Road To Review: Destiny: The Taken King

It would be wrong to suggest that everything has changed with Destiny’s 2.0 patch last week and the launch of The Taken King, but it certainly feels like it has. It feels cruel that your Gjallarhorn doesn’t do quite as much damage, that your stats have been altered and redefined, that your gear is all so suddenly outclassed, but Year Two needed to redress the balance and nullify some of the flaws that had persisted since launch.

https://youtu.be/jTvf2cAIUtk

And so the first few hours of The Taken King are quite messy, when it comes to looking at your gear. Where there was once a clear hierarchy from common to uncommon, rare, legendary and exotic, the waters are instantly muddied as uncommon gear of a higher level than your precious exotics starts to have noticeably higher stats.

Your trusty Fatebringer or Gjallarhorn aren’t instantly made redundant, nor is your favourite set of armour, but you’ll soon be tempted away from them as you start to earn experience once more and unlock higher ranked gear – the game has shifted away from determining your post-level 20 progression by armour light levels to a standard RPG levelling system. The plus side is that seeing a green or a blue engram is exciting once more, and always has the potential to exceed what you already own.

It really encourages you to try new weaponry with a whole new set of design paradigms for the guns that come from a handful of new fictional manufacturers. The Gunsmith lets you try out new guns on a weekly basis, for one thing, but simply seeing much better damage output in one gun compared to your previous favourite will get you to try things out.

The Taken King quickly embroils you in a wider variety of concurrent activities than you had before, beyond simple tackling bounties and story missions with quests. Yes, you’ll be eager to head off and do battle with Oryx and his Taken minions – and these live in the new quest system – but you’ll also find yourself visiting a number of the vendors or vanguard leaders on multi-part quests. Bounties still exist, but they’re more singular in purpose, instead, if you visit Lord Shaxx he’ll pose you a series of challenges in the Crucible, Petra Veng and Varix will have you hunting specific kinds of Taken, and so on.

The Taken, introduced very quickly as you explore the burning ruins of the Cabal fire base on Phobos, go a long way to refreshing the core gameplay of Destiny too. They might borrow the models and designs of existing foes from the four alien races that besiege humanity’s last bastions, but they behave very differently. They animate and twitch in a torturous fashion, having been pulled into an alternate dimension and subjugated by Oryx to do his bidding.

Where Petra Venj and Varix were both delightful new characters that brightened the journey through House of Wolves, the burden of carrying the story in The Taken King falls largely to Nathan Fillion as Cayde-6, the swashbuckling and utterly charming hunter Vanguard leader – playing right into the hands of Nathan Fillion’s most popular work. He adds a great deal of light humour when juxtaposed against Eris Morn’s anguished tone and the new Ghost voiced by Nolan North.

That change will be one of the most contentious, and it feels in places as though he’s been directed to do anything but the same delivery as the oft-maligned Peter Dinklage. It can fall flat at times and it almost sounds as if he’s been pitch shifted in order to add a greater degree of differentiation, but he plays his part within the greatly improved storytelling that we’ve seen since The Dark Below. More story and lore is embedded in the world via items that the Ghost can scan on command, rather than locked away in the online Grimoire, for example. Yet it’s Cayde-6 who steals the limelight at every turn.

Though Oryx’s Dreadnaught is absolutely the centrepiece new addition to the game, Bungie carefully tiptoe past overusing it. Strikes and going on Patrol are both locked away until after you’ve reached a natural conclusion of the story that sets up the Raid that will appear on Friday, but over the course of those first five hours with the expansion they pull the familiar trick of opening up new areas in the Cosmodrome, re-exploring parts of the Moon – in a quite excellent fashion that will please long standing fans – and the Warlock has an excellently inventive solo mission to discover its third subclass, all of which ensures that the Dreadnaught continues to feel special.

It’s may be a little disappointing to reach a moment of some finality so soon – I hadn’t expected something of that scale to arrive prior to sharing my first impressions, certainly – but it’s clear that The Taken King is continuing to improve from the lessons that Bungie have learnt over the last year, and it still feels as though there’s plenty more to explore and plenty that will remain hidden for the coming weeks and months.