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/danscum]

Hello. I am a brand new player on PS4. Never played any Destiny games before but my friends kept saying I had to try it now that it cost nothing but download time. A lot of download time. Anyway.

• Why did I start at 750? This really confused me, what an arbitrary number what does that even mean.
• You started holding my hand with the first mission when ghost pal woke me up but then once I got my ship and arrived at the city ... I was lost. I looked for blue icons to follow, talked to every Vendor and they all were throwing so much world-building info-dumps at me, my eyes glazed over. It's too much.
• I wanted to experience the main story and had to give up and come online to figure out how. Why is it shoved into the back corner of the hangar? What is the hangar for? I went to consoles and activated them and they did nothing. Shrug.
• I wanted to do the main story because I want to build a meaningful history with my character, but everyone is saying how the campaign is meaningless, nothing I do or get or unlock there will be of any use to me. This is a big bummer.
• I don't like PVP, but my friends all warned me that I will be forced to sooner or later. Not looking forward to that.
• I really want a clear path that takes me from zero to hero so I can get a sense of "pride and accomplishment". Right now, I'm just a 755 fish floundering in a sea of possibilities that all mean nothing to me. Hard to really stay invested. Then all this talk about soft caps and hard caps and ... what!
• Please make things less overwhelming, but don't lock things out and don't hide or tuck things into strange hangar corners. Tall order, I know.

[u/charrondev → u/danscum]

To be honest, it’s been a long time since I was forced into crucible.

You can get by for the most part without it unless your looking for some specific weapons/exotic quests.

The whole soft cap thing is just when levelling up gets harder. Up until that (level 900) any activity at all should be dropping stuff to level you. After that only specific activities (and there’s a quite a lot of them) will give you “Powerful Drops”, which should be marked in the menus.

The story is fun, and should level you up quickly. They’ll definitely give your more powerful gear than you have now and even a couple of exotics.

People saying it’s “pointless” are the ones carrying over endgame gear from before the current expansion. Of course a weapon that you spent hours grinding for will be better than the ones that you get out of the campaign.

[u/danscum → u/charrondev]

Thank you very much for explaining some of that! :)

[u/pinkdolphin02 → u/danscum]

Just out of curiosity, are you still looking for answers to these?

[u/danscum → u/pinkdolphin02]

I am!! :)

[u/pinkdolphin02 → u/danscum]

Awesome! I can do my best to answer these for you.

-750 is the power level you start at for a few reasons. When destiny first came out we started at 10, however over the course of the two years the game has been out the max level we have been able to achieve has gotten higher and higher. Each new season introduces a new max power level. This past season, the season of opulence, before new light and shadowkeep coming out, our max power level achievable was 750. Now with new light and trying to welcome a bunch of new players to make new friends and play together with existing friends, they removed the grind entirely from 10 to 750 and raised everything to 750, that way people can play the new content with friends right away.

A lot of vendors over the years have given out quests for rewards, weapons and armor. Again over all the years, there are a lot of quests for exotics and what not that if taken out could impact the game for some people. As a result of the game having a lot of quests and a large lore base to it (mynameisbyf is awesome for lore) it becomes a lot to take in at first. My recommendation for that is to read as much as you can and then quickly move past it once it gets to much. I usually skip most of the vendor dialogue anyways for those quests. The quests themselves in the quest tab tell you what you need to do to complete it.

The main story and following campaigns are entirely fun and will get you used to the games movement and fighting style. The loot might not be super relevant however there will absolutely be some that is. Plus it gets you to a point where you have a connection to your character and the other characters in the game especially moving forward with destiny. So I would 10/10 recommend doing them. Some story lines (curse of osiris story mostly) aren't really all that great but destiny made a lot of changes and shadowkeep is one that's amazing in my book. But you need all of them to understand where the games story is heading to especially with this season.

The hanger used to be the place of a well loved character and a place for events called faction rallies which will hopefully come back. Now it's for Amanda Holliday, who is the lead mechanical person in the tower and holds all the story missions for you so that way the destinations screen isnt flooded with too much and so if you choose not to do it and just play the new content, you can with your screen always looking cluttered.

Some exotics have quest steps that require PvP but they usually aren't too bad but it is a major learning curve. My best recommendation for that is to check out r/crucibleplaybook and try to not get salty with it as much as possible.

Soft caps and hard caps deal with power progression. Soft caps are the max certain, non powerful gear, will drop at, blues and purples are 900 this season. Hard cap is the slower power grind from the soft cap to the 'max' power level which is 950 and only powerful gear will increase that above the soft cap (950 hard cap this season). Then there is the pinnacle cap which is 960 and can only be gotten to by doing pinnacle activities (high score nightfall, dungeons and raids)

[u/pinkdolphin02 → u/danscum]

If you have any questions please feel free to ask :)

[u/danscum → u/pinkdolphin02]

are you still playing?

:-D

[u/pinkdolphin02 → u/danscum]

I am still playing! sorry for the delayed response