Destiny’s Upcoming Prison Of Elders Co-op Mode Revealed

There was a lot of disappointment when Bungie announced that the House of Wolves expansion would not include a new raid, along the lines of the Vault of Glass and Crota’s End. Instead, the DLC features a whole new mode called Prison of Elders, which pits a fireteam of three against wave after wave of enemy within the eponymous prison.

Thankfully, as Bungie streamed the mode today on Twitch, it’s sounding like it’s much more substantial than just your bog standard horde mode – though something like that would not have gone amiss, it would have been disappointing – but rather aims to keep things interesting and fresh between waves and rounds. Most notably, as you pass through the air lock into the arena, this is not simply limited to the Fallen, but can also pit you against the other enemies factions.

The Prison of Elders takes place over four rounds, each of which features three waves of enemies, before culminating in a Strike-style boss. There are randomised elements within, so each play should be different from the last, with modifiers that can boost primary weapon damage, alter the way that shields work, add burns and so forth, to always keep you on your toes.

The second round will start to bring extra elements into play, such as the need to capture zones before time runs out in order to defuse mines or having to kill a VIP enemy. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see any of the bosses during the stream – there were different styles of communication during the stream, shall we say – but I’m still hopeful we’ll get to fight a giant shank.

The main game mode is a level 28 arena, featuring matchmaking for those without a fireteam of three, and which can be played as many times as you like while still receiving rewars. Each week will also see non-matchmade challenge modes, with names such as Broken Legion, Urrox’s Grudge and Skola’s Revenge. Five different challenges rotate to fill the level 32 and level 34 slots, while Skola’s Revenge will permanently reside within the level 35 challenge, and presumably has some sort of significance to the House of Wolves central plot. The challenge modes will only hand out rewards once per week, similar to the Nightfall strike and raids.

We also got a sneaky peak at a couple of the new guns in the game, including a new class of special weapon, the sidearm.

To see all of that in action, check out the archived stream below. I would advise turning the volume down or even off, though:

5 Comments

  1. Man! That dude on the left made me leave the stream. Looks like fun but we’ll have to see if it has a “I wanna run it again!” Factor like the vault. It’s a good pve equivalent to the trials.

  2. I really like the look of it, I think it’s pretty smart from bungie. Clearly only the select few of us are hardcore enough to get a team of 6 together regularly to raid, so teams of 3 make it all much easier. It looks like there will be a nice variety to it and it definitely will need a lot of teamwork. Shame professor broman is such an absolute cockface, he totally ruined the reveal last night.

  3. Nope, don’t like it. Not impressed.

    This pretty much just confirms that I will be playing the story missions that come with this DLC. Assuming there are some of course – People (including myself) assumed there would be another raid & look how that turned out…

    But yeah, I’ll play through whatever story content is delivered via the DLC (as I have already paid for it) & then that’s highly likely to be the end of the road for me & Destiny. As mentioned previously, that’s a bit of a shame considering the sheer hours I have logged on it to this point, but it had to end sometime.

  4. Looks like a lot of fun to me. There are YouTube videos without constant commentary by a hyperactive moron if you want to see how it looks when competent people play. I think they had a bunch of people round at the same time and allowed them to capture some footage. This actually makes it look fairly easy, doing the level 34 version as level 34s.

    Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKScwHe4IR8

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