If you’ve ever played Destiny 2, you’ll be familiar with the creeping overwhelm that can happen when returning to the game after a while, or if it’s your first time playing. There are a lot of menu options, quests, triumphs, challenges, and more all housed within a complicated UI that many people seem to struggle to navigate easily. I recently returned to the game after a three-month hiatus and found myself blindly clicking to find the menus I needed–and that’s as someone with more than 3,000 hours in the game.
During a reveal stream for the new expansion, The Edge of Fate, Bungie also outlined many quality-of-life upgrades and updates coming to the game. The most notable of these is a complete overhaul to the game’s UI, which is now known as the Portal.
The Portal is a streamlined activity-selection screen, instantly showing the activities available at that time. There are different subsections within the Portal depending on the type of activity you want to play. These are split into Fireteam, Pinnacle, Crucible, and Solo Ops sections. Solo Ops is a new category that splits off smaller, shorter, self-contained gameplay sessions for those who want to play without the need for a fireteam.
You can also tailor the activities on offer depending on the rewards you’re seeking. There are 50 new gameplay modifiers, which allow for the most customization in Destiny 2 so far. Activity rotations are now curated to provide variety and something new.
From looking at the improved UI and the introduction of the Portal, it’s already clear that Bungie may have fixed the most frustrating problem with its space shooter to date. As an avid Destiny 2 fan I’ve found myself trying to convince my friends to jump in, but with a complex New Light experience that dumps new players into the game with little direction other than suggesting to follow a marker for a bit to see what happens, they were reluctant, to say the least.
Now, with the Portal, the next logical activity is highlighted in the bottom right of the interface, whether that’s a new campaign mission, or the next activity you need in order to complete a specific quest or triumph.
The Portal will be added with The Edge of Fate release date, which also introduces new Destiny 2 armor systems, weapons, and locations. The first of those new locations, Kepler, will feature customizable difficulty options, further deepening your ability to play the game exactly as you’d like.
