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Recently, my fiancée and I started playing Destiny 2 together. We were looking for a co-op game with a lot of stuff that supported crossplay and cross-saving. Somehow, I convinced her to give Destiny 2 a shot. So far, we’ve had a great time. It’s been excellent coming back to the game after years away. But returning to Destiny 2 as an experienced player alongside a rookie has highlighted a problem: Destiny 2 doesn’t respect its own narrative. With so much of the past missing, it’s hard for a new player to get caught up without jumping on YouTube.
In 2020, Bungie purged a lot of content from Destiny 2. This included entire storylines and locations. The original Destiny 2 campaign, the Red War? Gone. Past expansions and events that moved the game’s overall narrative forward? Deleted. Locations that were once very important in Destiny’s story, like the Farm? Removed. And while the game does spend some time vaguely explaining what happened, if you actually want to know all the details, you’ll have to get caught up via YouTube videos or blog posts. Not an ideal situation.
And with more content soon leaving in February, this problem is only going to get worse. If Bungie cares about telling stories in Destiny (and based on all the lore books buried in the game, they do), then it’s time to start letting players experience this past content, even if it comes back without any rewards or specific loot.
Currently, the new player experience is bad and not just because some folks are getting trapped in a cosmic game show, unable to progress until stronger players come to save them. (Though that also sucks.) If you actually want to understand what is happening, who all these characters are, and what they are talking about, Destiny 2 doesn’t offer you much in the way of context.
The main strategy Bungie seems to use is to offer a timeline feature in the game’s menu that lets you read blurbs about specific seasons and DLC events. This is nice, but it lacks a lot of detail. And reading about the Red War is far less compelling than actually playing it, which you can’t do in 2021. The new player experience is especially bad for free-to-play folks, who now have very little content to mess around with, and most of it exists without any narrative build-up outside of a limited timeline feature.
Read the full article on Kotaku
