Destiny 2’s seasonal model acted as a lifeline for Bungie’s looter shooter after a slightly disappointing first year of content, and it kept the momentum going after the Forsaken era all the way into the present. With the game enjoying a ton of new content drops as frequently as every three months for Seasons and yearly for expansions,Destiny 2quickly began to perform worse overall, meaning that Bungie had to find a way to deal with this issue. Although virtually no one in the community liked the idea when it was first proposed by Bungie, players realized that removing past content was indeed the lesser of two evils, and that’s what the company went with.
Thus, with the launch of the Beyond Light expansion,Destiny 2’s vanilla contentwas removed for the most part by Bungie when the company decided to “vault” old campaigns and locations to let the game grow without sacrificing the players' experience and enjoyment. While the problem of performance and loading times was finally manageable, the removal of the classic campaigns thatDestiny 2included did come with other issues attached, such as how to get newcomers started. Because a new introductory questline and newbie-friendly environment had to be envisioned, Bungie’s choice fell back to The Cosmodrome, much like inDestiny.
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Why Destiny 2 Needs a Better New Player Experience
This translated into Bungie having to come up with a new way to welcome newcomers toDestiny 2after the Red War was gone, which is now through a series of quests from Shaw Han, but the consensus is that the new player experience is one of the worst aspects of the game in its current iteration. As it stands, there is very little explanation in theDestiny 2prologueabout what the game mechanics are, what to do, what sort of gear to strive for, and so on.
Features like mods are not even touched upon, and although they are currently one of the most important and controversial in the game, they are still incredibly important now more than ever due to Bungie’s renewed focus on build-crafting. Even on the story side of things, the new player experience is ultimately flawed, as it provides very little context about the main events andcharacters ofDestiny 2in a limited span of time, which doesn’t make new players care about it much, if at all. This is particularly bad when considering how important the overarching narrative has been in the past couple of years, and how much energy is poured into the lore surrounding Seasons and expansions.
Because these are all things that matter and should indeed be part of the onboarding quests forDestiny 2, many have suggested that Bungie should bring back the Red War campaign. Even though it was not the best campaign in the history of the game, it was all-encompassing when it came to explaining the gameplay loop, introducing both allies and enemies, and providing players with a sense of progression. However, this is not feasible due to the campaign including multiple locations that are now vaulted, and the same goes for therecently removed Forsaken.
As such, Bungie’s only option is to reworkDestiny 2’s new player experiencefrom the ground up in the future, but doing so can be quite expensive in terms of money and effort from the team, and it wouldn’t really provide new content for older players nor a reason to create a new character, to begin with. This is most likely a vicious cycle where it’s hard to figure out a solution that pleases and works for everyone, Bungie included, and it’s a rather unique predicament for the developer to overcome.
Destiny 2is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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