Sorry Bungie, your quest tracking still blows. (Destiny)

by Kermit @, Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, October 09, 2019, 07:42 (10 days ago) @ cheapLEY

The new quest page still sucks. I don’t know the answer, but it needs a fundamental redesign.

Let me guide you through the experience of a friend I’ve been playing with over the last week. This friend is a Destiny veteran. He played all of D1, and stopped sometime during Forsaken before the Annual Pass.

He logs in, starts up Shadowkeep. His quest log is already two and half pages deep with unfinished god knows what quests from the previous 2 years of Destiny. The folks at the Tower pile on another page. He goes to moon. That’s mostly straightforward. Until he gets to the craft Dreambane armor stuff in the middle. He does those three Nightmare hunts, gets the Essence and starts knocking them out. Until he gets confused, because those aren’t the only Essences he has, because they drop randomly from all over the place. He has the one for the heavy machine gun, but he’s not paying that much attention and doesn’t realize it’s not for armor and thus not the correct Essence. He spent three hours doing random shit hoping for a Heavy Machine Gun to drop so he can finish the stupid quest. He damn near quit playing after that night—I had to tell him what do and talk him into coming back.

All because Bungie’s quest system is dogshit. Because they think it’s a good idea to make a system in which you get15 items that look exactly the same just with different colors, only some of them are mission critical, and the actual Shadowkeep quest step doesn’t even tell you which ones. And that’s without mentioning that those quest items get buried in a sea of 50 other quest items that are displayed in a completely random order that changes every single time I open the quest menu.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say I think it might literally be the worst quest system I’ve ever seen in a video game. Morrowind’s Journal system was easier to parse than this.

I remember when Luke wrote about the team feeling bad about the response to the Pursuits tab. That genuinely sucks. People shouldn’t get mean over a video game.

But every time I open the quest page, I feel a little bit of secondhand embarrassment for whoever made it. Because the quest page absolutely sucks.

That’s the only negative thing I have to say about Shadowkeep, and I had to get it off my chest. The rest of the expansion is very cool and I am enjoying it immensely.

I agree. I like having bounties and quests separated, but I miss being able to scan the page to see what's there without hovering over anything. Regardless, I feel like every play session requires a preliminary planning session to make the most of my time, and several times I've gotten confused about whatever it is I'm supposed to do next. I realize that some think of that as a feature, that we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of what we want to pursue, but it could be way easier to do such strategizing in the game. Case in point, besides leaning on DIM heavily for item management, I also use it to scope out bounties and quests, looking for keywords in order to spot what overlaps. When DIM was flaking out last week, I found it all a bit overwhelming. I imagine it's worse for players less committed to the franchise, much less new players.

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