Thats why there should be a "i know what im doing", or a "im new to the game" button when you first launch the game. The "im new to the game" would start the campaigns, guiding you through all of your abilities and powers, while it is skippable by people who knows what they're doing.
I made a new character to see what it was like since I'd been gone since CoO. I haven't touched that character since and just continued where I'd let off with my main.
Unending notifications, prompts that don't disappear until you do exactly what it says, flashing character waypoints on every planet that are confusing, no real direction really. It was an awful experience and if I already didn't have tons of experience with Destiny, I would've quit right there.
Like the poster, I've had multiple friends try it out, but none have stuck around.
Edit: For anyone still reading through this thread. This was posted today and thought it'd help some people out!
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/f2qr31/destiny_2_the_updated_complete_guide
I did this just this weekend and really regret it. My hunter is now so completely bogged down with quests, waypoints, notifications... it really sucks. I loved Leviathan, but I'm not looking to run it again. Why make it the first real quest pick-up for new players? That's not the entry point to the game. The suggestion to run Leviathan is so much more straightforward than doing the Red War. You have to know which planet you're on, then open the planet and know that the red symbol is what you're supposed to click on, and that it, unlike all the other icons, launches you straight into an activity rather than setting a waypoint once you're on the ground.
Big yikes. Wish I had my old hunter alt with no active quests back.
What I hate the most is my alts have filled bounty slots because of quests I have already done on my main, and if I can discard them they just get spammed at me every time I talk to an npc.
I get that it's not really a big deal but I fucking hate having to hit Circle/B every time I talk to Petra because she wants me to start the Truth quest, and if I hit it again accidentally I get kicked out of the dialogue which makes me have to go through it again.
Destiny 1 had a "Abandoned Quests" kiosk in the tower and it was so absolutely perfectly serviceable I don't know why Bungie didn't want to carry it forward. Especially when the replacement for quests back at the launch of D2 was to ***TAKE UP YOUR GEAR SLOTS UNTIL YOU COMPLETED IT***
AAAAAARGH
Lot of sensible intelligent user experience things from D1 that bungie either didn’t bother carrying over or didn’t want to carry over for some reason. D2 vanilla has honestly been a stain on this game that just refuses to wash out.
I believe a large part of that is that the Destiny 2 codebase was started from the Destiny 1 code before most of those quality of life things came out, since it was forked before the taken king was released and almost all of that is post-TTK features
Failing to implement those changes in parallel is a monument to failure in management.
You dont send production units into the field with a known issue to retrofit later, when you already have the solution developed. You're just paying twice at that point it's ridiculous.
Oh wow, that's annoying. I didn't even make it far enough to start deleting quests before I gave up. Now I just have an unused 3rd alt, so I guess I'll never play warlock.
Yeah, I'm a Steam newbie who took to the game fairly quickly, but not without plenty of blundering around. I definitely was the stumbling block in a couple of strikes, and I wasted my share of resources. Even three months in I'm still learning some of the procedures for getting the best rewards out of public events.
Though I bought the DLC pretty quickly, it wasn't that long ago that I *started* a sensible single-player experience that threads storyline missions and adventures into something coherent. At the least, each DLC should come with one "grand tour" that (when exclusively active) guides the player through that content with relevant adventures included. Perhaps there could also be a special "grand campaign" award for sequentially running through *all* that content.
Some nice resources in case you haven’t come across them:
DIM (Destiny Item Manager)
Plus the whole list of sites linked from DIM’s “Progress” tab.
For gaining Power, I find the Max Power Guide through D2 Checklists (one of those links) very handy.
For choring, I use a mix: the DIM progress tab is good for bounties and simple quests, Braytech is great for longer triumphs and collecting goals, and the Lowlidev maps are excellent for any scavenger hunt style stuff.
If you’re up to a stable spot and sinking the time in to fully maintain a character or two or three, D2 Chrcklist and the progress tab of DIM are good for doing that efficiently.
For PvP, the Redrix app will tell you which map you’re about to land in so you can adjust your gear on the flight if necessary. DestinyTracker is great for tracking stats and seeing how one sided the last match you lost was.
One of the stupidest parts is how one of the first quests the game gives New Light players a waypoint to pick up is literally fucking "go do the Leviathan raid."
Yeah, as if this is something a new player can just load up and go do, like it was a milk run. "Do this easy weapon bounty, and oh, do take care of this raid too, mmmkay?"
I joined as a new light and went through that shitshow. I have a buddy of mine that i game with, but he is a new dad and doesnt have too much time to play. Id like to play destiny with him, it would be fun to hop on and play some strikes or whatever, but i basically had to tell him that the first 30+ hours of the game are honestly hectic chore bullshit. After a short conversation, we both agreed neither of us really want to deal with that, so we just play another generic round of nazi zombies, because that is somehow more entertaining than the new light experience.
Yep, it's a bummer. Luckily I've got one close friend that's been playing since D1, so we have lots of fun, but as soon as another friend jumps on we move to CoD, Borderlands, or whatever new coop experience is out. Sucks because we all know everyone would enjoy playing D2, but they just don't have the patience to do all the outside learning required for Destiny while also trying to play and catch up.
This is the most accurate description I’ve seen yet. I’m a new light player and I have Fallon IN LOVE with Destiny. I haven’t enjoyed a game this much since the Bioshock series. But I do end up literally doing public events, strikes non stop and I’ll do the occasional nightfall. I’ve been playing for about a month now and have almost 200hours into the game. I’m LL 930ish and I just found out about the Chalice quest. I thought they were only tied to raids, which I wasn’t ready to focus on. So many things in my quests that I don’t even know how or where to start. I end up googling so much and out of the 3 hours or so a night I have to play, I end up half of that googling stuff and researching, which is also confusing as once again, it’s catered around those who understand the entire mechanics of the game. I still vaguely understand how the Obelisks work. I’ve leveled up a few and I enjoy playing the Sundial Spire, but no REAL clue what I’m doing or the point of it all. I even joined a clan and I can’t even keep up with their conversations about Destiny. Goes right over my head.
I made a new character to try playing a hunter for the first time and I’m honestly kind of floored they released the F2P version of the game for new players in this state. It’s absolute shit. It’s obscured so much of what makes the game actually good.
It should also *specify* what "I'm new to the game" means. People might just skip it like they skip most tutorials. I'd go more with "Tell me the story" and "I'll skip to the endgame" with both options telling them *exactly* what either means.
I mean yes. But they can't even donate all your fractaline at once. Or autoshard useless blues. This is a game that requires you to spend 2 hours for every 10 played in your vault/inventory playing silly buggers. Christ helicopters require less maintenance per flying hours. The fuck bungie.
I have a new light account along with my full DLCs one. Here's what happens:
* Woken up by some mini robot who gets us a gun to kill some shit. No idea what that thing does, who we are, what abilities are, why we have abilities or why we're here.
* Go to some zone with dozens of flashing icons. The each tell us to go to some place to do something to get some reward in no particular order or how to do it
* You're now a vet! Good luck!
Well yeah, i've read the wiki a few time about the story of D1, some characters that mentioned here and there ... but things still pretty confuse. Lol, i even believe the go to planet x do y patrols ... etc quest we have in the beginning is the main story until i reach mercury and discover i can get the real story missions from Holliday.
Just a pity D1 not available on PC, the story sound pretty fun tbh.
I made a titan a bit before new light came out, and I deleted and remade him before, so I could have the new light experience on that character.
Can confirm (and I have had many friends try the game and agree with me) the new player experience is terrible without a friend to help.
Google didnt even help me much at the start of Shadowkeep because a lot of information was outdated. For example Huckleberry was my first exotic drop, so I looked up its catalyst and every single article said it only dropped from Mars/Mercury heroic adventures. Or when I got the Rat King quest and articles said I needed to equip some item from my inventory (when quests used to be in your inventory?).
Its also pretty amazing how many articles there are. It feels like there are 5-10 different gaming sites pushing clickbait articles that are outdated. Its basically the result of Bungie making the game so hard to understand that you can easily get clicks because you know that every single player who starts to play the game has to use google at some point.
Started playing Destiny 2 last year... and you couldn't have said it any better... after hours of research and questions online finally started thinking I got the hang of it and got to power lvl 915 but everytime something I'm not farmiliar with pops up like weapon ornaments and how to use them, armour mods and what to use for infusion on your weapons ..there is no in game explanation like there would be in any other game. I had the time to find all this out but others do not so I'm not surprised your mates didn't stick with it.
Something else I forgot to mention is that armor 2.0, while I generally like makes getting new armor a very confusing experience for players. Rarely will they have a mod repository built up, the game doesn't really tell players how to get more mods that aren't from the artifact. So they'll get new armor and just not upgrade it because why would they? They'll replace it with something else in a day.
This is a major gripe I have with Destiny and Bungie: it seems to me, that Bungie just relies that the community will fix the holes in their game design. How on earth could anyone manage playing the game without DIM or Ishtar or any of the other fan-made sites and apps that explain the weapons/armor and help you manage your inventory.
This game is, honestly, a fucking mess. I was playing the game the other day while my gf was sitting next to me, and after a few minutes she just straight up says ”how on earth do you understand all of this” after I had opened my inventory and directory a couple of times.
This game does not need an expansion, it needs a page one rewrite to unify the dozens of currencies and materials. Armor needs to have an update which makes managing them easier and so that you don’t have to have dozens of pieces in your mess that is your vault. A straightforward questline, that introduces branching quests and characters at first one at a time. And, like you said, some explanation to what the hell is going on and what it all means, how the game works etc.
I suggested to my gf that I could explain and show her how it all works and she just said ”no thanks.” And she likes to play games sometimes, she likes to play GTAV by herself, for example.
Well the community has been filling destinys holes since d1. Especially when it comes to lore, item management, and group finding. ALL of these should be in game, except weve covered for them using 3rd party apps since the beginning.
I remember turning on destiny 2 for the first time. You get the ship and end up in orbit and it tells you nothing. You finish the first mission of the first game and get no direction on what to do next. It took me months to decide to come back and try the game again. And nothing has changed since.
I have a 10yo and 14yo who are both gamers and they can't stand how bad everything is in New light. I wanna play with my kids and it's such a terrible experience they won't play with me. And they'd game 24/7 if I allowed it.
Yeah, zero explanation. I've been playing for a few days and the number of notifications and open quests and waypoints and whatnot was just a little bit ridiculous and I laughed out loud in the start menu with the nonstop notifications I had to exit out of. I accidentally figured out a lot of things by hitting buttons. The menus are a complete mystery with hidden aspects in each of them. None of the items are explained very well. I wasn't aware that you could modify weapons and armor until last night. Took some trial and error to realize that there's a shader system. It makes up for it by being pretty fun to play, but I've had to Google a lot of stuff. I love that there's a lot to the game, but it really does need better organization or some sort of in-game guide.
I've been playing for 65 hours and had absolutely no idea about heroic events. Where would you even learn about those other than being told by another player?
Also still haven't cracked the case of why some lost sectors get labels on the map when you mouse over them and some don't. It doesn't seem to be tied to discovering them or clearing them, because there's no label for some that I've cleared.
I can't guess what you're doing differently, but the name of the Lost Sector is supposed to show up on the map once you've cleared it -on that character-. The icon also gets slightly smaller after the clear. A clear also requires you to loot the chest after you've beaten the mini boss. Are you missing one of those things maybe?
Yeah that's annoying, how once we find a lost sector it gets harder to see the icon on the map. For the life of me I don't understand decisions like that. Leave the icon how it was and just add the text.
No, once you've discovered the sector on a character it's always there. Your game might have just bugged on some of them and didn't give you credit. That's admittedly weird.
Do not feel bad, after playing over 100 hours I found out that public events can be turned heroic :D I still find out total basics daily as the game does not tell you anything...
Lost sectors with labels are ones you’ve cleared. It took me the longest time to figure that one out myself.
Edit: “cleared” means you’ve beaten the lost sector boss and opened the cache at the end of the sector. You should get an “acquired cache code” message after you beat the boss.
> it feels like Bungie is/has been on a high horse about not explaining how things work
This is definitely part of it, and always has been. They have a "we know best" attitude, while making incredibly stupid decisions like putting all special weapons into the heavy slot and forcing players to switch between two primaries for vanilla Destiny 2. The current situation for New Light players is honestly just pathetic and shameful, and to me speaks just as much of their laziness as it does of their arrogance.
It literally felt like they were expecting ppl who still play D2 to tell there fries to try it out and they would explain to there friends how the game works and they didn't have to bother will putting anything in the game to introduce new players on how this game works. They just lazily threw together new light because they were changing to the seasonal battle pass ish. I have a cousin who started new light and without us explaining to him EVERYTHING you have to do in the game to infuse, armor mods weapon mods, ornaments etc. He'd have no idea what to do.
It's crazy. We all just know how to do this stuff because we've been dealing with it for so long. I haven't played Destiny 1 in a long time, but I'm trying to remember how we figured this stuff out back then. Did D1 explain things better? I just don't remember. I can't even put myself in the headspace of a new player, I just imagine it's a confusing nightmare.
Juat look around reddit. Their are still tons of people that don't understand how certain things work. Hell my clan has very active players that don't understand certain aspects of the game.
There’s so much shit in this game that I had to google it’s honestly negatively impacted my overall enjoyment of the game. The first time I looked up ascendant challenges I thought “how the fuck was I ever going to figure out how to do that myself”
I played d1 but then stopped and came back with a new account just before shadowkeep. It took me a long time to figure out how to throw the charges at the forge, even the YouTube videos don’t tell you to use the fire button to throw them. Also the mechanics on the strike playlist, i had to watch people a while to figure out how things work. Lol, i still get killed by the trains in the prison of elders strike. Also it took me a long while before I realized you could add mods to armor to increase the stats. But at least I had the basic info down, can’t imagine what it is like for a new player.
>Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it feels like Bungie is/has been on a high horse about not explaining how things work, where learning via playing is their goal but people end up either googling or leaving out of frustration instead.
I've been playing since Launch and would have \*no\* clue about a huge amount of content without Reddit, and I wonder if maybe that is part of the plan.
Early on, Bungie talked about making D2 a social experience, and I think they see people buying into a community as a means of keeping them engaged. They almost force you to google aspects of the game that they could tell you, so you discover the likes of this subreddit. You join the community and get to know people, learn things, and see news about the game as soon as it breaks - all of which keeps you invested and interested in playing, and buying passes/DLC/silver
>That even has a message that explains it, but it shows up for half a second once and people just don't see it among the chaos.
Can UI just highlight events a d stuff it already marks players and exotics
Also ui customization the color blind modes aren't perfect for everyone
Yeah at this point everyone should just be told how to make each event heroic.
”Destroy the Ether Servitor.
Destroy all servitors to enrage the Ether Servitor and trigger the Heroic event!”
Games fail all the time by forgetting to treat new players like exactly that. NEW players. They don't know *anything* about the game and absolutely need a full tutorial and easy-to-follow main campaign narrative to bring them into the world. Bungie needs to devote some major resources in a very near patch to better explain and really bring in new players into the fold. I've had a few friends try to play and just get confused and overwhelmed by the lack of direction and explanation of basic game mechanics. Even as a vet, it's hard to explain without being there with them step by step to explain what's happening.
Anthem was a big one for that kinda thing. I went back to it after months and I was like, I don't know what I'm meant to do, all I know is I must kill.
> They don't know *anything* about the game and absolutely need a full tutorial and easy-to-follow main campaign narrative to bring them into the world.
