[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.