have been expensive and time consuming, but it could have done a great deal to make a unforgettable story and make the fans truly happy.