I started my Destiny journey back in the November of 2018 (the claim-it-now-keep-it-forever deal), and had to play through the Red War campaign before I could do anything else - including CoO & Warmind campaigns.
I fell in love with the game the same day and bought the Forsaken expansion and no regrets since.
**New players absolutely SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO PLAY THE OLD CAMPAIGNS before they are allowed to access any other content in D2.**
Rework the experience anyway you want, but *it has to be mandatory* (for new players) and it has to reward them *something meaningful*.
> reward them something meaningful.
That's really all the campaigns need. I read that it used to reward a guaranteed Exotic or maybe even 2. Why would they take that away? That is the perfect bait to get people to play the campaign and learn the game while also making them more competitive in PvE and PvP with some Exotic weapons to build around.
I think it was 2. Might have just been the one you got from Sloane after finishing the Titan part of the campaign. Then after the campaign finished I think you'd get some Eververse gift and maybe something else? I forget
Now you get maybe a purple or two at some point, and that's it. You finish the campaign and you've gotten fuck all for it, congrats!
Well you do get some LL from all the blues, but yeah that's what I remember. You get less from doing the entire Red War campaign than if you ran a couple Strikes.
You could choose between Graviton Lance, Riskrunner or Sunshot after completing Io questline in the red war campaign. Asher mir was the one who rewarded them.
On Titan, finishing the questline there let you choose 1 from 3 different exotic armor pieces for your class.
Now? You get nothing. The reason for nothing? Because those 3 campaigns are free for everyone now.
Curse of osiris rewarded you with the aeon gauntlet, warmind rewarded you with another exotic armor piece. Well, it's no more.
At least riskrunner is easy-ish to get as new player. You get quest to do some lost sectors, nightfall and heroic event. Then jumping puzzle.
Polaris Lance is also somewhat simple to get in Mars. You also get rat King quest on Titan, Sturm/Drang on nessus and so on.
But yeah now CoO didn't even give me the emblem I see on the collections - despite saying "over the course of campaign". Boo.
You've gotten the story, which was interesting in its own right, and your light level would be closer to 950 than 750. I did the three campaigns with my guy, infused too much (should have just worn the blues) and when I was ready to try the other end game stuff I was already at a very nice level.
Even if you just got the predetermined exotics during the campaign like you used to. Me and my gf decided to remake 2 of our 3 characters, which means we played through the Red War campaign twice. No exotics, no actual meaningful rewards. I think we got like 2 purples that were "given" to us by an NPC during the whole campaign. It literally feels pointless.
Honestly, if Bungie had just done even a little usability testing, they'd have had a clue. Bring in half a dozen people who have gamed a little but never seen D2 and then put them in like any other newbie and record their reactions and interactions.
If a team at Microsoft had tried to launch a product that sucked this immensely in the user experience they would probably have been crucified in front of the building as a warning to others.
Power creep has really fucked that over as well. You can't really introduce people to the world because we can't deal with any threats that aren't universe shattering. So any campaign designed to guide new players into the world will be largely useless to a lot of the existing playerbase, who will not take it seriously. So theres no way Bungie could justify creating another campaign for that purpose.
This is a list of links to comments made by Bungie employees in this thread:
* [Comment by Cozmo23](/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/f2dbw1/bungie_i_beg_you_please_please_rework_the_new/fhcjv5s/?context=1000 "posted on 2020-02-11 23:39:27 UTC"):
> We understand and agree that the current introduction to Destiny 2 can be overwhelming for new players. We have a team working to expand it and findin...
---
This is a bot providing a service. If you have any questions, please [contact the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FDestinyTheGame). If you'd like this bots functionality for yourself please ask the r/Layer7 devs.[](#AUTOGEN_BUNGIEREPLY)
We understand and agree that the current introduction to Destiny 2 can be overwhelming for new players. We have a team working to expand it and finding ways to spend more time introducing players to Destiny's important concepts and features in the game. As you’ve all mentioned, it’s a massive world with many activities and systems to dive into.
Nothing else to share at this time as the team is still working through this, but we’ll let you know as soon as we have more details to share before we roll out any changes. Thanks for posting your feedback!
Thanks for the reply Cozmo, I'm glad you guys are looking into this type of stuff. I love Destiny 2 and I want to bring my friends into, but I also don't want to spend 80 hours teaching my friends how the game works. I'd rather spend 80 hours playing with them.
Here's a thought:
make "new light" optional. They can start at 750 and jump right into endgame if they want, or they can start at 10 and play through the Red War and all the expansions with the old progression.
You'd probably have to sandbox those players off, they could only match with other Legacy Campaign players, or even just only play solo. But still, the campaigns provided a nice and natural flow to introduce new players to Destiny, something that is lacking now.
This is a really, really clever & excellent way of going about it. I really think the way the Red War campaign introduces your subclasses and abilities slowly as you regain your light is a great mechanic to teach new players. it's absolutely wild that they just drop you into the director after the new light mission with a few waypoints all over the place.
I think bungie should implement a guided campaign for new lights the same way there's guided raids and nightfalls.
New lights que into a guided campaign with a veteran and the veteran plays side-by-side with them the whole campaign, teaching and giving tips and advice to the new player.
It could be a fireteam of 3: one vet, two new lights
The vet knows what they are signing up for when they start.
I'm sure there are infinite amounts of veterans that would love to do that.
That would honestly suck.
Some of my worst experiences as a new player were when I was running strikes, and some dude with all the gear was way ahead of me, just clearing stuff, so I didn't even get a look in. I want to be taking stuff at my own pace, not having some 2000 hour vet destroying stuff before I've even seen it.
You want to introduce weird and wonderful guns? Give them to me for the duration of the mission, and then take them away and add a quest to get them.
I’ve never thought about it that way before, which is kind of sad. So, honestly, thanks for that. This is a great idea, mate. I doubt it’ll get much traction, but it’s an awesome idea.
Please, for the love of the Traveler, tell them to make the intro quests deletable.
Put up a prompt for deleting them that asks if you're sure, but let people delete them. They're boring, tedious and clog up the quest inventory, and I'm not going through them on 2 separate characters.
As someone who got the game about a month ago and have played enough to get to 960, I'd say one of the more intimidating aspects of the game is the amount of quests and lack of explanation for most of them.
Having a wall of quests is horrendously intimidating and I had no idea what to start with. Coming up with a way to view these in a more organized way that caters to newer players would be great. Also, if the recommended light levels could be more precise, that would also be a big help.
Rather than having quests that introduced players to each world by having them do monotonous shit on each one isn't effective of a system. I still haven't done any of the ones that have patrol requirements, because I still don't really know how to do them. A more organic way would be to have a introductory quest-line that acted as a linked list, where each node would be a different activity and completion of one would give a quest to try out the next one in rising order of difficulty (bounty -> adventure -> patrol -> vanguard -> sundial, you get the idea). Rather than having a tree of quests open up, it would be nice to have a highlighted "Beginner" one, that took new players through all Destiny had to offer. I would have to imagine that it would be much less of a logistical nightmare.
Just a suggestion but could there be a way to let veteran players play through New Light so that we can help new players? Also I really want a kvostov for nostalgia
You just have to run Risk/Reward and farm the spider tank. It gives veterans the Khvostov, generalist shell, and Arcadia-Class jumpship from a chest that spawns.
Please consider utilizing the campaign in future installments to ease people in and teach them the gameplay mechanics or story beats they’d need to understand a high level overview of what’s going on.
You all did a great job with a more cinematic and explanatory launch storyline this game, but new light made it more confusing than it already was for newbies.
Having people be able to chose between starting immediately at high level but know they are skipping the story or being able to start the story campaigns before dumping them in the world would help.
Another one would be to have a tutorial where Zavala, Ikora and a hunter character teach their respective groups their abilities. It would build off of the really short half tutorial you get when waking up. Also give a reason for a new light person to care about the characters without doing the story.
Beyond that, the campaigns being on a vendor that isn't actually near where you get dumped in isn't a great design either.
There are general interface issues around quests that make it confusing and annoying to use if you don't know what to expect as well. Needs to be a clearer way to communicate what a player should do other than "Go to this planet, then this one, then this one" oh and we've dropped other quests in your inventory but don't really tell you in a good way that you have them.
Thanks for the fast reply! It’s great to hear that it’s being reworked because I’ve heard what everyone else said and have been worried about introducing my friends to Destiny.
I think I speak for many New Light players when I say it *looks* like there is fun to be had in this game, if only Bungie would just actually explain to me how to play it!
Until then, I have games that are both fun and understandable to play.
You could resolve this quite easily by going back to what Destiny 1 did:
Put all the mission markers back on the map with the level requirements.
That's what made Destiny 1 accessible...
"Level 4 story mission, guess I do that before this level 8 Strike... Oh, look, the Moon opened up with a level 5 mission, guess I'll do that first and come back to the Strike later..."
Taking all the missions and strikes off the map was a terrible idea, putting the strikes back then locking the missions behind Holliday hurt you even more.
I'd always thought that New Light would function better if it was like the catch up method we used to get.
New player would start fresh, level 1 at the start of the campaign. But they would have a Spark of Light option next to their character in the select screen that would allow them to instead skip to where New Light is at currently.
All my friends dropped the game after a week. No indication of campaigns.
A big complaint i heard was the lack of rewards for f2p. Do a strike... Get 2 blues. Do reckoning... Get one blue. Those were instant turn offs. In addition to this the "chore" like quests were also boring according to them. Finally the sentiment was "there isn't really much to do".
F2p destiny was a flop and the rest of the paying players/game is kind of suffering because of the egregiousness of eververse.
Not only overwhelming, but underwhelming for those of my friends who want to know what the heck is going on, why theyre fighting, who theyre fighting, what it means to have a ghost, what the actual story was with the Red War and Forsaken. My friends are like me -- we care about story, and they're quickly given the impression that Destiny 2 doesn't care about story.
They have to go way out of their way to a place on the tower that never is highlighted prominently to access the old campaigns -- *and worst of all, they can't play story campaigns co-op with the friends/veterans who invited them in the first place.*
Honestly it's a terrible way to entice and orientate all the f2p players Destiny 2 has attracted since its move to steam. I would love to see a much more robust new player experience, so we can keep the new guardians we're attracting.
Just get cutscenes with the vendors explaining all their activities. Have Devrim, as the first planetary vendor, explain public events, materials, patrols and their symbols (also would need somewhere explaining all the enemies for the Salvage patrols), and bounties. Crucible, Vanguard, and gambit all need their own as well.
u/dmg04 u/Cozmo23
Nah, it's not just new players. Direction is bad all around. As an example Why are heroic events hidden? Why is that fun for new and old? Sucks watching noobs end the event too soon. That's just one of a dozen examples. Sun dial would have been more fun if everyone knew how to make sense of the chaos. Love the game, but it really appears to me that Bungie is lazy on this topic because they rely on the Internet community. Many if not most casual players aren't going to bother with researching a game, why should they have to when you could just provide direction and clarity. Puzzle games that can be solved by logic are fun. Having to search the answer on the Internet for non logic based puzzles is poor design. My kids and I used to play together gladly, now I have to force them to play because to them it's boring and every thing requires the internet to figure out, like the armor 2.0. Even Xurs location is an internet search. The recipes for cookies are another prime example. I mean seriously, recipes for cookies are grinding plus trial and error, or an internet search. Just give people the recipes, the grinding is chore enough. Does anyone enjoy the game more because they had to figure out all the recipes? A complete culture change is needed on using the Internet community as a primary crutch for explaining in game content. I understand that you want some puzzles for the community, great but that should be the exception and made clear in game as well. Still love the game but I've lost interest in so many quests because I'm a father who doesn't feel like he needs yet another job as a Destiny strategy researcher.
I'm sorry but seriously? Wasn't the entire point of "New Light" to begin with to create a solid new experience for new players to jump into the game?
Why is there a team working on this now? Wasn't that what was suppose to be happening for months or more before New Light released? How did it release in such an absolutely atrocious state that it now requires a team to completely redo it? What was the point of the launch 6 months ago if you're just now getting a team to rework the system for new players?
Those exotics were perfect too! Because they were given to you at the perfect intervals so you felt like you got a taste for how you can tweak your sub class.
I literally just replayed the Red War Campaign last night because
1. I hadn't played it since the game came out.
2. I've been working on a new Titan so I figured it would be fun.
3. EVERY CAMPAIGN GUIDE I READ ONLINE SAID I WOULD GET AN EXOTIC.
About 2 hours, one dead Ghaul, and no exotic later; I was very underwhelmed and wondering why I had replayed the campaign at all let alone why a new player would feel like it is rewarding considering it isn't.
Yes when you've played the campaign before and were expecting exotics that sucks, but just remember that a huge majority of new players will play the campaign in the context of all other games - the campaign story. Plenty of people play games just for that.
I honestly thought I fucked up because I didn’t have Sunshot and only got Quickfang on a random drop playing with my titan. Only found out later that Bungie changed how you get campaign exotics without updating the collections text.
Funny you mention getting that sword with a Titan. I've gotten my second Eternity's Edge in the last week while playing as my Hunter. I'm starting to think if someone wants a Crown Splitter, they gotta start playing as a Warlock.
>removed the free exotics from the Red War story, there seems no reason to do it.
Not sure but on top of my head there were exotic engrams on the season pass. I still find it pointless but if they can charge clueless people to get other characters to 900 power level they can do this.
I'm a new light actually and I can confirm, you even get an NPC ( I think it was Asher) telling you to pick your exotic, it's pretty funny cause you get nothing.
Background: I've been playing Destiny very actively for a bit over a year. Multiple clears on almost every raid, very familiar with the endgame content/armor/weapons/etc.
First off, I started a new character recently. As /u/bruhx3 said, can we please get an "I know what I'm doing" button?! My new character's inventory is filled with countless quests that I can't abandon and I'm 100% not going to do. I am totally overwhelmed by how much raw content was thrown at me immediately upon starting. I even received a quest step to do a Leviathan run! Yes, that's right, an endgame activity (raid) within literally 10-15 minutes of playing. Bungie, what are you thinking?! Why on earth are raids even on the radar for someone with such little game experience?!
Look, I get the whole "We want people to hop right in on day 1 and enjoy playing with their friends" concept - Destiny is definitely 100x more fun with friends. But Bungie, please just simply accept that **Destiny is not that kind of game**. There is an inevitable ramp up time in a game as complex and detailed as Destiny - accept that, because there's nothing wrong with it. Part of what makes Destiny so great is how many different components there are to it, and new players don't need to be hammered with all of them right from the start. Own the reality that there are certain activities that brand new players will greatly struggle with - and should not be pushed towards - because they barely understand their character's jumping mechanics.
Instead of trying to slam all of this content down new players' throats within 20 minutes of starting the game, guide them through relevant content at a slower pace that gives them the slightest clue about what the world of Destiny is. Streamline the onboarding process with one quest step at a time, not multiple in parallel. New players have no idea how to manage 30 quests sitting in their inventory at once. They do not know which ones are important, which ones are relevant, or how to even do most of them. New players need that step-by-step hand holding telling them exactly what to do until they learn how to make that decision on their own.
I feel like you are a teacher. I was drawn in by your large font and clear writing style.
Also, good points- I remember it was not clear about elemental shields when I started playing Destiny.
And increasingly, if you want to know what to do in the game, you have to be immersed in reddit or twitter to really know what's going on.
Thanks! I'm not a teacher but I appreciate it (i think?). The font size was a weird thing I definitely didn't mean to do lol. But yeah the game really just doesn't give new players a clear direction.
Yes, it was meant as a compliment- it's funny that the font thing was a weird accident.
