With the recent news that Destiny 2 is delivering it’s final live service update on June 9th, I thought I’d talk about the reasons, from a game design point of view, where I think it gradually went wrong over the years.
I’m not going to be talking about the leadership of Sony, the mismanagement by Bungie CEOs, the business decisions or financial stuff here – although there are loads of reasons here too. I’m purely talking from a game design point of view and where the experience went wrong for players.
I have around 10,000+ hours in Destiny 2 and have purchased every expansion, played every update and have seen my friends drop off over the years – usually after bad decisions or lackluster updates.
Going Free to Play
In 2019, Bungie made the decision to go “free to play” with Destiny 2 and an unfortunate side effect of this was that they opened all destinations to every player no matter their progress in the game. This was meant as a way to allow players to play with friends everywhere in the game even if they didn’t own the expansions and likely to allow free to play players do strikes on destinations that were part of expansions. However, there was a significant problem here – it completely broke the new player experience.
In Destiny 1 you didn’t actually get access to all the destinations right off the rip – you had to progress through the story to unlock destinations. This was how Destiny 2 worked until the Free to Play update. It meant that all the destinations were overwhelming to new players, all the destination quests were shoved in players face up front and it just meant that players were met with an overwhelming amount of menus, quests and options which just wasn’t good for new players.
Free First Mission of Every Expansion
The other thing that was introduced over time (although I’ll admit I’m not sure when this happened) was that the game would drop players straight into the latest expansion with no context. The game made the first mission of every new expansion free – for the purposes of trying to sell it.
Let’s say you’ve never played the game or you’re returning to the game if you haven’t played for a long time. You log in and get immediately dropped into the first mission of the latest expansion. This essentially means you’re spoiled on story that you haven’t had the time to experience yet, you have no idea what is going on and you are not given time to remember where you even got up to last time.
This is probably to try and sell the expansions – but man, it’s an absolutely awful player experience and I really don’t know who at Bungie thought this would be helpful or increase sales – in fact, whenever I’ve seen any sort of clip or reference to this it’s always been to complain about the confusion or blatant sales bullshit that people just see right through.
New Player Experience
In bringing the game free to play, they also vaulted content – including the Red War campaign – this meant that there was a new quest for free to play players that was supposed to onboard you.
Unfortunately, they have since done something that I would say is one of the most disappointing things I’ve experienced. I’m not sure when they added this but I would guess it was around The Final Shape – although it could have been after.
At the beginning of the New Light campaign – so bear in mind this is for brand new players – they show a very long (8 minutes+) cutscene which essentially tells the entire story – including major story spoilers like revealing things from Witch Queen that players at the time found out organically, revealing The Witness, revealing major plot points which are in the game so don’t need to be told in a cutscene.
It’s genuinely disappointing that they think this is how to onboard new players. Why not just let them play the campaigns and discover things that way? You know, like every other game does.
Speaking of Story Content…
The content vaulting situation is hardly a secret, in fact, it’s one of the things that Bungie and Destiny 2 is known for – removing large amounts of story content that players paid for. However, one thing that isn’t talked about quite as much is that there were actually very big story beats within seasonal content which has also been removed.
For example, the origin story of The Witness was housed within the Season of the Deep. The lead up to getting into the Traveler for The Final Shape was housed within Season of the Wish. Some of the biggest lore and story beats related to one of the main characters Eris Morn is housed within the Season of the Witch. Just major context that was in these seasons has just been deleted. Sure, you can follow the story just fine if you play the campaigns but it’s just such a shame that some major character development and context is deleted from the game – context for expansions that are still in the game.
Obnviously, the major thing with the story side of things is the content vaulting that happened where they removed major expansions such as the Red War and Forsaken that provided such good onboarding for players.
Red War Onboarding Gone
I think a lot of long term players have forgotten how good of a job the Red War did for onboarding new players to the franchise. I’ve recently seen playthroughs on YouTube to remind me and I can tell you now that the Red War is 100% better than the current onboarding experience.
It not only introduces you to stakes and why the Light is important, it introduces you to your subclass and how to use your super, the main characters of the game, Ikora, Zavala, Cayde etc. and then it also gradually introduces you to the enemy factions – first the Fallen on Earth, then the Vex on Nessus, then the Hive on Titan and it does it in a way that feels natural to the story. Obviously as the first campaign of Destiny 2 it was designed from the ground up to be an onboarding experience.
Comparing that to the New Light quest which feels like a hastily thrown together patrol quest. The weird interactions with a character called Shaw Han who literally has no other purpose in the game – and there were plenty of other characters who could have taken this task. Then there’s the weird Navota strike which is some kind of Omnigul rip off from the first game. It just doesn’t make sense and the majority of the actual quest is running around an empty Cosmodrome on Earth scanning and collecting things. It’s awful.
It just feels like the new player onboarding was just shoved into the game as a last minute decision after vaulting a bunch of content and making the game free to play. It doesn’t seem like it was properly implemented and it just feels rushed and tacked on – especially when compared with something properly designed for onboarding.
It is madness to me that new player onboarding was just rushed and it feels like it wasn’t important to them – insanity for a live service long running game.
Exotics Became Marketing Material
When the seasonal model started – exotics became marketing materials because they were introduced to the season pass and so instead of the highest weapon or gear tier being something super rare and therefore provoking some feeling when you finally got one to drop – they were simply there. Easy to obtain. Easy to access.
It meant that the loot rarity of these items was meaningless and over time the game just started handing out exotics like candy to the point where I am regularly deleting exotic engrams from my inventory because they are so abundant that I need to clear space and have no worries about getting more.
To be honest, gear rarity is broken in general in Destiny 2. Throughout the new player onboarding you will be given legendary weapons almost straight away – skipping the rarities of white, green, blue almost immediately. It ruins the experience of levelling and gradually getting more gear because you just get given the good stuff straight away. This means you don’t value it because it’s so easy to get that you don’t feel the growth of starting with crappy weapons and working your way through the rarities.
No Clear Campaign Order
After you complete the main quest part of the onboarding, you are literally dumped in the Tower – the games social space – with no clear objective.
The game doesn’t even tell you which story expansion to start with. Because of the free to play open destination thing, you literally get all the main story quests thrown at you and there is no clear way to determine which one to start with. It’s likely that next time you log in, you’ll also be thrown into the latest expansions first mission too – completely ruining any sense of progress or coherent story. It’s just a disaster.
Guardian Ranks Aren’t For New Players
The game even promotes Guardian Ranks as a way to learn the game and guide them – even though when the game first added Guardian Ranks, it would direct new players to complete the first mission of The Final Shape campaign as something to “learn the game” – I mean, really? Sure, play the first mission of the final campaign when you’ve only just started! That’s like telling someone to get into Game of Thrones by watching the first episode of the final season. Ridiculous.
The UI and menus have no clear way to categorise quests into expansions and you can literally end up doing a side quest for a campaign you haven’t even started yet. It’s just a mess.
None of that matters now…
All of these issues definitely contributed to the game not being a welcoming place for new players and unfortunately, without proper new player onboarding, it became a place where not only could you not start as a new player – it was pretty hard to return to the game after a break. This all contributed to a gradually dwindling player base. No new players, no returning players.
Sure, the game did hit record player counts during it’s final Light & Darkness Saga expansion The Final Shape – and it was arguably the best expansion. However, I can’t help but feel the player counts would have been ever higher if the new player experience made sense and if returning players hadn’t been confused and overwhelmed. And perhaps with higher peaks, we could have avoided this awful end to such a great game.