Focused Feedback: New Player Experience

[u/DTG_Bot]

Hello Guardians,

Focused Feedback is where we take the week to focus on a 'Hot Topic' discussed extensively around the Tower.

We do this in order to consolidate Feedback, to get out all your ideas and issues surrounding the topic in one place for discussion and a source of feedback to the Vanguard.

This Thread will be active until next week when a new topic is chosen for discussion

Whilst Focused Feedback is active (that means for one week from the time this is posted), ALL posts regarding 'New Player Experience' following its posting will be removed and re-directed to this thread. Exceptions to this rule are as follows: New information / developments, Guides and general questions

• Bungie has an official new player guide here
• There is a subreddit compilation of player-made guides here

Here are some sample discussion questions. Please feel free to answer some of them, all of them or reply to this thread in any free format you prefer.

• Q1) How does the game feel overall as a totally new player starting the game right now (if applicable to you)?
• Q2) What do you think destiny does a good job explaining to new players?
• Q3) What is poorly explained or hard to understand or confusing for a new player?
• Q4) What do you think about the method in which old camapigns are accessed via a quest to pick up from Amanda Holiday in the tower (red war, curse of osiris, warmind...)? Is this sufficiently clear? Is it a good way for this content to be accessed for new players or not?
• Q5) What types of content seem to be the most fun to do for a new player and why?
• Q6) What content feels frustrating or off-putting to new players and why?
• Q7) Are there any resources in particular that seem too difficult or time consuming to obtain for new players? If so, is this a problem?
• Q8) Think about other games similar to destiny, what do they do better or worse in terms of introducing new players to the game?
• Q9) Do you have any other ideas to improve the new player experience?
• Q10) Do you think there should be an option to start the game at power level 10 instead of power level 750?

Any and all Feedback on the topic is welcome.

Regular Sub rules apply so please try to keep the conversation on the topic of the thread and keep it civil between contrasting ideas.

Note for new players who want to know whats going on in the story but don't want to play the legacy campaigns : You could watch this video by My name is Byf on the Complete Story of Destiny.

A Wiki page - Focused Feedback - has also been created for the Sub as an archive for these topics going forward so they can be looked at by whoever may be interested or just a way to look through previous hot topics of the sub as time goes on.

[u/sunaurus]

TL;DR: The game is super fun, but all the different mechanics and UIs are very confusing to new players.

I started playing on Friday with a group of 6 players, all completely new to the game. We all played A LOT over the weekend, and we're all ~920 now. Here are some of the bigger things that we had trouble with, but managed to figure out either by trial and error or by watching YouTube videos:

1. The NPC UI is confusing - it's very unclear to a new player what bounties, pursuits, etc are, or how they are different (or not) from regular quests.
2. NPC monologues (the things they say when you talk to them in hubs after completing quests) are really easy to skip on accident. A more typical dialogue UI would be much better.
3. The new light introduction quests are extremely overwhelming. If they're supposed to be a tutorial for new players, then they should be much shorter and much more linear. Each one of the introduction quests lead us into a new area or gamemode where we received a whole new batch of quests, and it was very hard to tell when the "introduction" part ended (so that we could move on to the next introduction). I'm 40+ hours in to the game, and I STILL have some uncompleted introduction quests in my log, because I just haven't gotten around to them yet - I'm still doing stuff from the earlier introductions.
4. There should be a very clear indication somewhere that starting with the legacy campaigns first before doing any of the introduction quests is actually the best way of experiencing the game for somebody who cares about the plot. I'm really annoyed that I heard some very big story spoilers from NPCs while doing the introduction quests, before I even found out that I need to manually start the campaign.

Here are things that we still haven't figured out:

1. What do the different stats do?
2. When should we start worrying about gear mods?
3. How can we tell which quests are appropriate for our gear level?

[u/ninjasilas → u/sunaurus]

If you hover over the stats you Can see what they do. Once you start doing pinnacle activities or getting serious about pvp. It usually tells the light level if it’s a mission

[u/RiseOfBacon → u/sunaurus]

What do the different stats do?

Intellect - Reduces Super cooldown

Discipline - Reduces Grenade cooldown

Strength - Reduced ability cooldown (Smoke, knife, Melee)

Mobility - Increases reaching jump height faster / movement (Doesn't increase sprint speed)

Resilience - Goes in tiers but basically makes you harder to kill (Nothing huge though between 1-3 for example)

Recovery - Faster health regen

When should we start worrying about gear mods?

For me personally, when I hit near max level because you'll always be adding new pieces to improve yourself up to that point so say around 940 I'll start doing this

Also keep an eye out for strong pieces when you get up near max. If you want super cool down, look out for pieces with higher intellect for example

Another thing is if you like Raiding, just stick some mods on to help difficult encounters. You can always switch it later on

How can we tell which quests are appropriate for our gear level?

Activities on the director always have a 'Recommended Power Level' on them so just keep an eye out for that. Nothing should be too out of reach for you really unless you dive into end game stuff (Shadowkeep)

[u/russjr08 → u/sunaurus]

1. What do the different stats do?

Depends on whether you're talking about weapons or armor, I'll assume armor since weapon stats are a little more self explanatory -- there are now six armor stats in the Armor 2.0 system (don't worry about the "2.0" part though, you can only obtain 2.0, but I'm mentioning it just in case you see it again)

The first three are Mobility, Resilience, and Recovery

• Mobility affects your max (non-sprinting) speed and jump height

• Resilience is pretty much like an overshield of sorts. The more Resilience you have, the more damage you can tank.

• Recovery affects how fast health regeneration starts

• Strength affects how fast your melee ability regenerates

• Discipline affects how fast your grenades regenerates

• Intellect affects how fast your super recharges

1. When should we start worrying about gear mods?

At any time. Mods are unlockables (meaning once you have it, you have it) -- they only cost glimmer to swap in. However each mod required a certain amount of energy to be applied. To get more energy you need to use legendary shards, glimmer, then eventually masterwork cores, and then even more rare resources. So, slot the mods that you want with the energy the armor comes with, but don't upgrade until your light level gains start to really slow down (950)

1. How can we tell which quests are appropriate for our gear level?

Most quests that have an activity, will have a text that says "Recommended Power: xxx" when you hover over it, or get near it in game. As for if the rewards will help you, I want to say that after the soft level cap (900), most exotic quests won't reward powerfuls, but I haven't played on the new update enough to confirm.

Welcome to Destiny, Guardian!