A year after its initial release, Bungies once inchoate first-person shooter, Destiny, has finally fulfilled many of its original expectations from 2014. Coming from an acrimonious consumer, I have to reluctantly admit that this new expansion,
The Taken King is everything I wished the game was before I sunk an inordinate amount of time and effort in it. With a myriad of new features and content,
The Taken King is a perfect balance for new players who want to enter game and for existing players to finally pick up their remotes again!
The only thing that’s changed is everything.
I’m going to steal that esoteric slogan those pretentious Apple douches came up with and seamlessly apply it to
The Taken King because unlike the iPhone 6s; the new expansion
has changed everything. Right from the opening cinematic, I knew that this expansion was going to be bad ass. Unlike the previous, mundane cut-scenes throughout Destiny’s history, the opening cinematic of
The Taken King proved to me that the Bungie team was taking this release seriously. From the Queen, Mara Sov’s “
I bow to no one” to the new melodically-realistic voice of your ghost, I knew that I was going to enjoy playing this game once again.
If you haven’t played Destiny in a while like I had, you’ll find that a lot has changed with many aspects of the game. The biggest modification by far came with an update dubbed
Destiny 2.0 which was released two days before the expansion. This update completely restructured the old leveling system. The old “light-level” system relied on the individual leveling their character through how much
light their gear contained. Levels were contingent on the characters gear, and how upgraded that retrospective gear was. This created a lot of issues because if you were to join a fire team to complete a raid or strike with a character that was just one level below the rest, that character’s damage output would be 20% weaker and would substantially effect the gameplay for the rest of the team. The difference between someone’s light score opposed to light-level will help ameliorate some of the preexisting conditions people were having with completing raids because now the damage output between two characters is no longer an insurmountable albatross. The new “light-score” system is not like its antiquated predecessor, as it doesn’t rely on the individuals gear anymore to determine a characters level; now everyone levels purely through experience while the light score is now a culmination of a characters damage output, armor, and character traits like Discipline and Intellect. You will no longer be forced to fluctuate between levels to just simply upgrade a piece of gear to max out its light, your armor
and weapons now constitute your light scores average.
Oryx,
“The Taken King,” is the crux of the new campaign content as he is Crota’s (
The Dark Below narrative) father who has come to avenge his fallen son. The majority of the new content takes place in a new zone called the Dreadnaught, which is Oryx’s ship that resides in the rings of Saturn. Like most of Destiny’s campaign, I saw it as almost a formality, as I lethargically went through the motions to complete the quests and garner the rewards. It took me about three to four hours to complete the story content and I can honestly admit, that I still don’t know exactly what’s going on other than the good guys (the light) are in a perpetual battle against the bad guys (the darkness) for control of the universe…
Quests, bounties, and resources also got a complete reworking. No longer will you have to return to the Tower to turn in bounties to that stupid
Star Wars robot; you can now just complete the quest right in the menu screen. Resources are now ever abundant, as you can trade and craft anything you need right at the tower while valuable resources like Strange Coins are copiously rewarded for completing Strikes and Crucible matches. Months of frivolously collecting and grinding are now a thing of the past as I can now sociopathically trade in my beloved resources for a picayune of reputation from a designated vendor.
Crucible is still one of the strongest features of Destiny gameplay as the Bungie team has added a plethora of new maps, game modes, and weapons. Unfortunately, I still suck at it as I incessantly got tea-bagged, match after match, in the ever-unforgiving “Elimination” and new “Rift” game modes.
Good for the new, expensive for the old
If you are new or thinking about getting into
Destiny, then this is the time to do it. The Bungie team has included
The Taken King plus all other expansions for only sixty dollars for new users. They have then surreptitiously charged existing users fourty dollars for
The Taken King expansion alone. Essentially, they have violated the existing customers butt holes by brazenly charging an additional forty (now $140 total) while also making sweet oral love to the new users by only charging sixty dollars for the whole kit and caboodle! And what do existing users have to say about this expensive endeavor?
Please sir, I want some more…Game score: