Destiny 2 lead admits the MMO is terrible at onboarding new players after deleting the first third of the game

Bungie’s Destiny 2 has suffered from plummeting player numbers over the years as the amount of newcomers fail to replace the amount of departing players. After 10 years of the MMO struggling to bring in new players, assistant game director Robbie Stevens has admitted that the game has terrible onboarding for new users.

Speaking to YouTuber MrRoflWaffles ahead of the new Edge of Fate expansion—which is out now—Stevens explained that Bungie is looking into ways to bring new players into the game. While exact details were sparse, the game director admitted that the studio wants “to do even better” when onboarding newcomers to the game.

Destiny 2 dev admits onboarding is pretty poor

In the interview with the YouTuber, who actually managed to get into the MMO this year, Stevens explained that Edge of Fate was designed to bring in new players, but even more improvements are coming.

“One of our major goals for The Edge of Fate,” he said (via GR). “And then we also have some medium and long-term plans and features where we want to do even better here.”

Just one of these improvements is a drastic reduction of in-game pop-ups that interrupt players. These pop-ups tell players about content they don’t have, tell them about micro-transactions they can buy and… honestly there’s just too many pop ups. Stevens explained that pop-ups have a “more robust review process” on which messages are sent to which players.

In order to bring new players in better, new players will no longer be funnelled directly into seasonal content so as to not distract newcomers from their main stories. Additionally, Bungie is “looking at things like New Light” and thinking about what parts of the game actually make players feel like a Guardian and how they can push players into that feeling.

“What’s the right way to do that?” Stevens asked. “How do we do some big updates to that in the future to update it with where the game is at today? So that wasn’t a specific focus this time around, because we had so many other parts of the games that we needed to just get right, so that we can build part of that new experience in the future.”

The game director explained that Bungie needs to have “more focus on a more curated experience that understands that people are smart for some of the basics of how video games work”. But what exactly does this mean?

Of course, the terrible onboarding of Destiny 2 is a problem that Bungie has made for itself. Since the release of the game ten years ago, Bungie has gutted the first third of the game. You know, the entire onboarding process of the second game for new players. With a lot of this content locked behind the content vault, it’s really hard to bring players into the fold.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of the vaulted content will come back into Destiny 2, but maybe a ‘Greatest Hits’ selection of missions from Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind and Forsaken would be a decent way of at least giving new players the entire story of Bungie’s MMO.