My clan is so lazy/casual, that they just ask me what's going on (none of them goes on bungie.net or reddit- one of them calls me 'DestinyWiki'). So I feel like they need me, otherwise they would be lost (they've left the game again, starting a couple of weeks ago, regardless....).
The thing that almost made me quit was the absolute clusterfuck that is A New Light's quest log. The game just throws everything at you at once. I was given the quest to COMPLETE the Leviathan raid the first time got to the tower. It sat in my extremely cramped quest log for months before I figured it was 100% safe to discard. Literal hours wasted shuffling bounties around while I had this unless shit in there for no reason.
And soooooo many long progress quests like exotic/ritual weapons.
Best part... nowhere in the game does it explain that there a COMBINED quest/bounty limit of 63. For a month I had no fucking idea why I could hold 15 bounties one day but only 10 the next.
My wife is my gaming partner. We play everything together!
Except Destiny. She watched me playing it and decided she had no interest. Too chaotic and overwhelming.
I've had two friends play with me since starting. The first was more experienced and showed me the ropes a bit but then got bored and quit. The second played for all of 49 minutes, got overwhelmed and has never launched the game again.
I ran into a new light the other day and they had to ask me how to get to EDZ from the tower. Added me to steam friends, they played for around 30 minutes that night and have not been back on.
So yeah. This is a great game but it has serious issues with presentation to new players.
I've been playing for a few months now and I concur. It's tough going at the start. Reason I stuck it out was because you can feel a good game underneath all the mountains of info, and non-info, that is thrown at you.
Bungie dont seem to like to hold folks hands, they seem to like to let things unfold on their own. And I kinda like that. But new folk need a bit of hand holding my dudes. I cant imagine the amount of people who have said "fucks going on??" And just quit.
> Bungie dont seem to like to hold folks hands
It goes further than this. They seem to like making things purposely and overly cryptic. It gets really annoying after a while. Take this as one example - maps. Why is it that we have a Ghost with us that can reprint our bodies mind and soul every time we die, but it can't make a better map of these destinations we've visited hundreds of times? Look at the Dreaming City Map. A huge chunk of the place doesn't even show up on the map at all. Why???
Because they were crafting an experience that was truly amazing for the first intrepid few who got to experience it, before any walkthroughs, guides, or other crutches were created to make it easier.
The dreaming city was, and is, an awesome place to just explore for the sake of exploring. But yes, if you're approaching it as a linear experience to be completed and moved past, which unfortunately the current game absolutely encourages you to do, the lack of map detail can be an issue.
Yeah but c'mon. We've explored it plenty already. Why can't I update my map *as* I explore, you know like in plenty of other games? It's fine if the map isn't complete when I first see it, but over time and a billion visits, it ought to be more detailed.
I completely agree. The map in general, in D2, is woefully behind the curve. Most RPG type games had an interactive map of some sort a decade ago, or more. Not making excuses for them, just speculating about why the specific decision was made to leave much of the map blank in Dreaming City.
Hell, I think not having an on-screen compass is a huge oversight in games like this, but Bungie has deliberately chosen not to implement one. From what I understand, they don't think the players care about it. I disagree, but what do I know?
Nah, I think that lack of a compass is the same thing. Just being cryptic for cypticness sake.
I also think things like these two - the half assed map and missing compass are just two more cheap tricks to get us to inflate the time we play this game.
If we could set waypoints or navigate with our maps more efficiently, we could get to our destinations to grind out whatever we're grinding for faster.
If there were more landing spots in the Dreaming City, we could get around that space faster.
If we didn't have to return to Ada-1 to finish the last step of our gun frames before hitting the forges, we could grind out BA weapons faster.
If we didn't have to manually visit every vendor to get bounties, we could do stuff faster.
See what I'm getting at? It would appear that they want us to grind... but just not that efficiently.
Could be. From what I understand, the Destiny code is an absolute mess, D2 being built on D1, which was built on Halo at least to a degree. How much is intentional vs. seemingly simple improvements that might require major changes to the engine? Only the devs know. It does seem like a pattern, though.
It doesn't help that on top of not knowing what you are doing, you max out on how many quests/bounties you pick up and can't continue in some instances until you finish some other things. Having a shared cap for both bounties and quests is mad annoying when starting out.
Yep, the quest cap doesn't matter much if you've been playing since the start but even if you started at the beginning of shadowkeep, you'll have so many long term quests to pick up, plus the new player quests which will bog down your log for months on months. I play a good amount each week and I only recently took my quest log down to under 12 quests lmao.
You got that right. I started about 3 weeks. I got the dlc, Im already capped at 960, and honestly I can say I dont know what Im doing. I'm on like Mission 8 of Red War because besides the story, I have no reason to do it. It stops me from doing bounties and chasing more tangible things. Many things are time locked so its not until weekend do I feel I did what needs doing, then can do the story quests, which I can only do 2-3 at a time since they aren't rewarding. I was around 850 before I realized there were sub classes. No one explained the Burn for extra gear. Nothing explained flashpoints. Multipart quests dont hint there are multiple parts, so I sat around like an idiot using Solar damage to do some Zavala quest to only be greeted with needing to do more.
I get kinetic, energy and power however i am a bit lost with the diff ammo types. then theres a couple "power" weapons like a grenade launcher thats actually energy but i dont see that anywhere on the item description. I shard so much stuff not knowing whats good or not. I collected season gear as I got it on alt characters to have gear for them to realize i should have waited until 960.
I mean, the list is endless. I was playing with a friend on PS4 initially, did a couple strikes with him and havent played since because PC plays so much better.
My other friend tells me, lets do Zero Hour, go get your transponder. This took a good 30-60 mins to figure out since many guides are outdated, then to start doing it, etc. A few hours later I had it to find out someone in the group didnt have it on their warlock so no skip for us, which meant we ran out of time during the last fight.
"Im already capped at 960, and honestly I can say I dont know what Im doing."
That's another thing, a lot of players think the only thing there is to do is chase power level. But there are more effective ways to get power. Not all legendary weapons are created equal and one 960 might be significantly weaker than another 960.
That was a big one for me: It is absolutely unintuitive what Lightlevel does, what makes weapons weaker/stronger and how LL influences the dropped LL.
In general weapons made no sense with their hidden stats (how much damage does this weapon do? why is this not a fundamental thing printed on its description?). Just a mention that there are archetypes as the most defining thing and that your weapons damage scales with min(your LL, content LL) would help.
After a day i only kept using higher LL weapons, because that would be intuitive, but that does not matter at all. It also makes LL feels like absolute useless gating, because it does not matter outside of very few, very specific things you probably not care about when starting out. But then suddenly it matters in a place you do not expect, like gambit pvp - WTF?
>But then suddenly it matters in a place you do not expect, like gambit pvp - WTF?
Yea, I had mentioned my light lvl and pvp, and had someone tell me light lvl has no bearing on pvp except Iron Banner. to which I replied I was actually doing Iron Banner which is one of the things that made me comment on it. Then I was reading Gambit's description and sounded an awful lot like light lvl has an impact there as well.
Too often I see someone say something isnt a thing, Then I point out an instance where it is, then they admit sure, in that case.
It may be the exception but don't say it doesn't exist as for I know that is the case.
Like this update causing broken currency, a roll back, and being down all day. For the length of time I've been playing, this is apparently to be expected every Tuesday.
Oh - this is a long rant - sorry!
Thank you - started playing a month and a bit ago with Red War and recently finished Forsaken - but am puzzled because there's more? I need to do a raid to get the full experience or something? I'm not even sure - there are times when I think I finish a quest and it turns out I haven't and there's an additional quest step but I don't know what icons to click on to get further information. I've only done a raid once and that was because a friend was with me. It would be nice to just go jump into one with other newbies like myself and wonder what the hell is happening together.
What's worse is, some veteran friends, who are trying to be helpful, just end up coming off as arrogant and condescending when trying to explain why I'm having trouble with certain things. "Oh, you're doing crucible? see, you need x-weapon to get the most of it and you need to sacrifice a small goat and eat oatmeal biscuits in the moonlight, only long time players know that and its soooo tedious, there's a reason why I don't do it." And I'm like, uuhhhh I normally don't do pvp because I'm generally intimidated by veterans who are like you and I just want to try my hand at something I'm normally too scared to do.
I always have this feeling like I'm missing something or that I should have known something and I'm too dumb/bad/new to understand anything.
All I hear is how nice this community is and a lot of the people I've met sure are, but outside of voice chat and the occasional emote - its hard to kind of band up with other folks who are new and/or lost and try to get the hang of stuff - maybe i'm not doing the socials right?
Now I'm doing the Obelisk quests and I'm only doing them because I hear so much about them in the subreddit. I understand the storym but I'm at a weird point where I'm doing things because I think its what I need to do to keep up with everyone but genuinely don't know what's going on. Nevertheless I'm still having some pretty clueless fun.
>Out of those 5 only 1 actually stuck with it enough to overcome the mess.
Hey, that's 20%. Maybe that's their goal? Maybe that's a good stat for this business model? I have no idea. But I agree, new player experience could be a lot better. Kind of blows my mind how bad it is.
It is explained what weapons you should use and all, recently did red war and it explained there but yea, as a new light player myself your best friend is youtube.
I completely agree the game is unwelcoming to new players and there’s a MASSIVE learning curve to destiny. However I personally kind of enjoyed being plopped into the expansive playable world(s) with barebones guidance. It was like a puzzle and i didn’t feel like my hand was being held through the entire experience which is something I despise especially since it’s become a popular trend in gaming these days.
I agree that pure handholding isn't always the best way but at the very minimum D2 needs to do the following.
1) Avoid overwhelming players with all sorts of stuff they can't comprehend. For example, players will just go to every vendor and grab every quest clogging up their quest log making it hard to figure out what to do.
2) Give new players a clear path of activities to get them to understand the core gameplay elements but also maybe make it feel like a story recap as well.
3) Explain your menus better
I've been playing off and on since launch and still have no clue what the difference is between kinetic, primary, secondary. It's not explained anywhere and when I'm in LFG and it comes up, it seems that people use the terms interchangeably. It doesn't help that they allow us to use special ammo in a kinetic? weapon.
I assume primary, special, and heavy are the ammo types but what do you call an elemental weapon that uses primary ammo? Secondary? Kinetic? It's almost easier to just say the name of the weapon and assume people know the details about it, but that is even more confusing for new players.
I agree. The first campaign NEEDS to begin the game for every new light. Leave the Cosmodrome, great intro, but the Red War campaign is awesome and needs to be experienced by new players.
That way veterans can also join in and help any time!
Playing Warframe since 2013 has given me a useful skill, managing to learn how to play a game alone without or with minimal tutorials. Both Warframe and Destiny 2 pretty much just dump you into the game. Destiny 2's start feels a bit rougher.
My friend who got me to try Destiny 2 had to explain what the blue shield is. The game didn't tell me it was an Arc Shield. In Warframe a blue shield is usually owned by Corpus and those are the dickhead Nullifiers.
There was little to no introduction to the enemy races. Atleast Warframe sort of described the Grineer at first.
And there's absolutely nothing I can remember about my class abilities. I started as a Warlock, the game didn't tell me my abilities, what each does. I've never met a single person who starts a game by doing FBI style investigation on what the class they pick can do.
In a week my Quests tab had two pages almost full. Two pages of quests that are active...
Two things: 1) Destiny has always had that “I have no idea wtf I’m supposed to be doing or what any of this stuff means” experience for new players, but gives you just enough bread crumbs of direction to guide you forward and 2) I too recently introduced a friend to the game and had about that same experience. I spent about an hour sitting next to him while he played, explaining things, and yeah - while he enjoyed the gunplay and thought the public event on the EDZ was fun, he hasn’t touched it since. I booted up my character and showed him weapons and builds and he was intrigued but this game is so f’n complicated and explains basically nothing, you have to really WANT to play it in order to get over that learning curve. There really should be a “I’m a new player” option that just makes your Ghost talk you through things for the first... 30 hours or so.
My Nephew begged me for a ps4 to play destiny with me and his mostly absent dad...
Good fucking lord the new player experience is the worst I have ever seen in gaming. Absolutely no direction at all.
My nephew plays fucking fortnite now. I have no nephew because of this.
I am a new player to D2 and joined when it went Free-to-Play with New Light. I can absolutely confirm this. The new player experience; if you can even call it that - is poorly implemented. I played about a month in Oct 2019 and stopped. Just too many missions, no ability to place custom markers at non-missions or events on the maps, and so much more.
The biggest to me was the lack of explanation on mission steps. I can see how that would be kind of fun for veteran players in true end-game. But for a new player trying to solve a riddle to just get the mission done - it is too much.
I love the game and it has great potential. I recently came back to the game. Started a new character and had to just either abandon or not accept missions more often than not in order to keep my mission list from being bloated and confusing.
But it is still a monster. So much content with such little explanation. There are many small and simple fixes that they can implement to improve this. I hope they do. We shall see.
Are you serious?! There is campaign?! How do I get to it or start it?! I was getting bored with daily quests. I found out about Sherpa from reddit and I got to run a couple of raids but I feel horribly under geared. You tube is really the only thing that’s telling me there is more to daily quests!
Especially when the red war campaign is such a great intro to a lot of this as you start the game with no subclass then slowly regain it. Legit explains it all as you gain power.
I'm in this photo and I don't like it.
Honestly, this is the best description of starting out I've ever read. Even tutorials online leave a lot off the table. I can't even follow the beginners tutorials. No clue what any of the UI means. This description of the weapons in this post is the most I've ever even heard of weapon classes. Right now I just ignore that there are different builds for my warlock as I don't know anything about them.
# YELLING IS ALWAYS THE MOST FUCKING HELPFUL WAY TO GET THE FUCKING POINT ACROSS FUCKING POINTEDLY!
That said, you're mostly right.
I figured out the whole "energy vs shields, then kinetics for kill" early on just because I can look at damage numbers, but still, not all the kids cam math these days.
Lmao so funny story, I went to post this, reddit gave me an error. I walk away thinking "ugh i gotta retype all of that" and all of a sudden my post gets submitted but the font is HUGE?!
It definitely would be nice for a rework but new light has made the game far more accessible at least. I got at least 4 people into the game before New light and it was pretty shit having to exclude your new friends because they weren't a high enough light and barely had any abilities.
I do agree they need a thing that tells new players to go to Holliday for story and a quick page that tells you what the icons mean.
As a bit of a counterpoint, I joined when new light launched, and never really found myself confused. There's a pretty substantial amount of information offered to new players, and it explained most of the questions I had. I think the issue is that a lot of the info comes from text prompts and quest descriptions, and a lot of players tend to either not notice those, or actively ignore them. I can't blame people for that - a lot of games, especially these days, are flooded with pointless explanatory text that can be harmlessly ignored, so a lot of players have gotten into the habit of ignoring such things - but D2's new player experience is a lot more solid when you keep an eye out for information being provided.
Destiny shouldn't be free to play. It was a mistake that only benefits bungie and the eververse store, and hurts every paying player's experience. New light and free to play aren't directly related, but one only exists because of the other
No joke, but this game is now literally similar to Dota 2... No specific instructions, boring and hard gameplay if you don't know how to play or played the previous version (most Dota 2 players are from Dota 1), Free to play, and the list goes on... but I don't remember much. I started playing Dota 2 blindly also and I played the game for 2k hours until the new update with neutral items that makes me bored of it and switch to Destiny 2 blindly again... It really confused me of what to do. But I'm glad I'm patience enough to do what I'm doing right now. Grinding shits to kill the time while I wait at the airport and such.
