Optimizing the New Player Experience
Context
Blizzard formed an internal strike team to solve issues with Diablo Immortal's onboarding experience that were identified in public test phases prior to release. This team included myself and various content and narrative designers.
The initial design of the onboarding experience aimed to be an action-packed introduction focused on core gameplay that properly sets player expectations of the game. Combat basics and core-loop concepts are gradually introduced to players who are tasked with fighting demonic evils and protecting the town of Wortham.
The single-player onboarding experience spans a player’s first ten levels before they are introduced to the open MMO world.
Problems
Qualitative and quantitative data collected from both our Alphas and Beta public test phases indicated the following problems:
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High drop-off rates at several points when players were either directed to return to the safe town in the zone or when players were required to travel long distances between quests.
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Low overall completion rate of the onboarding questline.
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High drop-off rates once the onboarding quest was completed and players were directed to travel to the next zone Ashwold Cemetery.
Goals
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Reduce the severity of the highest drop-off points during the onboarding questline.
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Increase the overall completion rate of the onboarding questline.
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Reduce drop-off of players before Ashwold Cemetery.
Hypotheses
DROP OFF POINTS
The team shared concerns that allowing players to enter the safe town as early as they were was creating a lot of opportunities for divergent behavior. The town presented too many options to players too early, which also meant they weren't getting exposed to enough of the core gameplay early enough.
After arriving in the safe town, players would complete a few tasks and then soon be asked to venture back out into the wilderness to fight more enemies. This was an unknown time commitment, so many players used the safe zones as opportunities to end their play sessions.
Upon completion of the onboarding quest, as players were transitioned into the open MMO world, they were bombarded with too many new features, tutorials, and notifications. I worried this would create a sense of overwhelm and negativity, and eventually lead to churn. I took it upon myself to advocate for change here.
COMPLETION RATES
The entire onboarding quest felt far too long and was unrealistic for many players to complete in a single session. Our team would take a multi-faceted approach to reduce the time of completion.
I was also worried that because players could not set any sort of expectation about what kind of time commitment onboarding would require from them, they felt less motivated to persevere through lulls in action (like returning to town). It was also unclear to players how long onboarding would take and what kind of time commitment was being asked of them.
Proposals
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Progress Visualization – give players an overall sense of progression and a predictable measure of session length.
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Onboarding Completion Optimization – tutorials and system notification optimization at end of the onboarding quest.
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Close the gates of town and force players directly to the first boss fight.*
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Gameplay optimizations focused on combat and core experience.*
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Shorten the walking distance between major areas of interest.*
* Solutions owned and driven by other game design partners on the team.
Progress Visualization
I began by experimenting with different ways of visualizing the length of the overall onboarding experience. I tried leveraging existing systems (quest tracker, tutorial tooltips) and adding new UI to display quest progression.
My hopes were that:
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Persistent visualized progress would positively reinforce player interaction with the game
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If a player could see they were near completion, this may encourage them to extend their play sessions.
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Seeing their own rate of progression could help players set expectations about the actual length of the quest line.
It was agreed that utilizing the quest tracker was the best direction. This would reinforce the habitual behavior of referencing the quest tracker we wanted to teach players. It was also coincidentally the easiest to implement.
Considerations were also discussed on how to potentially segment the questline, i.e. breaking it down into chapters so players could have more frequent celebratory moments to carry them through the entire experience. Although this was a direction the team liked, we were subject to prohibitive technical and production limitations. Therefore, we moved forward with a simple progression bar that displayed a player's overall percentage of the questline they have completed without altering the narrative writing or adding additional rewards.
FINAL DIRECTION
Onboarding Completion
The final step of the onboarding quest was marked by players exiting the Wortham chapel after speaking with Deckard Cain. This moment was notably overwhelming as players were being shown a lot of new information in a very unthoughtful way.
Players were transitioned into the open world for the first time and could potentially be seeing other players in the world or chat channel activity for the first time. Simultaneously, three separate Feature Unlock notifications were also being triggered sequentially, with instructional tutorial tooltips accompanying two of those notifications that both instructed players to interact with different parts of the HUD. Needless to say, there were several opportunities for improvement.
OPTIMIZATION #1
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Remove the World Map system unlock from this moment. Move it back into the Chapel, as this contextualizes it when it is introduced by Cain.
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After exiting the Chapel, only trigger the auto-pathfinding notification. This will help reduce the friction of players traveling to the next zone.
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Keep the progress bar below 100% to encourage players to fully complete the questline.
OPTIMIZATION #2
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Direct players to enter Ashwold Cemetery through the northern gate of the town. This would reduce the distance players would have to walk compared to the existing path.
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Reduce and/or eliminate the number of enemies encountered, which would remove more friction points.
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Eliminate the potential perception of backtracking through part of the zone players have already seen.
OPTIMIZATION #3
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Once players enter Ashwold Cemetery, mark the quest complete and fill their progress bar up to 100%.
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Then, trigger a celebratory completion popup that encourages players to continue playing and helps them set expectations about what content is to come.
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Once the completion popup has been dismissed, trigger the feature unlock notification for the Guide, alongside the instructional tooltip prompting players to open the Codex.
Alignment
Once we reached internal alignment with all stakeholders of the Blizzard team, the strike team pitched our solutions to our co-development partners. The pitch included all supporting data and proposed design solutions, along with visualized flows.
Meeting with our partners was productive and together we identified even further areas for improvement. They proposed adding a big “WOW” moment to elevate the narrative experience, as well as adding a cliffhanger after players' first trip to the safe town to discourage drop off.
Final Steps
My preferred version of the progress visualization UI was aligned on and implemented with no resistance from our partners.
Next, the experience of completing the onboarding quest was cleaned up in a couple of ways. First, the World Map feature unlock/tutorial was moved back inside the chapel to lighten the cognitive load upon exiting it. As players leave the chapel, their progress tracker will still hit 100%, then the completion popup trigger. Unfortunately, we could not stall the completion popup until players entered Ashwold (this had to do with technical limitations around how our quest logic was built). As a workaround, all the feature unlock notifications and tutorial tooltips for the Guide would be stalled until after the completion popup is dismissed, so players won't feel overburdened.
The path to travel to Ashwold Cemetery remained the same, as my proposed change would incur significant development costs. As a compromise, we aligned on reducing the number of enemies players would encounter on their way to Ashwold, as well as reducing total enemy health so they are easier to defeat.
Other additional changes included:
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Blocking players from entering Wortham until after completing the first cave boss encounter.
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Reducing the overall amount of enemies and reducing enemy health en route to the first boss.
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Adding smoke screens to limit player access to unnecessary areas of the zone map.
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New, exciting narrative elements (cultist attacks on Wortham gates, Xul’s reappearance to guide the player).
The Results
The team's initiatives were successful. After the worldwide launch of the game, we increased the overall completion rate, reduced the average completion time for the onboarding quest, and maintained a positive NPS score.
We were also happy to see churn rates remain relatively the same despite the dramatic increase in the game's population at launch compared to previous test phases. Another important consideration was that the data from our test phases were from an audience of self-selected players who arguably had greater levels of investment in the game. Seeing the same data from a larger population of variably-motivated players was definitely encouraging.