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Bungie has finally listened to its fans across Reddit and other platforms that the current state of its new player onboarding sequence for Destiny 2, titled “New Light,” makes no sense to new players picking up the game without friends to follow.

When Destiny 2 was first released, the story began at the beginning of this game, meaning anyone looking to start from the very beginning had to spend money on the previous title to get the same experience as series veterans. Coming alongside the “Shadowkeep” expansion in October 2019 was “New Light” which let new players (or anyone starting a new character) to re-experience the very first mission of Destiny.

While this was an excellent way to get new players acquainted with the movement and general systems of the game, there was nothing connecting it to the actual story of the second game that players then found themselves in, and players quickly found themselves in a different Tower with no further prodding in any given direction.

Instead, new players with all of ten minutes of playtime were given free reign over the entire game without any further explanation on what to do, what all the blinking indicators are for, how to level up, or what missions they’re supposed to do first.

This total lapse of judgement got a lot of flack from the community at large, as new players were left to aimlessly complete two years’ worth of content in whatever order they wanted, meaning they could complete something from the base game, when community favorite Cayde-6 was still around, finish the first mission in “Forsaken” where he dies in a cutscene, and then finish another mission as a part of the Red War campaign from vanilla Destiny 2 where he’s magically still alive.

New players were everywhere, since this was about a month after the game went free-to-play, and while plenty of veteran players were willing to help out the new ones, that wasn’t a sentiment shared across the board.

In a This Week at Bungie post yesterday, the developer explained what the overhauled “New Light” experience will look like: “Starting November 10, players will start in the same way that most all of us have…What’s different now is that you won’t immediately find a ship. Rather, you’ll stumble into another Guardian in the wild. Shaw Han is his name, and he’s on a mission with his fireteam to investigate what the Hive are up to in the Cosmodrome. He’ll show you the ropes, and help you find your way among the gameplay and systems of Destiny 2.”

So it sounds like rather than dumping new players into the Tower 10 minutes after booting up the game for the first time, they’ll be guided through how the gameplay and various systems in the game work, hopefully making for a smoother transition that will keep new players around, rather than finishing the first mission and the uninstalling.

While I stopped playing Destiny 2 before “Shadowkeep” went live and haven’t touched it since, it looks like November 10th is the day I finally give it a fresh download (since it’ll hopefully be considerably smaller) and create a third character to experience the “New Light” experience for the first time since 2014 when I played the first game.

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