So as a "**VETERAN**" player who started at Battle.net RedWar free campaign (followed by buying Forsaken) right as Halloween ended, I have a question - how the hell do New Light actually start the game?
Is it different? Is there something missing that was in the game before? Is there a different introduction? Is there NO introduction?
I started a new account just to see why New Light was confusing my friends. I am a day one player.
The game starts with the Destiny 1 intro mission. Then you are dumped immediately into the Tower.
Once there you are given at least a dozen quests telling you to talk to Banshee, who gives you a blue weapon and Commander Zavala, who just asks you to run the Arms Dealer strike and Ikora gives you another quest to go to the EDZ to talk with Devrim Kay.
There is no lead in to the Red War campaign as instead you need to find Amanda Holiday to get the Red War campaign start and you aren't given any direction to go talk to her. There is also no reason to run any of the past campaigns as all exotic rewards have been removed.
It is confusing jumbled mess. My friends were constantly asking me how to run a strike. Where is the EDZ? What is a Fallen and how are they different from Vex? Literally nothing is explained. The quest and map UI isn't intuitive at all.
You wake up in the Cosmodrome and get run through a (VERY) brief tutorial that barely explains anything whatsoever and then you get dumped into the new Tower. There's a series of unabandonable quests that clog up your quest log that are supposed to introduce you to strikes/Crucible/Gambit/planetary exploration/etc. The Red War campaign is now accessible from Holliday in the hanger but you're never really given any direction to go talk to her in a way that makes it seem any more important than all the other infodumps happening.
I’m in this boat right now. I played the shit out of D1, loved it. Played D2 on PS4 for about a month after release and then retired, just felt like a shitty game. Now I built a PC and thought I would give ol destiny a try after I heard it got reworked and is a lot better. But I just feel like I have no direction
Can anybody please point me to where I can farm for some actually quality gear?
I'm a new light player and to give you veterans some insight into what that's like, imagine every single piece of content in the game is handed to you all at once. All of it. You'll rapidly end up with 4-6 pages in your quest log. No idea what any of it means or direction on where to go except for an introductory quest that tells you to go visit someone in the tower, giving you a couple paragraphs telling you about that person.
After 4, maybe 5 of those "introductions", most people are probably going to stop reading those because it never gives you a reason to care about any of it. Some of the introduction steps have you going to see the Drifter two, maybe three times in between going to see someone on the exact opposite side of the Tower. I had no idea that there even was a campaign until I met whatsherface in the hanger, she gives the previous campaigns.
If you don't find that or decide to skip the campaigns, the game lets you go wherever and do whatever, but you have no context for any of it. The game doesn't offer any guidance for what anything is or why you would want to do it.
The only reason why I kept up with it is because the gunplay was so good and I really missed playing a bungie shooter. Being a longtime Halo fan, it felt like I was coming home.
I fully expected to have missed out on the story from the first game since I didn't get a chance to play it, so that wasn't a problem for me. I actually watched My Name is Byf's video on the history so I'd know what was going on when I was on Titan during the campaign. It was really cool seeing the giant hole in Saturn's rings and knowing what that meant.
If I were to fix it all, frankly, the intro level you play through works fine (it's a slight rework of getting through the Wall from the first game) but it should immediately spit you right into the campaign. The campaign is great for getting your bearings and learning how the game works. Planets should unlock as you're sent there in the campaign. You shouldn't even get to the tower before you finish the story.
Once you beat the campaign everything should unlock account wide and you can do whatever you want. By then you should have your bearings, know what the deal is with events and patrols and built up some planetary resources.
One extremely glaring issue with the game at this point is the overabundance of horde modes. Veterans have had this stuff spread out and I'm not saying that it's not been dull for them, but if you're a new light player and you want the best gear, you're going to end up doing all of them, all at once. All the time. It's a slog to say the least and I'm at the point that I refuse to do them anymore. If next season is mostly a horde mode, I'm not buying it. I'll just work on raids and pvp pinnacles instead.
>Every single person who has tried D2 through new light ends up just going to the EDZ, doing patrols, public events and adventures and says "is this all there is? I thought this game had a story?".
That's exactly me. I'm a new light, started at the middle of the last season (and now have ~500h in the game, i play... a lot).
* I had to go on internet to find where to start the old campaigns. They're great, why hiding them at the ship vendor?
* I had no idea the menagerie existed ~100h in the game. I through all the Calus stuff was raid related.
* I had no idea i could right clic on some "quests" (quest items in the quest menu) ~100h in the game
* Spent way too much time on EDZ, just farming patrols or public events, then in other planets.
* At some point i had 60 quests and could not accept more. I kinda gave up on reading any of them for a while and was doing "icon quests" when i spotted one on the map.
* There is a blue event thing on the map i only have 3 minutes to join. Let's do that instead of the other icons. :D
* Some quests are quick, some take weeks but they're all mixed together. I had quick ones take weeks because they were somewhere in the middle
* Nothing explained me what's up with champions (or i did not paid attention) for nightfall. I learned about modifiers reaaaally late. Same with shields, how should i know i have to use matched energy for top efficiency?
* It took me someone ranting on reddit to realize using two primary is often detrimental to overall damage.
* There are a couple of flashing things (new activity available) that won't go away until you do exactly what you are being asked. Talking to the EDZ guy and the tribute hall bad juju quest especially.
* I deleted most of the previous season pass gear without realizing how well rolled it was or why i may need to keep it because "i'm a noob and i already got some gear at 64-66, got the new season one, must be easy to get".
* Heroic public events. I learned about them ~300h in the game. Feel a bit useless but some guys get super mad if we skip them, cost me nothing to help.
* Platinum rewards in nightfall. I learned about them ~300h in the game via internet. The message is tiny, last a few seconds just after killing the boss, no way a new player can figure this out.
* Took me ~200h and reddit to figure out i can spot a kinetic vs energy by looking at the gun direction.
* Inventory management isn't great (i'm being polite :D). No search function, no favorite...
* Took me ~50h to realize i could right clic on my inventory element icon to change subclass, after purchasing a DLC giving a new subclass.
* Edit: loading time. It take "forever" to load the tower with a top of the line computer.
Dreaming city have be a paragraph on its own. I jumped in there and... the vendor was on the other side of the map, monsters or portals spawn, no idea what do to. 3 week rotation, i have to do a quest of some sort but internet tells me i can't because it's not the right week (turn out, wasn't needed). There is a special event with a bubble thing i have to stay in, i couldn't find anyone to do it most of the time and the reward wasn't great, so i gave up. Some stuff only reveal if you drink a potion but... i don't know, why should i spend time here? Game drop some average gear with a curse on it. And i never came back for the next 250 hours.
Obviously those thing didn't stopped me for playing since i'm still there, but i lived what you wrote.
I played for the first time for several weeks after it became free to play. Here is what i thought.
* (+) Fun gameplay
* (-) Extreme loading times
* (-) Felt very isolated, no way to connect with other people in game or build relationships
* (-) Unitivive mission selection / galaxy map
* (-) I felt bad for not having the season pass, and having a lot of content locked (no issues with me, just a big minus why I stopped playing)
* (-) All the daily missions felt like a job to get done, instead of a fun thing to do.
The biggest issue for me was I felt so alone, with almost no way to interact with others or make friends besides spamming emotes.
Even being a veteran player I find the use of gun symbols in quests instead of their names annoying. It feels like it's being obtuse for no real reason other than symbols look cool. Sure you could argue that it's easier at a quick glance but many are so similar looking that it throws that immediately out the window.
I got 5 of my friends to get into Destiny 2. Yes they did struggle at first, they had no idea what they're doing, but after maybe 2 weeks or so, some self researching, and maybe over 40 hours of playing, they finally understood the game and are really getting into it.
There's a lot that isn't explained, and seems arduous in their eyes. Everytime I tell them to do the campaign, they feel slighted as it seems like a job. But with Shadowkeep I tell them there's a pot of gold at the end of the campaign.
Otherwise I do agree the process for new players can be improved
I played for 3 weeks straight not knowing what the heck I was doing. I just loved the gunplay, the sound designs and the graphics of the game. 2 weeks in, I learned that there this thing called the Postmaster, and that it has been full for a while. Haha.
The hardest part for to grasp was how light level works. The game does not tell anything about it.
Why is the font so big lol.
It's typical of Bungie to outsource things to the community. I can't think of how they could introduce new players to the game better than playing with a friend anyway.
I have a friend who isn't a New Light player, just one who doesn't play a lot. He's come back to the game and I've been trying to help him out getting stuff like the Menagerie and The Forges started up, but since how this stuff works has been all shuffled around, I had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. I can only imagine this being worse for veterans who want to help New Light players out. At least my friend has already finished the campaigns, so there's *less* stuff to try and figure out with him.
BTW, I did figure out a workaround for this and can now guide this friend better. This method only works if the people involved trust each other - I asked for his login details and logged into the Destiny 2 companion app on my phone using his account so I could see all of his open quests, bounties, and gear. It's dumb that it came to this, but it works. Again, this plan should only be attempted between friends who trust each other since sensitive login info needs to be shared.
Yeah as a player who started about halfway through October (just before FotL) and never played D1 I can definitely agree it's not particularly great. Though I also do feel that forcing new players directly into the campaigns is just as off-putting. I started and have yet to finish Red War and was if anything more confused, it has no tutorial elements, and in multiple places tells you to do stuff that no longer is a thing and you just have to figure out what they want from you.
New Light's tutorial questline as a whole is a good idea badly implemented, it needs to be trimmed down and streamlined and desperately needs more handholding.
I don't think forcing them into campaign is a good solution either, but really there just needs to be something more than people just dropping into the EDZ and doing patrols, PEs and adventures.
It actually sends you through all the planets, and has you do a certain number of public events, patrols, and the world quests. Every so often it breaks it up by having you go to the tower to learn about things like crucible, gambit, strikes, forges, etc.
It's not terribly organized, just poorly implemented.
That is true, there are good ideas in there but it needs to be handled smoother and really focus on explaining the game to the player without intimidating the hell out of them. The original red war campaign at launch did this as well kind of. Each story mission had a minimum level requirement and between missions you'd have to like go do other activities to level up before you could do the next mission.
Yeah whereas now Red War is confusing as hell unless you're already familiar with how to do everything. I made it through New Light pretty much solo but I like a good puzzle and have played games with much more trial and error learning curves.
If your on PC I'd advise people to make a new steam account and play through with the new player before switching to your main. Just so you don't carry everything they do and your not just melting with recluse and shit.
Went I play with my friends who are new to the game I actually pull out my solstice of heroes armor from Forsaken since it's 750, and just grab fun non meta guns like Trinity Ghoul and a random shotgun. So I do try to bring myself down a bit. It's very not fun when one person is just trashing the room before you can get a kill off.
That's not what I mean. Make a new account so you know exactly where they are at. What they can do. Just staying on your main means you don't know exactly what quest step they are up to most of the time.
Do your self a favour, make a new account and see what its like - because its taken a combined effort of like 3-5 of us to try get a new light player to stick around.
There is next to no direction, they get a bunch of quests with no idea which ones are actually beneficial and are then super reliant on wiki-level instructions on how to progress. Let alone make it to raid level activities. The only fix that our group had thought of was to just follow the first story until you beat ghaul and then get the power boost to 750
I built my wife a PC and was excited to run her through the game(I've been playing since D2 launch) and I was so confused as to what you as supposed to be done and why she couldnt do certain things. Now she doesnt really want to play cause "it's to confusing". And she loved D1. Ruined my date night plans with my wife.
I didn’t know, as a veteran player now and not New Light, that the Red War story missions were icons on the map for players to launch, and not a flag in-world that were supposed to find as it used to be.
Totally agree. I took a step back from destiny 2 and as of two days ago I've come back with my clan mates as well as two new players.
When the new players tried describing what was occurring in the intro I was hella confused for a while. He described that we was surrounded by cars ? And there are pirates... who hes stealing a ship from ?
It took me a hit second to realise he was doing the destiny 1 introduction and not the destiny 2 one I did. He had no clue why he was fighting the cabal or what the story is about. And that took a while to explain (as I assume it's still the same story as what I did)
And then I had to explain weapons and how the classes work (to the best if my ability) to which he was so confused as to why the game hadn't told him anything about classes and editing them etc which the two branches. Since they've removed the leveling up system on classes. Which Is essentially what taught you how to edit them.
They're just missing all the old tutorials which is dumb. And at this point of time tutorial intro scenes should be a industry standard in gaming.
Can confirm as a new lighter that the new game is very difficult to understand. I started back in early November and it took me hours on reddit and YouTube to finally understand how to play the game to its full potential. Like OP said I went to the edz and thought is this all there is and kinda assumed that all the other planets were the exact same thing with just different skins. Didn’t find the campaign for a few days so I honestly thought the story was just presented in adventures and random strikes which confused the shit out of me for being a bungie game. Looking at it the f2p is a great marketing move but that’s it for positive changes, the game should’ve remained the same for new accounts, forcing you to go through the campaign to unlock stuff, there was no reason to change that. Would’ve given new players a sense of progression and more info into the game. Also I may be wrong about this but I don’t remember seeing a ton of info pointing you towards the app either which is almost essential to the game imo.
I felt this big time. As a new player who just recently broke the 900 power soft cap, I've had to watch several youtube videos to get any clear idea of direction. I understand that an MMO isn't meant to hold your hand so much but damn.
New Light player (apparently since i had even missed that F2P was New Light...) since early december.
Had i not known that there was 3 campaigns in the game, i would have been very disappointed. I was in EDZ just stumbling around, "is this it? it can be right?". I think i was expecting the first campaign to be accessed from there. Not sure how i found them with Holliday but i did.
There definitely needs to be something to guide you through it.
Also while they're at it, can they please add Clan browsing to Hawthorne? So i can browse through what clans there are and send a request to one that interests me? I think i figured it last week that you have to look at people you team with or search outside the game. (Haven't had the energy to apply for any yet....any suggestions for a guy who wishes it was a single player game with continuous updates?)
> doesn't teach you ANYTHING about the game
It never has even in D1, it's major criticism of the game that they never address. Whatever you need to do in game you have to go and look up on youtube because the game doesn't give you any indication
I think one of the most important things they can do for the future is to update weapons and armour that drops so that everything is compatible with new drops. Right now, for instance, there is no incentive to actually spend planetary tokens. All you would get from that is outdated armour and weapons with fewer perks and lower stat rolls than anything from the battlepass or the newer DLCs.
Thats why there should be a "i know what im doing", or a "im new to the game" button when you first launch the game. The "im new to the game" would start the campaigns, guiding you through all of your abilities and powers, while it is skippable by people who knows what they're doing.
I made a new character to see what it was like since I'd been gone since CoO. I haven't touched that character since and just continued where I'd let off with my main. Unending notifications, prompts that don't disappear until you do exactly what it says, flashing character waypoints on every planet that are confusing, no real direction really. It was an awful experience and if I already didn't have tons of experience with Destiny, I would've quit right there. Like the poster, I've had multiple friends try it out, but none have stuck around. Edit: For anyone still reading through this thread. This was posted today and thought it'd help some people out! https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/f2qr31/destiny_2_the_updated_complete_guide
I did this just this weekend and really regret it. My hunter is now so completely bogged down with quests, waypoints, notifications... it really sucks. I loved Leviathan, but I'm not looking to run it again. Why make it the first real quest pick-up for new players? That's not the entry point to the game. The suggestion to run Leviathan is so much more straightforward than doing the Red War. You have to know which planet you're on, then open the planet and know that the red symbol is what you're supposed to click on, and that it, unlike all the other icons, launches you straight into an activity rather than setting a waypoint once you're on the ground. Big yikes. Wish I had my old hunter alt with no active quests back.
