Hey all I’m back with a look at a topic I should really cover for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s all about Story vs Lore!

Story? Lore? What’s the Difference?: Recently I saw something that really crystallized my feelings on why I had such issues with Destiny and it’s various updates prior to Forsaken. When I say Story I’m talking about the “story” told in-game experienced by the average person who just loads up the game and plays through the campaign and maybe the raid if they got lucky. Prior to Forsaken the only real lore in Destiny itself was what you experienced in the missions, cinematics and the various blurbs on weapons. That was it. The story for all that it was huge and expansive once The Taken King released was never in the game itself. It was almost purely all outside the game itself. If you just played the game there wasn’t really much impact beyond, go here and kill stuff and things never really got explained. Like what is the Darkness? Or why does this Speaker dude wear a mask were never addressed in the game itself.

Vanilla Destiny in particular was terrible at Story. It was basically utter nonsense to the point that there are now huge YouTubers who deciphered the various lore given outside the game to make the story make sense. But until Forsaken all of the story of Destiny was just Lore which was story purely told outside of the game. From the Grimoire Cards to Collectors Edition notebooks, none of it was really present to the standard player. The lore tabs introduced in Destiny 2 were a big step in the right direction but weren’t nearly enough.

Various other games have much more extended stories beyond the games themselves, from Halo to Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor/War, but Destiny was particularly notable in how poorly executed the handling of in game story telling vs outside game story telling was.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.