[quote]I did a bunch of the side quests but once I realized they all consist of walk here and defend a computer or go kill a NPC with more health then other NPCs I will admit I tuned out the audio recording that played in the background and quickly finished them to get to a high enough level to play the "Story missions" which turned out to be more of the same. not great storytelling. Im not trying to say destiny is excellent story telling but the fact that it had cut scenes that progressed a story to a conclusion was better the voice overs while you are shooting dudes. they are both objectively bad but IMO the fact that destiny had cut scenes and a story flow/time line to the quests made it better IMO. in the division I didnt even know I had to go back to the base to talk to someone to view a cut scene until 3 missions later because I didnt see the small text on the bottom left of the screen lol...[/quote] Ok, I'll bite. But first, let me say that I really like both games and they both contrast with each other in a really pleasing way. Personally, I prefer Destiny's style and themes. The point of my reply was to contrast with the OP by doing what the OP did, which was picking out the flaws of one game and comparing them to the other game. As far as Destiny's story goes, I like the world a lot more and the setting is more mysterious and compelling, and while the opening few hours of Destiny is really top notch and got me invested, the latter parts of Destiny's story are just trash, it fell apart really quickly. The Traveller, once the most important and mysterious element to the fiction suddenly became unimportant, no more cut scenes, killing a giant ball of ink ... what? And there were no characters of interest or characters that had cool personality arcs or involved motivations. They all just stood next to a table and sold you stuff. Then TDB continued the lack of investing story telling. HoW once again ignored anything about the traveller and at this point, I still don't even know what The Darkness (supposedly the main villain of the game) is. TTK was a breath of fresh air, even though it still lacked strong characters and only gave us 2 or 3 cut scenes (and still hasn't given us info on the traveller or the darkness or the mysterious stranger). Sure, Cayde makes funny jokes, but once again there's no character arcs, Oryx is a terrible villain; I mean c'mon, we killed his son! Where's the cool interactions over that? He just arrives, like space Satan, with seemingly no clear motivation and no interesting interaction with our guardian. Although I like The Division's setting and story less (I've always been more into high fantasy than grim reality) I think the game as a whole tells a more tight and cohesive story and it has a lot more cutscenes. I don't think the characters are very exciting: stressed nurse, snarky tech guy, grizzled tech guy. The setting does not excite me, virus and quarantine stories aren't really my thing. But it honestly all feels like it was planned out and deliberate. Destiny's story starts strong (the opening hours are really incredible) but feels like it was aborted, scrapped and stitched back together in the most awkward way. The division doesn't suffer this problem. For example, the last mission I played introduced me to the prisoner faction, the mission starts with voice-overs and they continue to guide you through the mission, the environment tells an interesting story too, how the prisoners have converted the environment to meet their personality. Mid way through the mission I was treated to an echo (those digital memory things) that shows the prisoners taunting, tottering and killing JTF personnel and eventually leads me to see the leader of the prisoners, a lady, castorating a JTF person. When the mission ends and the lady is dead, I get a full cut-scene. This already is a lot stronger than almost all of Destiny's story missions which are almost exclusively in the patrol environment and are told with voice overs. If Destiny 2 doesn't have the same road bumps and behind the scenes drama as Destiny 1 did it could be even better (Bungie are great story tellers and they make very interesting characters and stories). As it is, Destiny's story lacks focus and direction, it feels like a Frankenstein of a plot that barely fits together.

I do agree with basically everything you have said. I think they have a similar number of cutscenes though but thats not really important. I think that it really helps the division to have the extra lore pieces IN THE GAME (cell phones, echos etc). I think the grimmoire stories are more interesting but not having them in the game means not many people read them. I do remember that instance with the prisoners and that echo, it was really cool however I also remember getting to the final mission and having them be like [spoiler]oh no general bliss and im like who the hell is that? and they say oh it was (forgot name) who shot down the helicopter and im like who? and then they kind of explained how he was a wave 1 agent etc[/spoiler] ... I at least knew why I was fighting that ink blob haha. I can agree to disagree that the main narrative was told better in the division than in vanilla destiny. I feel like they are both so close (although neither is really good) that you could argue one way or another... however I believe the overall lore in destiny (although hard to actually find) is VERY interesting and if it was in the form of audio logs etc in vanilla destiny we wouldn't even be having this conversation... if more people knew what happened in the vault of glass and what it actually is/ what was actually happening, lore wise, in that fight it would blow their minds.

That's cool, everyone has there own idea of what works for them. The story of Destiny was easy to follow because it was strictly linear. Rpg's have always been more of a grind and if you were mixing in encounters while you were going through the story, i could see how it would seem tedious for someone not expecting that. Although i will say if you did the side missions, picked up the cell phone and listened to the conversations. Picked up every echo and listened to how they unfolded and then did the main missions of those sections you become much more involved and informed of overall story. Again, if that's not your thing, cool but, the story is there, very in depth and in game.