wall of text turns off players 🤷🏻‍♂️

Plus new players have already missed out on so much that made Destiny, well Destiny. Having been engaged with the game since D1 and D2 with all expansions, I couldn’t imagine being a first time player now. Where do they actually start?

Without the red war, CoO, warmind, etc leading up to everything now, the new player intro is just basically “Shoot here, press this button, congrats now go to the tower and get bombarded with 9 million quests and eververse ads”

I think you’re looking at the game through the wrong end of the telescope. Destiny has never been truly beginner-friendly—we all had to learn it the hard way—but that’s not the real issue anymore. After ten years of playing, even veterans like me are no longer sure how this game is meant to be played, thanks to the constant restructuring of its core systems. You might see that as improvement, but the reality is that many long-time players have walked away, and the game still fails to attract and retain new ones. The problem isn’t that Destiny is hard to understand. It’s that, in its current form, fewer and fewer people actually want to play it.

I started playing with my seven year old and it has been nothing but joy. I have no problem with the microtransactions. I like the content but the free to play quick play system provides so many new experiences that you don’t have to purchase. I agree that it can be confusing and overwhelming but with some patience it delivers on everything. We mostly skip the story but it is there if you want it. The gameplay and visuals are truly lit and I hope this world and its community continue to grow.

The only good things about post Heresy D2 are the new weapon types, armour set bonuses, extra origin traits to chase and Renegades (even that has a lot of “seasonal model” issues with talk to vendor, talk to another vendor on different planet etc) Everything else is trash. Tiered Loot Edge of Fate Portal Feats in RaD’s to get the tiered loot All trash. And all this has done is push away more and more of the playerbase. People used to run raids and dungeons and play them for fun, teach their friends and even strangers. That has diminished to the point that there are very few people playing them, never mind teaching them. They replaced systems that weren’t broken and replaced them with worse ones that are more complex, because they have added more and more screens to go through to get anywhere, and then gaslit us into believing they were better. The simpler systems of D1 and a focus on weapons over abilities was a better idea. Whilst I still have fun playing D2, it has lost its way, and it started with Beyond Light and culminated in the abhorrent EoF. D3 needed to happen after TFS. However Bungie in their “infinite wisdom” decided to squander the money we paid them for D2. The spent that money on asinine projects that never went anywhere, ridiculously expensive buildings they hardly ever used or silly in house “side quests” that prevented people from doing what they actually should be doing, which is developing Destiny 2. Bungie as a studio deserves to be swallowed by Sony. Hopefully those people at Bungie that are talented and passionate about D2 will keep their jobs.

Have you tried a new player? No real instructions of what to do or where to go and pretty much no story. Destiny 2 needs a really good introduction to the game it was fine when we had the red war. I don’t think they’ll fix it now d2 is in its end game and bungie priority is marathon at moment.

They should bring back all campaigns so the new players get an idea of wtf is going on in this world. We need a weekly campaign rotator that gives high tier loot. It also rewards a consumable that can increase the tier of a weapon or armor piece. After clearing each campaign there should be a infogram showing what the new player can do next. Farm stuff, dungeons, exotic quests or continue with the next campaign. All this is optional. The player can always choose

They shouldn't waste any more resources on onboarding unless they are going to do it right. Fixing it would be equivalent to rebuilding all of the lost content. No one is going to be invested in the game after they watch some cutscenes and read some text boxes about what they missed.

I think at this point it's way too late for them to fix it, especially as barely anyone is picking up the game fresh outside of free content weeks etc. It's just not going to be viable to spend their dwindling resources revamping the new player experience yet again, when there's barely any new players to experience it.

Honestly the biggest problem is story context. New players have no understanding, which leads to attachment, of the main characters in the story. This is caused by Bungo removing the campaign stories every time we blink. Imagine if players had access to the campaign stories from Red War until now. The new players would have content forever to engage with.

I've been barking up that tree for years now. A live service always bleeds players, some slower than others but you never keep everyone, so making on-boarding as frictionless as possible at a minimum is essential, but destiny never seemed to make it a priority. A couple of "welp we tried" attempts and not much else. That doesn't even consider the wild pricing and dlc maze ppl had to navigate before even booting up the game

I've said for a long time that the game was too complicated. It really is a nightmare of gadgets, facets, and other crap that helps with one thing, and hinders another. We wanted Armor Builds. We got Armor Builds. Now, when Bungie eventually succumbs to providing something the Players want, they insist on putting their own spin on it. In other words, keep the status quo. So, Bungie made missions that depended on a particular Build. They even say so! "You will need to modify your Build to be successful in this mission." Complicated! I gave up. Then I played the opening campaign for this latest DLC, and I thought, "This isn't too bad." That didn't last! I found my self running from Vendor to Vendor with messages, and I gave up. Again! In a fit of self flagellation, I was thinking of deleting a character, starting a new one, and starting from scratch. I think I'll save what little sanity I have, and join the OP's sister instead.

Sorry to say but Destiny hasn’t been “new player friendly” since the original Destiny and even that left a lot to be desired. People didn’t love the story, but at least there was one. People played the story, did daily’s, bounties, etc just to gear up and do raids or trials. They should have stuck to that model but instead went with forced matchmaking for normal -blam!-. Health gating as a form of difficulty. Timed encounters as a form of difficulty. Nightfalls used to be like mini raids, I don’t think they exist anymore. Strikes used to have dedicated loot, I don’t think there are strikes anymore. Iron Banner used to be fun! Don’t know if that exists anymore. And Trials wasn’t a carrying service. Just to name a few. The problem is Bungie and that’s why the last time I played this game it was actually my five year old insisting that he play with the “sniper in the tower”. Now that he’s six he has no interest, but he does enjoy patrol on D1 at times.

So you don’t like these two people?