So while I’ve not been writing too much Kupop stuff, I haven’t been slacking. A lot of the stuff I’ve written the last few months has been other fan-stuff, largely related to the Destiny video game setting, because my brain loves to play with the lore there.
But late in November I saw a post on r/WorldBuilding for a daily challenge, with one- or two-word prompts per day. And my brain latched onto it, along with an inspiration of “space mythology” that I’d recently seen.
While I technically missed one day, I made up for it the following day and wrote two little entries for it. And rather than just write dry statistical stuff, I’m using each prompt as an excuse to write a scene as from a larger narrative. Some are scenes on a more local level (focusing primarily on the crew of one ship and some refugees on board it), while others are presented like tales from the setting about legends and whatnot.
I’ve been posting these all to my writing blog. Here’s a link to the hub post for the whole thing.
The whole thing is not going to give the whole narrative, and I fully intend to go back after the month is over and fine-tune and edit and rewrite and expand, but I’m appreciating the excuse to get my ass into writing/creativity mode every day.
I do love world-building and coming up with interesting story concepts-- most of my Gamr Drivl posts on my blog are along those lines-- but this is one of the few times I’ve actually found myself going a little more in-depth about it. The realization that I’m better able to focus on short-form than long-form has helped a lot, and that’s how I’m approaching this challenge.
Write individual scenes related (somehow) to the prompt, trying to focus just on the core group of characters, but always trying to add to the setting. Like I noted above, I’ll edit and discard/develop as necessary after the month is over.
First, yes, I play Destiny. I write about Warlocks, because they just feel better for lore, but I play as a Titan main because I like punching things, and Titans have a better jump than floaty Warlocks and fragile-ankle Hunters. (So, yes, it has been a wrench seeing the Titans getting smashed in the Guardian Games event right now.)
Second, yes, people still play Destiny. Apparently just so they can complain about it, if some of the Destiny subreddits are anything to go by. I won’t deny there are aspects of it to complain about (and I’m not even going to touch the announced addition of transmog, which is being handled very poorly), but I choose to mostly stay positive.
I hadn’t touched a lot of endgame content for a long while because I just didn’t have anyone to play it with. But one of my online friends invited me to join his raid party so now we raid every Saturday and have it down well enough we can finish it in like an hour. Heck, the first time we did DSC together, we managed to beat Atraks-1 without wiping.
For all the game’s faults, the storytelling has been very good in Beyond Light. The main expansion and the seasonal content. Looking forward to the new season next week.
I was never able to get into Destiny, or Destiny 2. Which surprises me sometimes, because I had a generally favorable view of Halo, and pre-Halo I was a fan of basically everything Bungie ever made (a couple years go I picked up a ported version of Myth II, and was shocked to see there’s STILL a very stubborn online community of players).
I remember enjoying the intro to Destiny 2, and being super into it… until you hit that first questing hub. That’s when you first start to get taken out of the game and they start hitting you with all the “live service” elements.
I’d say that I’m not able to play a game like that, but I’m maintaining a WoW sub… so clearly that isn’t the issue. shrug
I did feel a little stupid after D2 revealed their extremely messsy transmog sytem, which features about three different special currencies and some weird caps on how much and how often you can do it.
WoW, where you simply use gold at an NPC, does it better.
I think my biggest issue with Destiny (et al) is the same problem I have with games at large today: they rely on psychological manipulation, to one extent or another, to keep a player consistently engaged with them. I have jokingly referred to my daily quests in WoW as my WoW homework, but that’s sort of what it is. Rewards locked behind time gates or lengthy grinds, stuff broken up into daily repeatable tasks to make sure you keep logging in day after day after day…
I joked to somebody on Discord the other day that, time was, I used to use video games to avoid doing my homework, but what do I use now when my video game is giving me homework?
And again, the joke wasn’t very funny because it hit way too close to home.
You’re not wrong. But I’m not always logging on every day. Mostly once a week, to check “Is there more story this week? No? Okay, I’ll just finish out these weeklies today, then call it a day.”
If something’s too grindy, I often don’t bother. Like anything to do with Crucible (Destiny PvP) is just an immediate, “Well, that’s never getting done.”
And the transmog system is even more of a mess than initially feared. The materials grind alone-- which you need to do just to unlock a bounty to get the actual transmog material– is ridiculous and time-locked. (You can only get drops every two minutes, regardless of the activity.) Someone on reddit did the math and worked out that it would be 7 days, in-game, to grind out enough to hit the cap for the season.