Review: Destiny: The Taken King

The beta period is over

Year One Destiny players got taken for a ride. It’s very clear that Bungie shipped an unfinished game, riddled with questionable design decisions, a bare-bones story, and a distinct lack of content. Hell, the developer was even struggling to finish it months later, when it shipped the premium DLC House of Wolves without a raid.

Now we’re in the “Year Two” era, which houses its own litany of issues, but has improved upon the flawed platform known as Destiny in many ways.

Destiny: The Taken King (PS3, PS4 [reviewed], Xbox 360, Xbox One)
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Activision 
Released: September 15, 2015
MSRP: $39.99 (digital) / $59.99 (physical)

Lets start with the multitude of changes Bungie has made to this husk of a game since launch. It took a full year, but now, the vault is finally sufficient for storing a realistic amount of items. The Gunsmith, once a pointless relic a week after launch, now actually does something meaningful, and has his own questlines in tow. Ghost shells and class items have defense ratings, you can recreate and upgrade Exotics at will, class quests have been implemented to help players acclimate, and armor materials have been streamlined. This is in addition to a ton of quality of life updates the game has accrued this past year like alternative methods of gathering reagents. It’s finally starting to take shape.

Other major shifts include Nolan North completely taking over for Dinklebot as your companion, who has been completely and utterly erased from existence due to the online-only nature of the game. Ghost now sounds a little more enthusiastic, and presumably will have more actual voicework going forward for future DLCs — great decision, Bungie, as Dinklage’s previous DLC work felt like archived, pasted voices. Another big addition is the quest log, which, while barebones, actually provides players with some vague idea of what to do and where to go when choosing missions, which is leaps and bounds better than the nonexistent system before.

Nightfalls, the ultimate weekly activity outside of the raid, are now less tedious, as they don’t instantly boot you to orbit anymore upon death, all but ensuring that players won’t camp out in the same cheese (exploit) spot for fear of having to restart 30 or more minutes of progress. Likewise, Weekly Heroics are now thankfully removed and integrated into a playlist with better rewards, and the daily heroic only needs to be completed by one character for account-wide rewards. Finally, all of the PlayStation exclusive Year One content is now available for Xbox platforms. Every single one of these aforementioned changes is positive, though this is how Destiny should have been at launch.

But even still, Bungie has proven it can’t write a story for beans. The narrative this time around is that a new big bad, Oryx, the father of Crota (who you killed in the first DLC), has entered the picture. It’s everyone versus him basically, and that’s pretty much all you need to know from start to finish. While it has all the makings of a basic moustache-twirling villain plot, it’s actually coherent this time around, which is a massive step up from the awful story of the original. It’s a step in the right direction, but coherency doesn’t automatically translate into quality — it’s still pretty bad.

It’s just that this time, Bungie decided to put Nathan Fillion’s character Cayde-6 at the forefront, where he has plenty of time to do Fillion-type things and crack wise at every turn. Your mileage may vary in terms of how much you enjoy the Mal Reynolds character that Firefly fans (and Fillion himself) have been clinging to all these years, but suffice to say I’m kind of tired of the shtick. Not to mention the fact that it’s a bit odd that Cayde, who practically said nothing during Year One, is suddenly chatty. Also, all of the meaningful lore still isn’t accessible in-game, instead forcing players to go online to Bungie.net to access the Grimoire system. After a full year this is utterly indefensible.

So how is the actual content that you’re paying at least $40 for? Well, somewhere in-between a DLC and another full game’s worth. You’re getting roughly nine (short) story missions, four Strikes (three for Xbox), a raid, three new subclasses, seven PVP maps, a small number of sidequests (including an arena diversion called the Court of Oryx), and new pieces of gear. Once again though, the story bits are rather disappointing, mostly consisting of missions you can breeze through in 10 minutes or so. That isn’t to say that they aren’t fun, but most players are likely going to conquer the entire story in a casual afternoon, which isn’t the greatest feeling if you already spent $60 to $90 on the previous versions of the game on top of the Taken King. Oh, and roughly half of the areas are re-used, too.

Alternatively, the third subclass quests for each class are actually pretty fun and inventive, even if they also only last 10 minutes or so, and take place in the same areas as the campaign (or borrow existing locations from PVP). It also helps that since every class can now control all three elements, dungeons and raids are that much more fun with so many different combinations of loadouts. The saving grace however is the Dreadnaught, an entirely new location to be patrolled, with its own set of missions and Strikes. Billed as Oryx’s home base, this Hive ship is actually pretty cool looking, and is the first actually new exploration hub (the tiny Reef was pretty pathetic) Bungie has implemented since the launch of the game. Why the previous DLCs didn’t have something like this is beyond me.

The gimmick this time around is the “Taken,” enemy type, which are basically souped-up denizens of Oryx. He restructures their bodies to serve him, and as a result, have this shadowy sort of glow going on. They’re cool on paper, but once you realize that the Taken are literally just reskinned existing enemies, they lose their luster quite a bit. In my mind, they basically sum up Destiny‘s constant need to re-use existing content rather than actually provide something new.

The Strikes however, like the attempt at a story, are another step in the right direction. Bungie has overhauled them so they’re a bit more streamlined, and provide players with more to do than just shoot regular enemies before they face a giant bullet sponge boss. For instance, one tasks party members with grabbing a ball as a key of sorts, and running through the level with it to unlock various doors. Shield Brothers features a fun fight with two bosses, and Sunless Cell hosts a final boss encounter in complete darkness. When you add in the fact that the new Strike playlists actually give good rewards, they’re suddenly much more fun to play.

Additionally, the raid, King’s Fall, is par for the course. Raids are easily my favorite aspect of the experience, and give us a quick one hour glimpse each week into the game that Destiny could be. The boss fights here are fast, fun, and puzzling, and I had a blast trying to figure it out with my group. Once again though many players won’t even see this raid, as it still requires them to manually find a group and meet the entry requirements.

Finally, PVP is getting seven new maps (eight on PSN), as well as a few modes. My personal favorite is The Drifter, which is an abandoned ship in The Reef, sporting a really cool atmosphere and design. PVP is a bit more robust now in general, with three new modes in tow. Mayhem is a hyper-ability based mode, Rift is like a capture the flag/basketball hybrid, and Zone Control is basically what the original PVP mode should have been — where only capturing objectives, not kills, obtain points for your team.

This is very close to the same competent but flawed shooter you played last year. Brand new players should probably jump on this opportunity to try the game out with the “Legendary Edition,” which provides the base game, both DLCs, and the Taken King expansion, but anyone who hated Year One will only find the improvements to be incremental at best. Slowly but surely, Bungie is morphing this chimera of a game into something more presentable.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}