Allow Players to Sort Shaders
TLDR: Providing Destiny 2 players tools to more easily modify in-game appearance may increase their desire for customization and may drive improved micro-transaction rates and LTV.
One way Destiny 2 supports itself is through the sale of in game currency used to purchase in-game cosmetics and emotes. These cosmetics provide players with the ability to express themselves by making their Guardians visually unique.
A major way players express themselves in-game is by using shader that modify the visual appearance of their armor and weapons.
While, ultimately, Bungie is most interested in players purchasing armor ornaments, the availability of shaders, for new players especially, introduces the possibility of (and desire to) make their Guardian ‘look cool’ and stand out from the rest their fireteam.
Shader library screen.
As new players progress through the game they accumulate dozens of unique shaders that allow them to customize the appearance of armor and weapons.
Unfortunately, Bungie does not provide any way to organize or sort these shaders, making the process of finding a recommended or recently acquired shader very difficult.
Bungie should provide players with the ability to do simple sorting of their shaders to better motivate desire to customize their Guardians.
Bungie could repurpose existing UX element present on the Vault screen used for gear inventory.
Vault screen with Sorting option activated.
Sort icon used in Vault.
A similar, simple sort function would greatly improve the player experience specific to shaders.
While the Shader library is presented slightly differently across several different game screens (i.e. Guardian Appearance Customization, Armor Appearance customization and weapon appearance customization), a consistent simple sort option could be integrated across all shader screens. To provide interaction and interface consistency across the various shader screens and across the unique interaction that requires a user cursor be active in the shader area to interact with the shaders, one option is to replace first shader box with a sort icon/button.
Shader library with proposed Sort box appearing as first option in Shader library
Similar to how sorting functions in the Vault, players would have the option to toggle between multiple sorting options with an informational roll over updating between sort states each time the sort is updated. It would look like this:
Informational roll-over updates each time the player updates the sort of their shader library.
Leveraging existing design patterns and established UX elements already within the game may reduce some complexity and resources required to add this new new feature to Destiny 2.
However, specific sort options available to players may be limited by data currently and historically captured by the game, associated with player data record and available to the game via API.
A recommend simple, initial implementation would include the following sorts:
Added to Game (Default sort order)
Sorted in order the shader was added to the game (newest season at top of list, oldest season at the end of the list)
Recently Obtained
Sorted from most recently obtained at top
Obtained date would require a timestamp the player obtained a specific shader. This appears to be stored for weapons but may need to be added.
If this data needs to be added all currently owned shaders would get feature launch date as obtained date and date would be updated with more recent obtain date if obtained by player after feature launch date
Alphabetical Name
Sorted in Alphabetical order (A-Z) by shader name
Shaders marked as Favorites by the player would appear at the top of the list in whatever sort order the player has selected.
Bungie already uses a similar approach elsewhere in Destiny 2 and could replicate this existing design solution to limit resources required to make this change.
A more visually impressive (but incredible challenging) sort order would be to ‘By Color’. To provide something that makes sense visually, a complex, sort would need to be run that looks at the primary, secondary and then multiple tertiary colors to organize shaders in something that makes sense visually.
Since shaders actually apply to gear in a sometimes inconsistent way, it is unclear if the effort required to provide sorting is justified or even result in a good player experience.
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”