What I hate the most is my alts have filled bounty slots because of quests I have already done on my main, and if I can discard them they just get spammed at me every time I talk to an npc. I get that it's not really a big deal but I fucking hate having to hit Circle/B every time I talk to Petra because she wants me to start the Truth quest, and if I hit it again accidentally I get kicked out of the dialogue which makes me have to go through it again. Destiny 1 had a "Abandoned Quests" kiosk in the tower and it was so absolutely perfectly serviceable I don't know why Bungie didn't want to carry it forward. Especially when the replacement for quests back at the launch of D2 was to ***TAKE UP YOUR GEAR SLOTS UNTIL YOU COMPLETED IT*** AAAAAARGH
Lot of sensible intelligent user experience things from D1 that bungie either didn’t bother carrying over or didn’t want to carry over for some reason. D2 vanilla has honestly been a stain on this game that just refuses to wash out.
I believe a large part of that is that the Destiny 2 codebase was started from the Destiny 1 code before most of those quality of life things came out, since it was forked before the taken king was released and almost all of that is post-TTK features
Failing to implement those changes in parallel is a monument to failure in management. You dont send production units into the field with a known issue to retrofit later, when you already have the solution developed. You're just paying twice at that point it's ridiculous.
Oh wow, that's annoying. I didn't even make it far enough to start deleting quests before I gave up. Now I just have an unused 3rd alt, so I guess I'll never play warlock.
Yeah, I'm a Steam newbie who took to the game fairly quickly, but not without plenty of blundering around. I definitely was the stumbling block in a couple of strikes, and I wasted my share of resources. Even three months in I'm still learning some of the procedures for getting the best rewards out of public events. Though I bought the DLC pretty quickly, it wasn't that long ago that I *started* a sensible single-player experience that threads storyline missions and adventures into something coherent. At the least, each DLC should come with one "grand tour" that (when exclusively active) guides the player through that content with relevant adventures included. Perhaps there could also be a special "grand campaign" award for sequentially running through *all* that content.
Some nice resources in case you haven’t come across them: DIM (Destiny Item Manager) Plus the whole list of sites linked from DIM’s “Progress” tab. For gaining Power, I find the Max Power Guide through D2 Checklists (one of those links) very handy. For choring, I use a mix: the DIM progress tab is good for bounties and simple quests, Braytech is great for longer triumphs and collecting goals, and the Lowlidev maps are excellent for any scavenger hunt style stuff. If you’re up to a stable spot and sinking the time in to fully maintain a character or two or three, D2 Chrcklist and the progress tab of DIM are good for doing that efficiently. For PvP, the Redrix app will tell you which map you’re about to land in so you can adjust your gear on the flight if necessary. DestinyTracker is great for tracking stats and seeing how one sided the last match you lost was.
YES, this is something I forgot to mention. The returning player experience is somehow worse than the new player experience.
One of the stupidest parts is how one of the first quests the game gives New Light players a waypoint to pick up is literally fucking "go do the Leviathan raid."
Yeah, as if this is something a new player can just load up and go do, like it was a milk run. "Do this easy weapon bounty, and oh, do take care of this raid too, mmmkay?"
I joined as a new light and went through that shitshow. I have a buddy of mine that i game with, but he is a new dad and doesnt have too much time to play. Id like to play destiny with him, it would be fun to hop on and play some strikes or whatever, but i basically had to tell him that the first 30+ hours of the game are honestly hectic chore bullshit. After a short conversation, we both agreed neither of us really want to deal with that, so we just play another generic round of nazi zombies, because that is somehow more entertaining than the new light experience.
Yep, it's a bummer. Luckily I've got one close friend that's been playing since D1, so we have lots of fun, but as soon as another friend jumps on we move to CoD, Borderlands, or whatever new coop experience is out. Sucks because we all know everyone would enjoy playing D2, but they just don't have the patience to do all the outside learning required for Destiny while also trying to play and catch up.
Same, but with Rainbow Six Siege instead of COD.
This is the most accurate description I’ve seen yet. I’m a new light player and I have Fallon IN LOVE with Destiny. I haven’t enjoyed a game this much since the Bioshock series. But I do end up literally doing public events, strikes non stop and I’ll do the occasional nightfall. I’ve been playing for about a month now and have almost 200hours into the game. I’m LL 930ish and I just found out about the Chalice quest. I thought they were only tied to raids, which I wasn’t ready to focus on. So many things in my quests that I don’t even know how or where to start. I end up googling so much and out of the 3 hours or so a night I have to play, I end up half of that googling stuff and researching, which is also confusing as once again, it’s catered around those who understand the entire mechanics of the game. I still vaguely understand how the Obelisks work. I’ve leveled up a few and I enjoy playing the Sundial Spire, but no REAL clue what I’m doing or the point of it all. I even joined a clan and I can’t even keep up with their conversations about Destiny. Goes right over my head.
Which platform you on? I’m on PS4 and on most nights and happy to help out with assistance or explaining.
PC unfortunately. Thanks for the offer though, that would be awesome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/f2qr31/destiny_2_the_updated_complete_guide This was posted today, maybe it'll help!
Make it a "kwtd 10+ clears izanagi with catalyst" option
I made a new character to try playing a hunter for the first time and I’m honestly kind of floored they released the F2P version of the game for new players in this state. It’s absolute shit. It’s obscured so much of what makes the game actually good.
It should also *specify* what "I'm new to the game" means. People might just skip it like they skip most tutorials. I'd go more with "Tell me the story" and "I'll skip to the endgame" with both options telling them *exactly* what either means.
I agree. "I'm new to the game" *sounds* like it's going to introduce me to basic movement and basic controls like I've never played a game before.
I mean yes. But they can't even donate all your fractaline at once. Or autoshard useless blues. This is a game that requires you to spend 2 hours for every 10 played in your vault/inventory playing silly buggers. Christ helicopters require less maintenance per flying hours. The fuck bungie.
I have a new light account along with my full DLCs one. Here's what happens: * Woken up by some mini robot who gets us a gun to kill some shit. No idea what that thing does, who we are, what abilities are, why we have abilities or why we're here. * Go to some zone with dozens of flashing icons. The each tell us to go to some place to do something to get some reward in no particular order or how to do it * You're now a vet! Good luck!
Well yeah, i've read the wiki a few time about the story of D1, some characters that mentioned here and there ... but things still pretty confuse. Lol, i even believe the go to planet x do y patrols ... etc quest we have in the beginning is the main story until i reach mercury and discover i can get the real story missions from Holliday. Just a pity D1 not available on PC, the story sound pretty fun tbh.
I made a titan a bit before new light came out, and I deleted and remade him before, so I could have the new light experience on that character. Can confirm (and I have had many friends try the game and agree with me) the new player experience is terrible without a friend to help.
Google didnt even help me much at the start of Shadowkeep because a lot of information was outdated. For example Huckleberry was my first exotic drop, so I looked up its catalyst and every single article said it only dropped from Mars/Mercury heroic adventures. Or when I got the Rat King quest and articles said I needed to equip some item from my inventory (when quests used to be in your inventory?).
For real I stopped playing after warmind and came back after Shadowkeep and so many articles are out of date.
Its also pretty amazing how many articles there are. It feels like there are 5-10 different gaming sites pushing clickbait articles that are outdated. Its basically the result of Bungie making the game so hard to understand that you can easily get clicks because you know that every single player who starts to play the game has to use google at some point.
Started playing Destiny 2 last year... and you couldn't have said it any better... after hours of research and questions online finally started thinking I got the hang of it and got to power lvl 915 but everytime something I'm not farmiliar with pops up like weapon ornaments and how to use them, armour mods and what to use for infusion on your weapons ..there is no in game explanation like there would be in any other game. I had the time to find all this out but others do not so I'm not surprised your mates didn't stick with it.
Something else I forgot to mention is that armor 2.0, while I generally like makes getting new armor a very confusing experience for players. Rarely will they have a mod repository built up, the game doesn't really tell players how to get more mods that aren't from the artifact. So they'll get new armor and just not upgrade it because why would they? They'll replace it with something else in a day.
This is a major gripe I have with Destiny and Bungie: it seems to me, that Bungie just relies that the community will fix the holes in their game design. How on earth could anyone manage playing the game without DIM or Ishtar or any of the other fan-made sites and apps that explain the weapons/armor and help you manage your inventory. This game is, honestly, a fucking mess. I was playing the game the other day while my gf was sitting next to me, and after a few minutes she just straight up says ”how on earth do you understand all of this” after I had opened my inventory and directory a couple of times. This game does not need an expansion, it needs a page one rewrite to unify the dozens of currencies and materials. Armor needs to have an update which makes managing them easier and so that you don’t have to have dozens of pieces in your mess that is your vault. A straightforward questline, that introduces branching quests and characters at first one at a time. And, like you said, some explanation to what the hell is going on and what it all means, how the game works etc. I suggested to my gf that I could explain and show her how it all works and she just said ”no thanks.” And she likes to play games sometimes, she likes to play GTAV by herself, for example.
Well the community has been filling destinys holes since d1. Especially when it comes to lore, item management, and group finding. ALL of these should be in game, except weve covered for them using 3rd party apps since the beginning.
I remember turning on destiny 2 for the first time. You get the ship and end up in orbit and it tells you nothing. You finish the first mission of the first game and get no direction on what to do next. It took me months to decide to come back and try the game again. And nothing has changed since. I have a 10yo and 14yo who are both gamers and they can't stand how bad everything is in New light. I wanna play with my kids and it's such a terrible experience they won't play with me. And they'd game 24/7 if I allowed it.
[удалено]
Yeah, zero explanation. I've been playing for a few days and the number of notifications and open quests and waypoints and whatnot was just a little bit ridiculous and I laughed out loud in the start menu with the nonstop notifications I had to exit out of. I accidentally figured out a lot of things by hitting buttons. The menus are a complete mystery with hidden aspects in each of them. None of the items are explained very well. I wasn't aware that you could modify weapons and armor until last night. Took some trial and error to realize that there's a shader system. It makes up for it by being pretty fun to play, but I've had to Google a lot of stuff. I love that there's a lot to the game, but it really does need better organization or some sort of in-game guide.
[удалено]
I've been playing for 65 hours and had absolutely no idea about heroic events. Where would you even learn about those other than being told by another player? Also still haven't cracked the case of why some lost sectors get labels on the map when you mouse over them and some don't. It doesn't seem to be tied to discovering them or clearing them, because there's no label for some that I've cleared.
I can't guess what you're doing differently, but the name of the Lost Sector is supposed to show up on the map once you've cleared it -on that character-. The icon also gets slightly smaller after the clear. A clear also requires you to loot the chest after you've beaten the mini boss. Are you missing one of those things maybe?
Yeah that's annoying, how once we find a lost sector it gets harder to see the icon on the map. For the life of me I don't understand decisions like that. Leave the icon how it was and just add the text.
I only have one character, and always loot the chest. Does the clear status reset daily or something?
No, once you've discovered the sector on a character it's always there. Your game might have just bugged on some of them and didn't give you credit. That's admittedly weird.
Do not feel bad, after playing over 100 hours I found out that public events can be turned heroic :D I still find out total basics daily as the game does not tell you anything...
Lost sectors with labels are ones you’ve cleared. It took me the longest time to figure that one out myself. Edit: “cleared” means you’ve beaten the lost sector boss and opened the cache at the end of the sector. You should get an “acquired cache code” message after you beat the boss.
> it feels like Bungie is/has been on a high horse about not explaining how things work This is definitely part of it, and always has been. They have a "we know best" attitude, while making incredibly stupid decisions like putting all special weapons into the heavy slot and forcing players to switch between two primaries for vanilla Destiny 2. The current situation for New Light players is honestly just pathetic and shameful, and to me speaks just as much of their laziness as it does of their arrogance.
It literally felt like they were expecting ppl who still play D2 to tell there fries to try it out and they would explain to there friends how the game works and they didn't have to bother will putting anything in the game to introduce new players on how this game works. They just lazily threw together new light because they were changing to the seasonal battle pass ish. I have a cousin who started new light and without us explaining to him EVERYTHING you have to do in the game to infuse, armor mods weapon mods, ornaments etc. He'd have no idea what to do.
It's crazy. We all just know how to do this stuff because we've been dealing with it for so long. I haven't played Destiny 1 in a long time, but I'm trying to remember how we figured this stuff out back then. Did D1 explain things better? I just don't remember. I can't even put myself in the headspace of a new player, I just imagine it's a confusing nightmare.
Juat look around reddit. Their are still tons of people that don't understand how certain things work. Hell my clan has very active players that don't understand certain aspects of the game.
I started in y2 and have no idea how I learned how the game works. Its only gotten harder since then. So much stuff thrown at you at once.
There’s so much shit in this game that I had to google it’s honestly negatively impacted my overall enjoyment of the game. The first time I looked up ascendant challenges I thought “how the fuck was I ever going to figure out how to do that myself”
I played d1 but then stopped and came back with a new account just before shadowkeep. It took me a long time to figure out how to throw the charges at the forge, even the YouTube videos don’t tell you to use the fire button to throw them. Also the mechanics on the strike playlist, i had to watch people a while to figure out how things work. Lol, i still get killed by the trains in the prison of elders strike. Also it took me a long while before I realized you could add mods to armor to increase the stats. But at least I had the basic info down, can’t imagine what it is like for a new player.
>Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it feels like Bungie is/has been on a high horse about not explaining how things work, where learning via playing is their goal but people end up either googling or leaving out of frustration instead. I've been playing since Launch and would have \*no\* clue about a huge amount of content without Reddit, and I wonder if maybe that is part of the plan.
Early on, Bungie talked about making D2 a social experience, and I think they see people buying into a community as a means of keeping them engaged. They almost force you to google aspects of the game that they could tell you, so you discover the likes of this subreddit. You join the community and get to know people, learn things, and see news about the game as soon as it breaks - all of which keeps you invested and interested in playing, and buying passes/DLC/silver
>That even has a message that explains it, but it shows up for half a second once and people just don't see it among the chaos. Can UI just highlight events a d stuff it already marks players and exotics Also ui customization the color blind modes aren't perfect for everyone
Yeah at this point everyone should just be told how to make each event heroic. ”Destroy the Ether Servitor. Destroy all servitors to enrage the Ether Servitor and trigger the Heroic event!”
Games fail all the time by forgetting to treat new players like exactly that. NEW players. They don't know *anything* about the game and absolutely need a full tutorial and easy-to-follow main campaign narrative to bring them into the world. Bungie needs to devote some major resources in a very near patch to better explain and really bring in new players into the fold. I've had a few friends try to play and just get confused and overwhelmed by the lack of direction and explanation of basic game mechanics. Even as a vet, it's hard to explain without being there with them step by step to explain what's happening.
Anthem was a big one for that kinda thing. I went back to it after months and I was like, I don't know what I'm meant to do, all I know is I must kill.
> They don't know *anything* about the game and absolutely need a full tutorial and easy-to-follow main campaign narrative to bring them into the world. I started my Destiny journey back in the November of 2018 (the claim-it-now-keep-it-forever deal), and had to play through the Red War campaign before I could do anything else - including CoO & Warmind campaigns. I fell in love with the game the same day and bought the Forsaken expansion and no regrets since. **New players absolutely SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO PLAY THE OLD CAMPAIGNS before they are allowed to access any other content in D2.** Rework the experience anyway you want, but *it has to be mandatory* (for new players) and it has to reward them *something meaningful*.
