Destiny: The Taken King's New Player Experience Sucks

The new player experience is an aspect of design that serves to not only explain the features of a game, but it also facilitates the enjoyment of the game. There is a minor spoiler in order to clarify some examples.

Bungie's 'The Taken King' expansion for Destiny has injected a wealth of content, streamlining, and intrigue to the game. The Legendary Edition of the game was released as a bundle that packages the base game along with all three DLC's for newer players to jump right in on the action. While the practice of bundling games with post-release content is typical enough with other similarly structured games (such as MMO's), Bungie has yet again neglected to learn from mistakes and wisdom of other titles. In this case the lesson not learned is that of how to maintain a New Player Experience after the base game has been iterated on with several updates.

The content in vanilla Destiny is gated by levels, what this means is that in order to unlock the next quest you simply have to reach the minimum level required for it. This is further bolstered by all of the expansions. The trouble comes with the introduction of the "Spark of Light" consumable which is a single-use item that boosts a character's level to 25, the vanilla game's original level cap.

Before the release of The Taken King, Destiny Lead Concept Artist Jesse Van Dijk sat down with Gamespot and commented on the item saying, "We also wanted to make sure that players who may have never even played the game at all [were] immediately [able to] participate in the events of The Taken King, particularly because it might very well be the case that [between] two friends, one friend might be just beginning and one friend might be at a high level, and we wanted them to be able to play together." A rather sensible idea that was executed extremely poorly.

The level 25 item boost completely forsakes the content gate that was implemented for the game. At level 25, all Strikes and Story Quests from before The Taken King are unlocked to be completed without restriction, which completely throws any sensible source of progression into the blender. As a result the player may run into interesting and extremely confusing depictions of the story. It is possible, for example, that a key character (Mara Sov) goes missing after one mission, and then in the next mission you could be meeting her at her throne (which should be your first introduction to her).

Exacerbating this issue is the Quest system which was implemented with the Taken King's release. Among the dozens of quests introduced, there are some which compel the player to complete the different stretches of story content in order, which under normal circumstances would work. The Spark of Light is not only circumventing the level gated content, but it is also bombarding the player with a kaleidoscope of these new quests which all demand to be addressed by sending the player all over the galaxy map.

          When this is what shows up after you use a Spark of Light, it's no surprise people get overwhelmed.

Another problem is that the introduction trailers to the Dark below and The House of Wolves are completely absent from the game. While the Dark Below trailer may just be some propping up for a rather basic (and incredibly brief) journey, the House of Wolves trailer has an incredibly important plot element, which is the whole reason that DLC is given to exist. Without that trailer the player never would have known that the Awoken Queen's Fallen subjects had attempted an insurrection, and that is why you are hunting them.

In fact, on your second trip to the Reef you are speaking with Queen Mara Sov who is still surrounded by Fallen, and you are then sent off on the next leg of your journey. However, instead of returning to the lobby, you are whisked to the Rift's social area where the NPC's are commenting on your quest to hunt the House of Wolves. At this point, the player has never even been made aware that the Queen's Fallen subjects and the House of Wolves are one and the same, nor are you even aware why you are hunting them.

    Mara Sov, Queen of the Awoken, Kell of the House of Wolves

   

Every single effort Bungie had originally made a year ago to gradually introduce the new player to the experience is completely and inelegantly forsaken for the idea of having players jump in near the end.

When I first booted the game up with my level boosted Hunter, I noticed the peculiar amount of quests that were made available. With this in mind, I decided to make note of the experiences of four friends who were new initiates to Destiny, all having purchased the Legendary Edition. Two of them played the game as Bungie had presented it, while I elucidated the other two about the confounding experience they were bound to find themselves. These four friends don't play together, and so I was able to see how it worked out. It turns out that the two that just played the game without my commenting stopped playing a week later, and my other two buddies are still playing.

While this is a rather small sample size that may not represent the whole, it still leaves an impression. Simply making the player aware of the discrepancies of the story can make all the difference in their long-term enjoyment of the game.

     Even a warning would help.

Bungie dropped the ball with the New Player Experience in with the Taken King. If they had even given a warning about the potential risks of the level boosts and had reintegrated the older story trailers into the game, much of the confusion could have been avoided. Bungie should make meaningful design choices to preserve whatever story the game has in the future to salvage as many long term players as possible. There are definitely some players that could not care less about the lore of a game, but the examples above have implications that extend beyond just story cohesion. This may just be another example of how Bungie has left many rudimentary aspects of the game for the community to solve.