Good morning friends, I am a Day 1 Destiny 1 veteran and have spent time on and off of this game over the years. It is 3AM and whilst looking for somewhere to complain about Beyond Light Deluxe Edition I found the feedback forums, so let's talk about what I feel is a big issue that I find every time I try to get friends into Destiny 2. [b][u]The NPE[/u][/b] NPE stands for New Player Experience, in Destiny 2 [i]It's really, really bad[/i], it feels too handholdy, too slow and it fails to show the best aspects of the game in a manner that promotes getting a feel for the games handling and getting your feet wet in some PvE goodness. Let's go through a few of the steps. [b]The Cosmodrome.[/b] Awakening in the cosmodrome is very reminiscent of Destiny 1, because it is a carbon copy of the intro from Destiny 1 for the first few minutes. It's not a bad start, you get your auto rifle and your shotgun and you're let out into the cosmodrome. [b]And now we meet Shaw.[/b] This is where things start to fall apart, largely because everything here slows down massively. We are sent to complete some very slow story missions that just have us slay patrol zone fodder and jump for a couple energy beans. These include the array mission, again from D1, and a largely monotonous mission used to set up the disgraced strike. [b]But before that, we head to the tower... In singleplayer.[/b] This segment is also full of flaws. The ghost takes us in from the hangar and tells us alot about other characters, some of whom aren't met in this segment. We do go and meet these characters, but with the exception of zavala we only recieve generic greetings with some flavour text. This whole section takes up a large chunk of time and offers a whole lot of not much bar your ghost just throwing alot of information at you. That and the place feels very dead because there is absolutely no one around. [b]And now, a disgrace...(d strike.)[/b] This in my opinion is not an awful step for this intro, I do however feel that there is a much better option currently than this strike. My biggest gripe is how long it took to get here, this is a strike, the bread and butter of the games PvE and it has taken around an hour or two to get here and due to the snails pace of the content thus far it most likely will have felt longer. Now I have shared a general summary of my issues with the NPE I will propose some solutions, I want to give some constructive feedback and it's very easy to just degrade something and not actually offer some sort of solution. I will try to keep everything in a good order as to how the player should tackle them. [i][b]A more explosive entry.[/b][/i] One very important core aspect of Destiny is your subclass and abilities, these are limited and you don't get a great deal of practice with these, especially at the start of the game where your stats will keep these regenerating slowly. I would recommend instead of our character crawling out of the grave very weak and helpless, we burst out onto the scene with many enemies closing in and trying to over run us, leaving us no choice but to start overflowing with light. This would involve lots of very fast ability regen allowing the player to get familiar with their space powers, how they behave, and also get a decent handle on their movement. In a perfect world we could have our newly found light remain in a somewhat unstable state, meaning it would cycle through each subclass every so often in order to get a handle on other subclasses, but in the interest of time it may be worth just focusing on the one. Now that we have a handle on our abilities and how we move, we can learn to shoot. We leave our starting area and grab our weapons to make way for a flyable ship with some coms equipment, we get a couple shooting galleries along the way and maybe a public event to introduce us to cooperating with other guardians and learning our weapons. Once we find a ship and establish contact we are informed of a high priority threat in the region, a high servitor in the devils lair. I would change the intro strike to this one as it is the intro strike from destiny 1, it has plenty of shooting galleries in both enclosed and open spaces and allows us to stretch our lightbearing legs a little, with a hold ground section, mid strike tank and an enjoyable boss fight. Finally, after our victory, we head to the tower and introduce ourselves to the relevant folks, and they introduce themselves in turn. My goal with this structure is to streamline the NPE, keep it relatively high in pace and intensity. Mission wise the count has gone from 5 (6 If you count the tower intermission) to 3 (4 if you count a proposed tower epilogue) and I feel the value of these missions to the new player has increased. I feel a more engaging NPE will keep more players hooked as opposed to them getting bored and never picking up the game again. First impressions matter and I feel that the game really suffers from this one. Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, feel free to poke as many holes into it as you like, I will be interacting with the comments to explain any bits I may have left out in my cranky sleep deprived rant. Addendum: DLC A brief addendum, I feel that the need to buy the Forsaken and Shadowkeep DLCs after they have been out for so long is a big discouragement to new players as they have only limited content that is relevant but also a small amount of content that feels essential to some players. I feel and approach should be made to this content where it becomes free to all players after the release of the next major expansion in order to set a limit to playerbase splitting and to ensure that the barrier to entry for the game does not spiral into infinity. Edit 1: A couple grammar fixes and added a first addendum.