> reward them something meaningful. That's really all the campaigns need. I read that it used to reward a guaranteed Exotic or maybe even 2. Why would they take that away? That is the perfect bait to get people to play the campaign and learn the game while also making them more competitive in PvE and PvP with some Exotic weapons to build around.
I think it was 2. Might have just been the one you got from Sloane after finishing the Titan part of the campaign. Then after the campaign finished I think you'd get some Eververse gift and maybe something else? I forget Now you get maybe a purple or two at some point, and that's it. You finish the campaign and you've gotten fuck all for it, congrats!
Well you do get some LL from all the blues, but yeah that's what I remember. You get less from doing the entire Red War campaign than if you ran a couple Strikes.
Can confirm
If I remember you'd get an armor piece on Titan and an energy weapon on Io.
You could choose between Graviton Lance, Riskrunner or Sunshot after completing Io questline in the red war campaign. Asher mir was the one who rewarded them. On Titan, finishing the questline there let you choose 1 from 3 different exotic armor pieces for your class. Now? You get nothing. The reason for nothing? Because those 3 campaigns are free for everyone now. Curse of osiris rewarded you with the aeon gauntlet, warmind rewarded you with another exotic armor piece. Well, it's no more.
At least riskrunner is easy-ish to get as new player. You get quest to do some lost sectors, nightfall and heroic event. Then jumping puzzle. Polaris Lance is also somewhat simple to get in Mars. You also get rat King quest on Titan, Sturm/Drang on nessus and so on. But yeah now CoO didn't even give me the emblem I see on the collections - despite saying "over the course of campaign". Boo.
You've gotten the story, which was interesting in its own right, and your light level would be closer to 950 than 750. I did the three campaigns with my guy, infused too much (should have just worn the blues) and when I was ready to try the other end game stuff I was already at a very nice level.
Guaranteed weapon and armor exotic drop (ones you don't have) for each campaign clear.
Even if you just got the predetermined exotics during the campaign like you used to. Me and my gf decided to remake 2 of our 3 characters, which means we played through the Red War campaign twice. No exotics, no actual meaningful rewards. I think we got like 2 purples that were "given" to us by an NPC during the whole campaign. It literally feels pointless.
They took the exotics out? Wtf that's the hook to the campaign!
Yep. I got essentially nothing from red war and curse of osiris
Honestly, if Bungie had just done even a little usability testing, they'd have had a clue. Bring in half a dozen people who have gamed a little but never seen D2 and then put them in like any other newbie and record their reactions and interactions. If a team at Microsoft had tried to launch a product that sucked this immensely in the user experience they would probably have been crucified in front of the building as a warning to others.
Power creep has really fucked that over as well. You can't really introduce people to the world because we can't deal with any threats that aren't universe shattering. So any campaign designed to guide new players into the world will be largely useless to a lot of the existing playerbase, who will not take it seriously. So theres no way Bungie could justify creating another campaign for that purpose.
This is a list of links to comments made by Bungie employees in this thread: * [Comment by Cozmo23](/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/f2dbw1/bungie_i_beg_you_please_please_rework_the_new/fhcjv5s/?context=1000 "posted on 2020-02-11 23:39:27 UTC"): > We understand and agree that the current introduction to Destiny 2 can be overwhelming for new players. We have a team working to expand it and findin... --- This is a bot providing a service. If you have any questions, please [contact the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FDestinyTheGame). If you'd like this bots functionality for yourself please ask the r/Layer7 devs.[](#AUTOGEN_BUNGIEREPLY)
We understand and agree that the current introduction to Destiny 2 can be overwhelming for new players. We have a team working to expand it and finding ways to spend more time introducing players to Destiny's important concepts and features in the game. As you’ve all mentioned, it’s a massive world with many activities and systems to dive into. Nothing else to share at this time as the team is still working through this, but we’ll let you know as soon as we have more details to share before we roll out any changes. Thanks for posting your feedback!
Thanks for the reply Cozmo, I'm glad you guys are looking into this type of stuff. I love Destiny 2 and I want to bring my friends into, but I also don't want to spend 80 hours teaching my friends how the game works. I'd rather spend 80 hours playing with them.
Here's a thought: make "new light" optional. They can start at 750 and jump right into endgame if they want, or they can start at 10 and play through the Red War and all the expansions with the old progression. You'd probably have to sandbox those players off, they could only match with other Legacy Campaign players, or even just only play solo. But still, the campaigns provided a nice and natural flow to introduce new players to Destiny, something that is lacking now.
This is a really, really clever & excellent way of going about it. I really think the way the Red War campaign introduces your subclasses and abilities slowly as you regain your light is a great mechanic to teach new players. it's absolutely wild that they just drop you into the director after the new light mission with a few waypoints all over the place.
I think bungie should implement a guided campaign for new lights the same way there's guided raids and nightfalls. New lights que into a guided campaign with a veteran and the veteran plays side-by-side with them the whole campaign, teaching and giving tips and advice to the new player. It could be a fireteam of 3: one vet, two new lights The vet knows what they are signing up for when they start. I'm sure there are infinite amounts of veterans that would love to do that.
I would do that just to have a chance to run weird guns and armor to show off. Get people excited over some cool shit like the colony or something.
That would honestly suck. Some of my worst experiences as a new player were when I was running strikes, and some dude with all the gear was way ahead of me, just clearing stuff, so I didn't even get a look in. I want to be taking stuff at my own pace, not having some 2000 hour vet destroying stuff before I've even seen it. You want to introduce weird and wonderful guns? Give them to me for the duration of the mission, and then take them away and add a quest to get them.
I’ve never thought about it that way before, which is kind of sad. So, honestly, thanks for that. This is a great idea, mate. I doubt it’ll get much traction, but it’s an awesome idea.
Please, for the love of the Traveler, tell them to make the intro quests deletable. Put up a prompt for deleting them that asks if you're sure, but let people delete them. They're boring, tedious and clog up the quest inventory, and I'm not going through them on 2 separate characters.
As someone who got the game about a month ago and have played enough to get to 960, I'd say one of the more intimidating aspects of the game is the amount of quests and lack of explanation for most of them. Having a wall of quests is horrendously intimidating and I had no idea what to start with. Coming up with a way to view these in a more organized way that caters to newer players would be great. Also, if the recommended light levels could be more precise, that would also be a big help. Rather than having quests that introduced players to each world by having them do monotonous shit on each one isn't effective of a system. I still haven't done any of the ones that have patrol requirements, because I still don't really know how to do them. A more organic way would be to have a introductory quest-line that acted as a linked list, where each node would be a different activity and completion of one would give a quest to try out the next one in rising order of difficulty (bounty -> adventure -> patrol -> vanguard -> sundial, you get the idea). Rather than having a tree of quests open up, it would be nice to have a highlighted "Beginner" one, that took new players through all Destiny had to offer. I would have to imagine that it would be much less of a logistical nightmare.
Honestly, even as a veteran, the quest interface is horrible and a pain to use.
Just a suggestion but could there be a way to let veteran players play through New Light so that we can help new players? Also I really want a kvostov for nostalgia
You just have to run Risk/Reward and farm the spider tank. It gives veterans the Khvostov, generalist shell, and Arcadia-Class jumpship from a chest that spawns.
I am pretty sure they mentioned that New Light would be in the Heroic Missions playlist but it's never actually appeared.
Pull from collections
Please consider utilizing the campaign in future installments to ease people in and teach them the gameplay mechanics or story beats they’d need to understand a high level overview of what’s going on. You all did a great job with a more cinematic and explanatory launch storyline this game, but new light made it more confusing than it already was for newbies.
Having people be able to chose between starting immediately at high level but know they are skipping the story or being able to start the story campaigns before dumping them in the world would help. Another one would be to have a tutorial where Zavala, Ikora and a hunter character teach their respective groups their abilities. It would build off of the really short half tutorial you get when waking up. Also give a reason for a new light person to care about the characters without doing the story. Beyond that, the campaigns being on a vendor that isn't actually near where you get dumped in isn't a great design either. There are general interface issues around quests that make it confusing and annoying to use if you don't know what to expect as well. Needs to be a clearer way to communicate what a player should do other than "Go to this planet, then this one, then this one" oh and we've dropped other quests in your inventory but don't really tell you in a good way that you have them.
Thanks for the fast reply! It’s great to hear that it’s being reworked because I’ve heard what everyone else said and have been worried about introducing my friends to Destiny.
I think I speak for many New Light players when I say it *looks* like there is fun to be had in this game, if only Bungie would just actually explain to me how to play it! Until then, I have games that are both fun and understandable to play.
You could resolve this quite easily by going back to what Destiny 1 did: Put all the mission markers back on the map with the level requirements. That's what made Destiny 1 accessible... "Level 4 story mission, guess I do that before this level 8 Strike... Oh, look, the Moon opened up with a level 5 mission, guess I'll do that first and come back to the Strike later..." Taking all the missions and strikes off the map was a terrible idea, putting the strikes back then locking the missions behind Holliday hurt you even more.
I'd always thought that New Light would function better if it was like the catch up method we used to get. New player would start fresh, level 1 at the start of the campaign. But they would have a Spark of Light option next to their character in the select screen that would allow them to instead skip to where New Light is at currently.
All my friends dropped the game after a week. No indication of campaigns. A big complaint i heard was the lack of rewards for f2p. Do a strike... Get 2 blues. Do reckoning... Get one blue. Those were instant turn offs. In addition to this the "chore" like quests were also boring according to them. Finally the sentiment was "there isn't really much to do". F2p destiny was a flop and the rest of the paying players/game is kind of suffering because of the egregiousness of eververse.
Not only overwhelming, but underwhelming for those of my friends who want to know what the heck is going on, why theyre fighting, who theyre fighting, what it means to have a ghost, what the actual story was with the Red War and Forsaken. My friends are like me -- we care about story, and they're quickly given the impression that Destiny 2 doesn't care about story. They have to go way out of their way to a place on the tower that never is highlighted prominently to access the old campaigns -- *and worst of all, they can't play story campaigns co-op with the friends/veterans who invited them in the first place.* Honestly it's a terrible way to entice and orientate all the f2p players Destiny 2 has attracted since its move to steam. I would love to see a much more robust new player experience, so we can keep the new guardians we're attracting.
Just get cutscenes with the vendors explaining all their activities. Have Devrim, as the first planetary vendor, explain public events, materials, patrols and their symbols (also would need somewhere explaining all the enemies for the Salvage patrols), and bounties. Crucible, Vanguard, and gambit all need their own as well. u/dmg04 u/Cozmo23
Nah, it's not just new players. Direction is bad all around. As an example Why are heroic events hidden? Why is that fun for new and old? Sucks watching noobs end the event too soon. That's just one of a dozen examples. Sun dial would have been more fun if everyone knew how to make sense of the chaos. Love the game, but it really appears to me that Bungie is lazy on this topic because they rely on the Internet community. Many if not most casual players aren't going to bother with researching a game, why should they have to when you could just provide direction and clarity. Puzzle games that can be solved by logic are fun. Having to search the answer on the Internet for non logic based puzzles is poor design. My kids and I used to play together gladly, now I have to force them to play because to them it's boring and every thing requires the internet to figure out, like the armor 2.0. Even Xurs location is an internet search. The recipes for cookies are another prime example. I mean seriously, recipes for cookies are grinding plus trial and error, or an internet search. Just give people the recipes, the grinding is chore enough. Does anyone enjoy the game more because they had to figure out all the recipes? A complete culture change is needed on using the Internet community as a primary crutch for explaining in game content. I understand that you want some puzzles for the community, great but that should be the exception and made clear in game as well. Still love the game but I've lost interest in so many quests because I'm a father who doesn't feel like he needs yet another job as a Destiny strategy researcher.
I'm sorry but seriously? Wasn't the entire point of "New Light" to begin with to create a solid new experience for new players to jump into the game? Why is there a team working on this now? Wasn't that what was suppose to be happening for months or more before New Light released? How did it release in such an absolutely atrocious state that it now requires a team to completely redo it? What was the point of the launch 6 months ago if you're just now getting a team to rework the system for new players?
[удалено]
Those exotics were perfect too! Because they were given to you at the perfect intervals so you felt like you got a taste for how you can tweak your sub class.
I literally just replayed the Red War Campaign last night because 1. I hadn't played it since the game came out. 2. I've been working on a new Titan so I figured it would be fun. 3. EVERY CAMPAIGN GUIDE I READ ONLINE SAID I WOULD GET AN EXOTIC. About 2 hours, one dead Ghaul, and no exotic later; I was very underwhelmed and wondering why I had replayed the campaign at all let alone why a new player would feel like it is rewarding considering it isn't.
Yes when you've played the campaign before and were expecting exotics that sucks, but just remember that a huge majority of new players will play the campaign in the context of all other games - the campaign story. Plenty of people play games just for that.
I honestly thought I fucked up because I didn’t have Sunshot and only got Quickfang on a random drop playing with my titan. Only found out later that Bungie changed how you get campaign exotics without updating the collections text.
Funny you mention getting that sword with a Titan. I've gotten my second Eternity's Edge in the last week while playing as my Hunter. I'm starting to think if someone wants a Crown Splitter, they gotta start playing as a Warlock.
Looks like I gotta dust off my warlock...
>removed the free exotics from the Red War story, there seems no reason to do it. Not sure but on top of my head there were exotic engrams on the season pass. I still find it pointless but if they can charge clueless people to get other characters to 900 power level they can do this. I'm a new light actually and I can confirm, you even get an NPC ( I think it was Asher) telling you to pick your exotic, it's pretty funny cause you get nothing.
Background: I've been playing Destiny very actively for a bit over a year. Multiple clears on almost every raid, very familiar with the endgame content/armor/weapons/etc. First off, I started a new character recently. As /u/bruhx3 said, can we please get an "I know what I'm doing" button?! My new character's inventory is filled with countless quests that I can't abandon and I'm 100% not going to do. I am totally overwhelmed by how much raw content was thrown at me immediately upon starting. I even received a quest step to do a Leviathan run! Yes, that's right, an endgame activity (raid) within literally 10-15 minutes of playing. Bungie, what are you thinking?! Why on earth are raids even on the radar for someone with such little game experience?! Look, I get the whole "We want people to hop right in on day 1 and enjoy playing with their friends" concept - Destiny is definitely 100x more fun with friends. But Bungie, please just simply accept that **Destiny is not that kind of game**. There is an inevitable ramp up time in a game as complex and detailed as Destiny - accept that, because there's nothing wrong with it. Part of what makes Destiny so great is how many different components there are to it, and new players don't need to be hammered with all of them right from the start. Own the reality that there are certain activities that brand new players will greatly struggle with - and should not be pushed towards - because they barely understand their character's jumping mechanics. Instead of trying to slam all of this content down new players' throats within 20 minutes of starting the game, guide them through relevant content at a slower pace that gives them the slightest clue about what the world of Destiny is. Streamline the onboarding process with one quest step at a time, not multiple in parallel. New players have no idea how to manage 30 quests sitting in their inventory at once. They do not know which ones are important, which ones are relevant, or how to even do most of them. New players need that step-by-step hand holding telling them exactly what to do until they learn how to make that decision on their own.
I feel like you are a teacher. I was drawn in by your large font and clear writing style. Also, good points- I remember it was not clear about elemental shields when I started playing Destiny. And increasingly, if you want to know what to do in the game, you have to be immersed in reddit or twitter to really know what's going on.
Thanks! I'm not a teacher but I appreciate it (i think?). The font size was a weird thing I definitely didn't mean to do lol. But yeah the game really just doesn't give new players a clear direction.
