- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
It's no secret that the new player experience for D2 has been a colossal mess for years now, pretty much ever since they vaulted the old campaigns. Now you're just thrown into a rehashed and less interesting version of D1's Cosmodrome intro, and when that's done you're suddenly thrust into whatever the latest seasonal storyline is with zero context and no heads-up that they're sending you there, not to mention being bombarded with popups to buy a dozen DLCs or cosmetics, when you're not busy trying to figure out what everything in the menus does. It says something that the best-received update to the new player experience in years was the option to just skip the damn thing entirely and move on, though that still didn't fix the "hey do this new mission now that we're not going to explain" problem.
It's ironic how they were portraying it at the time as wanting to give new players a quicker onboarding process so they could play the new stuff with their friends faster, when all they really ended up doing was replacing a natural way to learn the game's systems and immerse yourself in the story with something so barebones and confusing that nobody would actually want to keep playing. The Red War campaign had its issues (Marvel-slop writing especially), but at least it was a cohesive experience and a clear starting point. Add the decision to trash it to the pile of the many things Bungie has done to kill any potential this series could have had.