It’s finally happening, folks: the Director interface that’s served as the basic staging ground for all of Destiny 2‘s core activities is going away. We’ve already seen some official mockups for the Portal UI, and it both looks and sounds pretty darn solid so far, though I do have concerns.
Destiny 2‘s new Portal UI is going to be “an easier, modernized way to browse and launch Core Game activities,” Bungie promises. “It will offer a varied selection of new and updated activities across a wide range of activity types.” Broadly speaking, the goal for the Portal is to give all players a universal jump-off point for activities both new and old. Functionally, that’s an excellent goal, but as interesting as the mockup seems, the execution is what it’s all going to boil down to.
Destiny 2’s Director is going away, with Portal as its replacement
To celebrate the first decade of Destiny, Bungie has gone out of its way to deliver a frankly astonishing number of blog posts about the future of the game. It’s very promising stuff, too, covering a broad spectrum of topics ranging from open-world content all the way to activity and gear balancing. The discussion of the Portal UI in Destiny 2 is thus being a tad overshadowed, but it’s a hugely important topic because it essentially concerns new player onboarding more so than anything else.
Playing a game needs to be a frictionless experience, and while Bungie does understand this in a sense, Destiny 2 is an infamously complex experience to be breaking into. Portal is supposed to alleviate this in a very specific way, by giving everyone ready access to a simple, sensible list of activities from the game’s roster of PvE and PvP content.
According to Bungie, Portal is going to:
- Offer a curated activity list that will be refreshed every three months, with every major content update
- Provide bonus rewards for engaging in Portal activities
- Relegate the Destination portion of the Director to “world navigation and accessing older activities”
“The emphasis of this redesign is quick and clean access to a wider offering of activities with updated rewards, as well as quick access to the current Expansion or Event content,” Bungie explains. “Our intent is for most activity launching in a season to occur from the Portal, and any choice you make will be a path to worthwhile rewards.”
Most content categories are fairly self-explanatory, with Fireteam Ops featuring Strikes, Onslaught, and the like, while Pinnacle Ops focus on Dungeons and Exotic missions, for example. Rewards are the really interesting bit in my book, though, as Portal will give players daily access to
- Specific weapons
- Specific armor slot items
- Targeted currencies (Strange Coins, enhancement materials, etc.)
It’s interesting stuff, honestly, and there’s potential for this to be the ultimate source of daily activity engagement in Destiny 2. The bit that sort of worries me, though, is that a huge chunk of the game’s activities will still be relegated to Destinations, and so this might not end up being the ultimate streamlining that Destiny actually needs. Time will tell, however.
Published: Sep 10, 2024 07:39 am