Because throwing people into the world of a fairly complex game without a well thought out guidance is a terrible thing to do period. User experience and player psychology is a legit thing that needs to be taken into account when designing experiences like this and Bungie failed big time on this one. Having a couple text to read doesn't do anything realistically. For a commercial product like this, there is a higher bar to reach.
It is known.
Bungie can't really
fully hang with the big leagues when it comes to video game story-teling, mission design and character development.
The crazy thing is that they were going places with Forsaken. We got;
- Proper and fleshed out character development for Savala, Cayde and Ikora
- Finally our Guardian is un-muted and shows motive and decision-making setting the stage for a full blown storyline with our Guardian in the future. Not only becoming the center stage of our social interactions instead of it being our Ghost (finally)...but a storyline where our Guardian carves a path on his /her own instead of always being told where to go and what to do.
- Well structured character progression for Uldren. Which is far better than what we got from the Cabal leader during Red War
So, it's shocking to see them not creating a coherent background for new players to easily follow, story-wise.
Bungie should have nailed the storytelling aspect pretty comfortably at this point.
I'm convinced this was an issue of moving staff around to create extra content for New Light, while adhering to other important deadlines and the attempt to do both simultaneously failed pretty hard.