Drifting Stardust

Every open is a cold open. Loid doesn’t tell you what’s going on at all, halfway through the new war you don’t even know who you are playing as or what your objective is, and Stalker simply appears in the middle of the orb vallis and shoots some gun.

This works for the sake of quests like the arthur section of WITW or The Hex itself where a cold open allows for an extremely sharp contrast from what you’re normally used to.

It also works for The New War because the quest starts with a series of three separate cold opens that when stitched together actually form a long, slow burn opening showing the war itself and slowly establishing the stakes of the story.

Every bit of explanation or characterization is hidden away in places the average player won’t go, or triggered by a mechanism that you would only think to fund out by going onto the wiki.

Isleweaver requires you to go out of your way into places you probably won’t even be able to reach in time if you’re playing with a public squad for secrets you wouldn’t come across on your own.

Jade Shadows famously included a not so well written female character whose story and voice we only heard through a story hidden in relays up until the most recent quest.

If you want to find out literally anything about why alad v is infested and also amalgam and also normal as a new player without consulting the wiki, good luck because that’s almost all hidden behind events that already happened.

This severely alienates anyone who prefers to understand a game within said game by experiencing it themselves, let alone people who don’t like reading essays in the middle of action heavy games, let alone people who prefer dialogue and exposition over paragraphs.

Every quest is as short as humanly possible. I understand that this is on purpose so that players can get to the content faster, but it really hurts the quality of quests. Most quests leave players with one emotion; “okay but what the fuck actually just happened”.

Look at the responses to Angels of the Zariman, The Duviri Paradox, even The New War. It’s like they heard the phrase “show don’t tell” but forgot to show in a way that actually makes sense. It feels impossible to explain lore to people because I’m not even sure I know what the lore is.