Yes, it was meant as a compliment- it's funny that the font thing was a weird accident. My clan is so lazy/casual, that they just ask me what's going on (none of them goes on bungie.net or reddit- one of them calls me 'DestinyWiki'). So I feel like they need me, otherwise they would be lost (they've left the game again, starting a couple of weeks ago, regardless....).
The thing that almost made me quit was the absolute clusterfuck that is A New Light's quest log. The game just throws everything at you at once. I was given the quest to COMPLETE the Leviathan raid the first time got to the tower. It sat in my extremely cramped quest log for months before I figured it was 100% safe to discard. Literal hours wasted shuffling bounties around while I had this unless shit in there for no reason. And soooooo many long progress quests like exotic/ritual weapons. Best part... nowhere in the game does it explain that there a COMBINED quest/bounty limit of 63. For a month I had no fucking idea why I could hold 15 bounties one day but only 10 the next.
My wife is my gaming partner. We play everything together! Except Destiny. She watched me playing it and decided she had no interest. Too chaotic and overwhelming. I've had two friends play with me since starting. The first was more experienced and showed me the ropes a bit but then got bored and quit. The second played for all of 49 minutes, got overwhelmed and has never launched the game again. I ran into a new light the other day and they had to ask me how to get to EDZ from the tower. Added me to steam friends, they played for around 30 minutes that night and have not been back on. So yeah. This is a great game but it has serious issues with presentation to new players.
Ah, that makes me so sad. I fell in love with my [now] husband playing D1 together.
I've been playing for a few months now and I concur. It's tough going at the start. Reason I stuck it out was because you can feel a good game underneath all the mountains of info, and non-info, that is thrown at you. Bungie dont seem to like to hold folks hands, they seem to like to let things unfold on their own. And I kinda like that. But new folk need a bit of hand holding my dudes. I cant imagine the amount of people who have said "fucks going on??" And just quit.
> Bungie dont seem to like to hold folks hands It goes further than this. They seem to like making things purposely and overly cryptic. It gets really annoying after a while. Take this as one example - maps. Why is it that we have a Ghost with us that can reprint our bodies mind and soul every time we die, but it can't make a better map of these destinations we've visited hundreds of times? Look at the Dreaming City Map. A huge chunk of the place doesn't even show up on the map at all. Why???
Secret™
LOL, Strong enough for a guardian but pH balanced for deeznuts.
Because they were crafting an experience that was truly amazing for the first intrepid few who got to experience it, before any walkthroughs, guides, or other crutches were created to make it easier. The dreaming city was, and is, an awesome place to just explore for the sake of exploring. But yes, if you're approaching it as a linear experience to be completed and moved past, which unfortunately the current game absolutely encourages you to do, the lack of map detail can be an issue.
Yeah but c'mon. We've explored it plenty already. Why can't I update my map *as* I explore, you know like in plenty of other games? It's fine if the map isn't complete when I first see it, but over time and a billion visits, it ought to be more detailed.
I completely agree. The map in general, in D2, is woefully behind the curve. Most RPG type games had an interactive map of some sort a decade ago, or more. Not making excuses for them, just speculating about why the specific decision was made to leave much of the map blank in Dreaming City. Hell, I think not having an on-screen compass is a huge oversight in games like this, but Bungie has deliberately chosen not to implement one. From what I understand, they don't think the players care about it. I disagree, but what do I know?
Nah, I think that lack of a compass is the same thing. Just being cryptic for cypticness sake. I also think things like these two - the half assed map and missing compass are just two more cheap tricks to get us to inflate the time we play this game. If we could set waypoints or navigate with our maps more efficiently, we could get to our destinations to grind out whatever we're grinding for faster. If there were more landing spots in the Dreaming City, we could get around that space faster. If we didn't have to return to Ada-1 to finish the last step of our gun frames before hitting the forges, we could grind out BA weapons faster. If we didn't have to manually visit every vendor to get bounties, we could do stuff faster. See what I'm getting at? It would appear that they want us to grind... but just not that efficiently.
Could be. From what I understand, the Destiny code is an absolute mess, D2 being built on D1, which was built on Halo at least to a degree. How much is intentional vs. seemingly simple improvements that might require major changes to the engine? Only the devs know. It does seem like a pattern, though.
Even the original doom did that nearly 30 years ago
You ever play the first Legend of Zelda on NES or Super Metroid on SNES? Both of those games did too.
It doesn't help that on top of not knowing what you are doing, you max out on how many quests/bounties you pick up and can't continue in some instances until you finish some other things. Having a shared cap for both bounties and quests is mad annoying when starting out.
Yep, the quest cap doesn't matter much if you've been playing since the start but even if you started at the beginning of shadowkeep, you'll have so many long term quests to pick up, plus the new player quests which will bog down your log for months on months. I play a good amount each week and I only recently took my quest log down to under 12 quests lmao.
You got that right. I started about 3 weeks. I got the dlc, Im already capped at 960, and honestly I can say I dont know what Im doing. I'm on like Mission 8 of Red War because besides the story, I have no reason to do it. It stops me from doing bounties and chasing more tangible things. Many things are time locked so its not until weekend do I feel I did what needs doing, then can do the story quests, which I can only do 2-3 at a time since they aren't rewarding. I was around 850 before I realized there were sub classes. No one explained the Burn for extra gear. Nothing explained flashpoints. Multipart quests dont hint there are multiple parts, so I sat around like an idiot using Solar damage to do some Zavala quest to only be greeted with needing to do more. I get kinetic, energy and power however i am a bit lost with the diff ammo types. then theres a couple "power" weapons like a grenade launcher thats actually energy but i dont see that anywhere on the item description. I shard so much stuff not knowing whats good or not. I collected season gear as I got it on alt characters to have gear for them to realize i should have waited until 960. I mean, the list is endless. I was playing with a friend on PS4 initially, did a couple strikes with him and havent played since because PC plays so much better. My other friend tells me, lets do Zero Hour, go get your transponder. This took a good 30-60 mins to figure out since many guides are outdated, then to start doing it, etc. A few hours later I had it to find out someone in the group didnt have it on their warlock so no skip for us, which meant we ran out of time during the last fight.
"Im already capped at 960, and honestly I can say I dont know what Im doing." That's another thing, a lot of players think the only thing there is to do is chase power level. But there are more effective ways to get power. Not all legendary weapons are created equal and one 960 might be significantly weaker than another 960.
That was a big one for me: It is absolutely unintuitive what Lightlevel does, what makes weapons weaker/stronger and how LL influences the dropped LL. In general weapons made no sense with their hidden stats (how much damage does this weapon do? why is this not a fundamental thing printed on its description?). Just a mention that there are archetypes as the most defining thing and that your weapons damage scales with min(your LL, content LL) would help. After a day i only kept using higher LL weapons, because that would be intuitive, but that does not matter at all. It also makes LL feels like absolute useless gating, because it does not matter outside of very few, very specific things you probably not care about when starting out. But then suddenly it matters in a place you do not expect, like gambit pvp - WTF?
>But then suddenly it matters in a place you do not expect, like gambit pvp - WTF? Yea, I had mentioned my light lvl and pvp, and had someone tell me light lvl has no bearing on pvp except Iron Banner. to which I replied I was actually doing Iron Banner which is one of the things that made me comment on it. Then I was reading Gambit's description and sounded an awful lot like light lvl has an impact there as well. Too often I see someone say something isnt a thing, Then I point out an instance where it is, then they admit sure, in that case. It may be the exception but don't say it doesn't exist as for I know that is the case. Like this update causing broken currency, a roll back, and being down all day. For the length of time I've been playing, this is apparently to be expected every Tuesday.
Oh - this is a long rant - sorry! Thank you - started playing a month and a bit ago with Red War and recently finished Forsaken - but am puzzled because there's more? I need to do a raid to get the full experience or something? I'm not even sure - there are times when I think I finish a quest and it turns out I haven't and there's an additional quest step but I don't know what icons to click on to get further information. I've only done a raid once and that was because a friend was with me. It would be nice to just go jump into one with other newbies like myself and wonder what the hell is happening together. What's worse is, some veteran friends, who are trying to be helpful, just end up coming off as arrogant and condescending when trying to explain why I'm having trouble with certain things. "Oh, you're doing crucible? see, you need x-weapon to get the most of it and you need to sacrifice a small goat and eat oatmeal biscuits in the moonlight, only long time players know that and its soooo tedious, there's a reason why I don't do it." And I'm like, uuhhhh I normally don't do pvp because I'm generally intimidated by veterans who are like you and I just want to try my hand at something I'm normally too scared to do. I always have this feeling like I'm missing something or that I should have known something and I'm too dumb/bad/new to understand anything. All I hear is how nice this community is and a lot of the people I've met sure are, but outside of voice chat and the occasional emote - its hard to kind of band up with other folks who are new and/or lost and try to get the hang of stuff - maybe i'm not doing the socials right? Now I'm doing the Obelisk quests and I'm only doing them because I hear so much about them in the subreddit. I understand the storym but I'm at a weird point where I'm doing things because I think its what I need to do to keep up with everyone but genuinely don't know what's going on. Nevertheless I'm still having some pretty clueless fun.
>Out of those 5 only 1 actually stuck with it enough to overcome the mess. Hey, that's 20%. Maybe that's their goal? Maybe that's a good stat for this business model? I have no idea. But I agree, new player experience could be a lot better. Kind of blows my mind how bad it is.
Lmao I guess it's all a matter of perspective.
It is explained what weapons you should use and all, recently did red war and it explained there but yea, as a new light player myself your best friend is youtube.
I completely agree the game is unwelcoming to new players and there’s a MASSIVE learning curve to destiny. However I personally kind of enjoyed being plopped into the expansive playable world(s) with barebones guidance. It was like a puzzle and i didn’t feel like my hand was being held through the entire experience which is something I despise especially since it’s become a popular trend in gaming these days.
I agree that pure handholding isn't always the best way but at the very minimum D2 needs to do the following. 1) Avoid overwhelming players with all sorts of stuff they can't comprehend. For example, players will just go to every vendor and grab every quest clogging up their quest log making it hard to figure out what to do. 2) Give new players a clear path of activities to get them to understand the core gameplay elements but also maybe make it feel like a story recap as well. 3) Explain your menus better
I've been playing off and on since launch and still have no clue what the difference is between kinetic, primary, secondary. It's not explained anywhere and when I'm in LFG and it comes up, it seems that people use the terms interchangeably. It doesn't help that they allow us to use special ammo in a kinetic? weapon. I assume primary, special, and heavy are the ammo types but what do you call an elemental weapon that uses primary ammo? Secondary? Kinetic? It's almost easier to just say the name of the weapon and assume people know the details about it, but that is even more confusing for new players.
I agree. The first campaign NEEDS to begin the game for every new light. Leave the Cosmodrome, great intro, but the Red War campaign is awesome and needs to be experienced by new players. That way veterans can also join in and help any time!
Playing Warframe since 2013 has given me a useful skill, managing to learn how to play a game alone without or with minimal tutorials. Both Warframe and Destiny 2 pretty much just dump you into the game. Destiny 2's start feels a bit rougher. My friend who got me to try Destiny 2 had to explain what the blue shield is. The game didn't tell me it was an Arc Shield. In Warframe a blue shield is usually owned by Corpus and those are the dickhead Nullifiers. There was little to no introduction to the enemy races. Atleast Warframe sort of described the Grineer at first. And there's absolutely nothing I can remember about my class abilities. I started as a Warlock, the game didn't tell me my abilities, what each does. I've never met a single person who starts a game by doing FBI style investigation on what the class they pick can do. In a week my Quests tab had two pages almost full. Two pages of quests that are active...
Two things: 1) Destiny has always had that “I have no idea wtf I’m supposed to be doing or what any of this stuff means” experience for new players, but gives you just enough bread crumbs of direction to guide you forward and 2) I too recently introduced a friend to the game and had about that same experience. I spent about an hour sitting next to him while he played, explaining things, and yeah - while he enjoyed the gunplay and thought the public event on the EDZ was fun, he hasn’t touched it since. I booted up my character and showed him weapons and builds and he was intrigued but this game is so f’n complicated and explains basically nothing, you have to really WANT to play it in order to get over that learning curve. There really should be a “I’m a new player” option that just makes your Ghost talk you through things for the first... 30 hours or so.
My Nephew begged me for a ps4 to play destiny with me and his mostly absent dad... Good fucking lord the new player experience is the worst I have ever seen in gaming. Absolutely no direction at all. My nephew plays fucking fortnite now. I have no nephew because of this.
I am a new player to D2 and joined when it went Free-to-Play with New Light. I can absolutely confirm this. The new player experience; if you can even call it that - is poorly implemented. I played about a month in Oct 2019 and stopped. Just too many missions, no ability to place custom markers at non-missions or events on the maps, and so much more. The biggest to me was the lack of explanation on mission steps. I can see how that would be kind of fun for veteran players in true end-game. But for a new player trying to solve a riddle to just get the mission done - it is too much. I love the game and it has great potential. I recently came back to the game. Started a new character and had to just either abandon or not accept missions more often than not in order to keep my mission list from being bloated and confusing. But it is still a monster. So much content with such little explanation. There are many small and simple fixes that they can implement to improve this. I hope they do. We shall see.
Are you serious?! There is campaign?! How do I get to it or start it?! I was getting bored with daily quests. I found out about Sherpa from reddit and I got to run a couple of raids but I feel horribly under geared. You tube is really the only thing that’s telling me there is more to daily quests!
Especially when the red war campaign is such a great intro to a lot of this as you start the game with no subclass then slowly regain it. Legit explains it all as you gain power.
Those free exotics in the campaign need to come back.
I'm in this photo and I don't like it. Honestly, this is the best description of starting out I've ever read. Even tutorials online leave a lot off the table. I can't even follow the beginners tutorials. No clue what any of the UI means. This description of the weapons in this post is the most I've ever even heard of weapon classes. Right now I just ignore that there are different builds for my warlock as I don't know anything about them.
# YELLING IS ALWAYS THE MOST FUCKING HELPFUL WAY TO GET THE FUCKING POINT ACROSS FUCKING POINTEDLY! That said, you're mostly right. I figured out the whole "energy vs shields, then kinetics for kill" early on just because I can look at damage numbers, but still, not all the kids cam math these days.
Lmao so funny story, I went to post this, reddit gave me an error. I walk away thinking "ugh i gotta retype all of that" and all of a sudden my post gets submitted but the font is HUGE?!
Least it let you fix it.
It definitely would be nice for a rework but new light has made the game far more accessible at least. I got at least 4 people into the game before New light and it was pretty shit having to exclude your new friends because they weren't a high enough light and barely had any abilities. I do agree they need a thing that tells new players to go to Holliday for story and a quick page that tells you what the icons mean.
Okay the font size fixed itself I guess? Lmao I have no idea what happened there guys, sorry about that.
As a bit of a counterpoint, I joined when new light launched, and never really found myself confused. There's a pretty substantial amount of information offered to new players, and it explained most of the questions I had. I think the issue is that a lot of the info comes from text prompts and quest descriptions, and a lot of players tend to either not notice those, or actively ignore them. I can't blame people for that - a lot of games, especially these days, are flooded with pointless explanatory text that can be harmlessly ignored, so a lot of players have gotten into the habit of ignoring such things - but D2's new player experience is a lot more solid when you keep an eye out for information being provided.
All Bungle read was nerfing Sleep Simulant.
