It definitely can be hard to keep track of which items in there are actually main story things, and which are their own standalone items. Separating bounties from quests was a good first step (remember, as bad as it is now, it used to be worse). The next step, in my mind, needs to be quest categories. Just separating main story quests from everything else would help.

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.

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.

My dad and I ran through the Nightmare quests twice because he hadn't gone to talk to Ikora before running them....

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Here's what happens to me:

When I log in, I normally have some basic idea of what I'm in the mood for. Strikes, Crucible, patrol, a specific quest, whatever. So I fly to the Tower, and look through the quests page while it loads. "Ah", I say, "Here's something I can work on while doing that thing I logged in for. Is there anything else I can also work on?" I scroll through the list, hovering over each thing to try to remember what they involve so I can evaluate priorities. At the same time, I check my bounties. Do I have any about to expire? Probably, so now I try to decide if I care enough to change what my original plan was.

Let's say I stick to my original plan (Strikes, for example). Now I run around the Tower and grab bounties that might be relevant to what I'm about to do, Gunsmith especially. The Gunsmith has kinetic and sniper rifle bounties, while Zavala has grenade and fusion rifle bounties. Wait, what's the burn this week? Now I have to load up the Map menu to see that. Wait, which type of weapon did I need to kill Hive Majors with while on the Moon? Oh it was Arc abilities, so that doesn't matter, but can I make that work with the burn? What good exotic armor do I have for Arc subclasses that also has scavenger perks for sniper rifles?

What weapons do I even have on this character? Press back, press start, load up the weapon menu. Oh wait my shaders are full, better delete some. What was I looking for again? Oh yeah, wait doesn't it make more sense to have a primary slot sniper and an Arc secondary slot hand cannon? Oh wait, wasn't there a quest for pulse rifles? Do I have an Arc pulse rifle that I've been meaning to try out? What was the burn again? Why is my leg armor slot full?

Point made. There's just way too much information sprinkled around in way to many menus. I find myself constantly switching between the character and map/pursuits menus, which sucks because they both take forever to load (even with an SSD). I'm not sure there's any way to combine all that information into anything effective, especially since you don't know what the player is actually interested in doing.

What I would find useful would be some sort of checklist tool, similar to the tracking thing but visible outside of being in an activity. Maybe they could stick it on the left trigger blade that got mostly discarded. If you could go through your quests/bounties/map and designate up to 10 items as checklist items, and have them show up on your blade (which you would have to be able to pull up over the top of other menus), that would drastically speed up my "what to do" decision process.

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In addition to what’s already been said, one of the big problems I have is keeping track of which bounties I can work on during a given activity. The crucible bounties are easy (since they can only be completed in the crucible), but a lot of the other bounties are activity agnostic. So if I’m going to the moon to do some patrol stuff, I might be carrying bounties from the Gunsmith, Zavala, Ikora, Ada-1, Drifter, Werner, Eris, and Eris’ fear-crafting widget thing, all of which could be completed during patrol activities. That’s without even considering any quests. And because I can only track 3 bounties at a time, that’s a whole bunch of sifting through my menu to figure out which bounties I can work on.

It may be too much to hope for, but some kind of auto-sorting or bounty-highlight system that shows you, visually, which bounties that you’re carrying can be done within your current activity would be very helpful. So if I’m in a strike, any bounties that can be completed in a strike would sort to the top of my list, or glow brighter... something to make them easier to track.