I’ve spent a lot of time with Bungie’s massively multiplayer first person shooter Destiny. I first talked about it on here about a year ago, and a lot has happened in the game since.
When it first launched, the game was alive, and there were lots of people to play with. Since then, a lot of people have dropped off, having completed all the content in the game a long time ago. Destiny’s second expansion, House of Wolves, was released this week, and adds a significant amount of action to the game.
House of Wolves delivers on some of the initial promise of Destiny. While before, I mostly found myself alone in the freeform patrol missions, there have been several events leading up to the release of the expansion that caused me to randomly join forces with half a dozen other players to take down a common enemy. I couldn’t have finished these by myself, and these impromptu team ups, along with some of the-curveballs the game would occasionally throw in, felt like what Destiny was supposed to be all along.
This expansion also simplifies many aspects of the game that the last expansion complicated. Many of the different kinds of currency in the game have been effectively consolidated, so upgrading equipment and buying new gear is much easier, and getting up to the maximum level can be done much faster than before, so even new players can join their friends in the new content without having to work for dozens of hours to get there.
I’m still upset with the way the game delivers the story. You only get fragments of the story in-game-- instead, playing unlocks short stories you can read online. It’s a bizarre way of handling it, and as a result, not many people know the story. That’s a shame, since the world is deep and rich, and House of Wolves delivers some of the most compelling characters and storytelling in the Destiny universe. But you wouldn’t know about it without stepping out of the game and reading about them on your computer.