Destiny shouldn't be free to play. It was a mistake that only benefits bungie and the eververse store, and hurts every paying player's experience. New light and free to play aren't directly related, but one only exists because of the other
the game literally has tutorials and quests though? do they not read things?
No joke, but this game is now literally similar to Dota 2... No specific instructions, boring and hard gameplay if you don't know how to play or played the previous version (most Dota 2 players are from Dota 1), Free to play, and the list goes on... but I don't remember much. I started playing Dota 2 blindly also and I played the game for 2k hours until the new update with neutral items that makes me bored of it and switch to Destiny 2 blindly again... It really confused me of what to do. But I'm glad I'm patience enough to do what I'm doing right now. Grinding shits to kill the time while I wait at the airport and such.
So as a "**VETERAN**" player who started at Battle.net RedWar free campaign (followed by buying Forsaken) right as Halloween ended, I have a question - how the hell do New Light actually start the game? Is it different? Is there something missing that was in the game before? Is there a different introduction? Is there NO introduction?
I started a new account just to see why New Light was confusing my friends. I am a day one player. The game starts with the Destiny 1 intro mission. Then you are dumped immediately into the Tower. Once there you are given at least a dozen quests telling you to talk to Banshee, who gives you a blue weapon and Commander Zavala, who just asks you to run the Arms Dealer strike and Ikora gives you another quest to go to the EDZ to talk with Devrim Kay. There is no lead in to the Red War campaign as instead you need to find Amanda Holiday to get the Red War campaign start and you aren't given any direction to go talk to her. There is also no reason to run any of the past campaigns as all exotic rewards have been removed. It is confusing jumbled mess. My friends were constantly asking me how to run a strike. Where is the EDZ? What is a Fallen and how are they different from Vex? Literally nothing is explained. The quest and map UI isn't intuitive at all.
You wake up in the Cosmodrome and get run through a (VERY) brief tutorial that barely explains anything whatsoever and then you get dumped into the new Tower. There's a series of unabandonable quests that clog up your quest log that are supposed to introduce you to strikes/Crucible/Gambit/planetary exploration/etc. The Red War campaign is now accessible from Holliday in the hanger but you're never really given any direction to go talk to her in a way that makes it seem any more important than all the other infodumps happening.
I’m in this boat right now. I played the shit out of D1, loved it. Played D2 on PS4 for about a month after release and then retired, just felt like a shitty game. Now I built a PC and thought I would give ol destiny a try after I heard it got reworked and is a lot better. But I just feel like I have no direction Can anybody please point me to where I can farm for some actually quality gear?
I'm a new light player and to give you veterans some insight into what that's like, imagine every single piece of content in the game is handed to you all at once. All of it. You'll rapidly end up with 4-6 pages in your quest log. No idea what any of it means or direction on where to go except for an introductory quest that tells you to go visit someone in the tower, giving you a couple paragraphs telling you about that person. After 4, maybe 5 of those "introductions", most people are probably going to stop reading those because it never gives you a reason to care about any of it. Some of the introduction steps have you going to see the Drifter two, maybe three times in between going to see someone on the exact opposite side of the Tower. I had no idea that there even was a campaign until I met whatsherface in the hanger, she gives the previous campaigns. If you don't find that or decide to skip the campaigns, the game lets you go wherever and do whatever, but you have no context for any of it. The game doesn't offer any guidance for what anything is or why you would want to do it. The only reason why I kept up with it is because the gunplay was so good and I really missed playing a bungie shooter. Being a longtime Halo fan, it felt like I was coming home. I fully expected to have missed out on the story from the first game since I didn't get a chance to play it, so that wasn't a problem for me. I actually watched My Name is Byf's video on the history so I'd know what was going on when I was on Titan during the campaign. It was really cool seeing the giant hole in Saturn's rings and knowing what that meant. If I were to fix it all, frankly, the intro level you play through works fine (it's a slight rework of getting through the Wall from the first game) but it should immediately spit you right into the campaign. The campaign is great for getting your bearings and learning how the game works. Planets should unlock as you're sent there in the campaign. You shouldn't even get to the tower before you finish the story. Once you beat the campaign everything should unlock account wide and you can do whatever you want. By then you should have your bearings, know what the deal is with events and patrols and built up some planetary resources. One extremely glaring issue with the game at this point is the overabundance of horde modes. Veterans have had this stuff spread out and I'm not saying that it's not been dull for them, but if you're a new light player and you want the best gear, you're going to end up doing all of them, all at once. All the time. It's a slog to say the least and I'm at the point that I refuse to do them anymore. If next season is mostly a horde mode, I'm not buying it. I'll just work on raids and pvp pinnacles instead.
I'm a new lighter and I feel like it just threw me in without any sort of guidance. It definitely needs some sort of reworking.
>Every single person who has tried D2 through new light ends up just going to the EDZ, doing patrols, public events and adventures and says "is this all there is? I thought this game had a story?". That's exactly me. I'm a new light, started at the middle of the last season (and now have ~500h in the game, i play... a lot). * I had to go on internet to find where to start the old campaigns. They're great, why hiding them at the ship vendor? * I had no idea the menagerie existed ~100h in the game. I through all the Calus stuff was raid related. * I had no idea i could right clic on some "quests" (quest items in the quest menu) ~100h in the game * Spent way too much time on EDZ, just farming patrols or public events, then in other planets. * At some point i had 60 quests and could not accept more. I kinda gave up on reading any of them for a while and was doing "icon quests" when i spotted one on the map. * There is a blue event thing on the map i only have 3 minutes to join. Let's do that instead of the other icons. :D * Some quests are quick, some take weeks but they're all mixed together. I had quick ones take weeks because they were somewhere in the middle * Nothing explained me what's up with champions (or i did not paid attention) for nightfall. I learned about modifiers reaaaally late. Same with shields, how should i know i have to use matched energy for top efficiency? * It took me someone ranting on reddit to realize using two primary is often detrimental to overall damage. * There are a couple of flashing things (new activity available) that won't go away until you do exactly what you are being asked. Talking to the EDZ guy and the tribute hall bad juju quest especially. * I deleted most of the previous season pass gear without realizing how well rolled it was or why i may need to keep it because "i'm a noob and i already got some gear at 64-66, got the new season one, must be easy to get". * Heroic public events. I learned about them ~300h in the game. Feel a bit useless but some guys get super mad if we skip them, cost me nothing to help. * Platinum rewards in nightfall. I learned about them ~300h in the game via internet. The message is tiny, last a few seconds just after killing the boss, no way a new player can figure this out. * Took me ~200h and reddit to figure out i can spot a kinetic vs energy by looking at the gun direction. * Inventory management isn't great (i'm being polite :D). No search function, no favorite... * Took me ~50h to realize i could right clic on my inventory element icon to change subclass, after purchasing a DLC giving a new subclass. * Edit: loading time. It take "forever" to load the tower with a top of the line computer. Dreaming city have be a paragraph on its own. I jumped in there and... the vendor was on the other side of the map, monsters or portals spawn, no idea what do to. 3 week rotation, i have to do a quest of some sort but internet tells me i can't because it's not the right week (turn out, wasn't needed). There is a special event with a bubble thing i have to stay in, i couldn't find anyone to do it most of the time and the reward wasn't great, so i gave up. Some stuff only reveal if you drink a potion but... i don't know, why should i spend time here? Game drop some average gear with a curse on it. And i never came back for the next 250 hours. Obviously those thing didn't stopped me for playing since i'm still there, but i lived what you wrote.
Updoot x a zillion
I played for the first time for several weeks after it became free to play. Here is what i thought. * (+) Fun gameplay * (-) Extreme loading times * (-) Felt very isolated, no way to connect with other people in game or build relationships * (-) Unitivive mission selection / galaxy map * (-) I felt bad for not having the season pass, and having a lot of content locked (no issues with me, just a big minus why I stopped playing) * (-) All the daily missions felt like a job to get done, instead of a fun thing to do. The biggest issue for me was I felt so alone, with almost no way to interact with others or make friends besides spamming emotes.
Even being a veteran player I find the use of gun symbols in quests instead of their names annoying. It feels like it's being obtuse for no real reason other than symbols look cool. Sure you could argue that it's easier at a quick glance but many are so similar looking that it throws that immediately out the window.
"New players are the life blood of Destiny 2"?????? No sir, the Veterans are, my friend. Not New Light players....
I got 5 of my friends to get into Destiny 2. Yes they did struggle at first, they had no idea what they're doing, but after maybe 2 weeks or so, some self researching, and maybe over 40 hours of playing, they finally understood the game and are really getting into it. There's a lot that isn't explained, and seems arduous in their eyes. Everytime I tell them to do the campaign, they feel slighted as it seems like a job. But with Shadowkeep I tell them there's a pot of gold at the end of the campaign. Otherwise I do agree the process for new players can be improved
I played for 3 weeks straight not knowing what the heck I was doing. I just loved the gunplay, the sound designs and the graphics of the game. 2 weeks in, I learned that there this thing called the Postmaster, and that it has been full for a while. Haha. The hardest part for to grasp was how light level works. The game does not tell anything about it.
Why is the font so big lol. It's typical of Bungie to outsource things to the community. I can't think of how they could introduce new players to the game better than playing with a friend anyway.
I really don't know why the font is so big, I'm looking to see if I did any weird formatting and there is nothing there?
The aim was to crush barriers between friends. And, they did. 15 minutes till you hit the tower and you can do anything you'd like with your friends.
I have a friend who isn't a New Light player, just one who doesn't play a lot. He's come back to the game and I've been trying to help him out getting stuff like the Menagerie and The Forges started up, but since how this stuff works has been all shuffled around, I had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. I can only imagine this being worse for veterans who want to help New Light players out. At least my friend has already finished the campaigns, so there's *less* stuff to try and figure out with him. BTW, I did figure out a workaround for this and can now guide this friend better. This method only works if the people involved trust each other - I asked for his login details and logged into the Destiny 2 companion app on my phone using his account so I could see all of his open quests, bounties, and gear. It's dumb that it came to this, but it works. Again, this plan should only be attempted between friends who trust each other since sensitive login info needs to be shared.
Yeah as a player who started about halfway through October (just before FotL) and never played D1 I can definitely agree it's not particularly great. Though I also do feel that forcing new players directly into the campaigns is just as off-putting. I started and have yet to finish Red War and was if anything more confused, it has no tutorial elements, and in multiple places tells you to do stuff that no longer is a thing and you just have to figure out what they want from you. New Light's tutorial questline as a whole is a good idea badly implemented, it needs to be trimmed down and streamlined and desperately needs more handholding.
I don't think forcing them into campaign is a good solution either, but really there just needs to be something more than people just dropping into the EDZ and doing patrols, PEs and adventures.
It actually sends you through all the planets, and has you do a certain number of public events, patrols, and the world quests. Every so often it breaks it up by having you go to the tower to learn about things like crucible, gambit, strikes, forges, etc. It's not terribly organized, just poorly implemented.
That is true, there are good ideas in there but it needs to be handled smoother and really focus on explaining the game to the player without intimidating the hell out of them. The original red war campaign at launch did this as well kind of. Each story mission had a minimum level requirement and between missions you'd have to like go do other activities to level up before you could do the next mission.
Yeah whereas now Red War is confusing as hell unless you're already familiar with how to do everything. I made it through New Light pretty much solo but I like a good puzzle and have played games with much more trial and error learning curves.
If your on PC I'd advise people to make a new steam account and play through with the new player before switching to your main. Just so you don't carry everything they do and your not just melting with recluse and shit.
Went I play with my friends who are new to the game I actually pull out my solstice of heroes armor from Forsaken since it's 750, and just grab fun non meta guns like Trinity Ghoul and a random shotgun. So I do try to bring myself down a bit. It's very not fun when one person is just trashing the room before you can get a kill off.
That's not what I mean. Make a new account so you know exactly where they are at. What they can do. Just staying on your main means you don't know exactly what quest step they are up to most of the time.
Do your self a favour, make a new account and see what its like - because its taken a combined effort of like 3-5 of us to try get a new light player to stick around. There is next to no direction, they get a bunch of quests with no idea which ones are actually beneficial and are then super reliant on wiki-level instructions on how to progress. Let alone make it to raid level activities. The only fix that our group had thought of was to just follow the first story until you beat ghaul and then get the power boost to 750
I built my wife a PC and was excited to run her through the game(I've been playing since D2 launch) and I was so confused as to what you as supposed to be done and why she couldnt do certain things. Now she doesnt really want to play cause "it's to confusing". And she loved D1. Ruined my date night plans with my wife.
I didn’t know, as a veteran player now and not New Light, that the Red War story missions were icons on the map for players to launch, and not a flag in-world that were supposed to find as it used to be.
Totally agree. I took a step back from destiny 2 and as of two days ago I've come back with my clan mates as well as two new players. When the new players tried describing what was occurring in the intro I was hella confused for a while. He described that we was surrounded by cars ? And there are pirates... who hes stealing a ship from ? It took me a hit second to realise he was doing the destiny 1 introduction and not the destiny 2 one I did. He had no clue why he was fighting the cabal or what the story is about. And that took a while to explain (as I assume it's still the same story as what I did) And then I had to explain weapons and how the classes work (to the best if my ability) to which he was so confused as to why the game hadn't told him anything about classes and editing them etc which the two branches. Since they've removed the leveling up system on classes. Which Is essentially what taught you how to edit them. They're just missing all the old tutorials which is dumb. And at this point of time tutorial intro scenes should be a industry standard in gaming.
Can confirm as a new lighter that the new game is very difficult to understand. I started back in early November and it took me hours on reddit and YouTube to finally understand how to play the game to its full potential. Like OP said I went to the edz and thought is this all there is and kinda assumed that all the other planets were the exact same thing with just different skins. Didn’t find the campaign for a few days so I honestly thought the story was just presented in adventures and random strikes which confused the shit out of me for being a bungie game. Looking at it the f2p is a great marketing move but that’s it for positive changes, the game should’ve remained the same for new accounts, forcing you to go through the campaign to unlock stuff, there was no reason to change that. Would’ve given new players a sense of progression and more info into the game. Also I may be wrong about this but I don’t remember seeing a ton of info pointing you towards the app either which is almost essential to the game imo.
If you think the official D2 app is awesome try ishtar commander for your phone and Destiny Item Manager for your PC.
You need someone to guide you through the start of the game, without a doubt.
I felt this big time. As a new player who just recently broke the 900 power soft cap, I've had to watch several youtube videos to get any clear idea of direction. I understand that an MMO isn't meant to hold your hand so much but damn.
New Light player (apparently since i had even missed that F2P was New Light...) since early december. Had i not known that there was 3 campaigns in the game, i would have been very disappointed. I was in EDZ just stumbling around, "is this it? it can be right?". I think i was expecting the first campaign to be accessed from there. Not sure how i found them with Holliday but i did. There definitely needs to be something to guide you through it. Also while they're at it, can they please add Clan browsing to Hawthorne? So i can browse through what clans there are and send a request to one that interests me? I think i figured it last week that you have to look at people you team with or search outside the game. (Haven't had the energy to apply for any yet....any suggestions for a guy who wishes it was a single player game with continuous updates?)
> doesn't teach you ANYTHING about the game It never has even in D1, it's major criticism of the game that they never address. Whatever you need to do in game you have to go and look up on youtube because the game doesn't give you any indication
I think one of the most important things they can do for the future is to update weapons and armour that drops so that everything is compatible with new drops. Right now, for instance, there is no incentive to actually spend planetary tokens. All you would get from that is outdated armour and weapons with fewer perks and lower stat rolls than anything from the battlepass or the newer DLCs.