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It's impossible for me to separate myself from 10 years of Destiny knowledge, so for years I've relied on stories and accounts from fresh players, including some friends, to understand the MMO's new player experience. At this point, it is widely described as like having a bucket of loose Christmas ornaments dumped over your head, which is to say, not good.
With Destiny 2's Edge of Fate expansion out tomorrow, July 15, assistant game director Robbie Stevens says Bungie's aware of the first-time user experience problem, and enacting and planning changes to help improve it – though we're quickly approaching the 11th birthday of this thing and some changes are still apparently far off.
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What Edge of Fate doesn't do, however, is make sweeping changes to the new player experience across the board. Stevens says Bungie is evaluating "the funnel" that gets players into the game, and how to make that funnel as wide and smooth as possible. For example: not instantly throwing you into a new activity that you have no understanding of or context for.
Expansion content will still auto-launch, Stevens clarifies, but not seasonal stuff. Instead, that kind of topical content will live in the game's new Portal UI hub as quick launch activities. "So it's very much like, oh, Ash and Iron is here, what's up? Oh, quick launch, OK, literally the first thing I should probably go and play right now. There's going to be some other things that are going to drive you around and advertise what all the content is coming with."
New Light, Destiny 2's free trial version, is also on the to-do list. Bear in mind, New Light is years old at this point and has been in various states of disrepair for most of that time. Destiny 2's reputation as an impenetrable MMO did not come from nowhere. If New Light were an old car, Bungie would have to empty the gelatinized gasoline before it could start restoring it. So it's not overly assuring that, on some issues and ideas, Stevens looks "beyond Renegades," the expansion due in December, on the timeline.
But to be fair, Stevens also says, "We really want to be looking at things like New Light and other parts of the game and really thinking about, hey, how do we get you into the fantasy of being a Guardian? What's the right way to do that? How do we do some big updates to that in the future to update it with where the game is at today? So that wasn't a specific focus this time around, because we had so many other parts of the games that we needed to just get right, so that we can build part of that new experience in the future."
He explains that "New Light was built at a time where we're like, hey, we're going to teach you how to pick up a gun and aim at stuff." But today, Stevens reckons, "We need to put more focus on a more curated experience that understands that people are smart for some of the basics of how video games work.
It's okay that they don't need a ton of handholding there, and [we need to] put more energy into hitting some of the areas you're describing, where we're gonna spend a little more time kind of getting your feet wet and giving you curated experiences that let you better understand how the systems of the game operate at the foundational level so that you can grow into them."
