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It was this time last year that the video gaming landscape saw a major new peak appear upon it in the shape of Destiny.
Now, marking the beginning of the game’s second year, a new expansion pack – The Taken King – is set to launch. Though “expansion pack” looks as though it sells The Taken King a little short, as this is a new and fully-fledged story for the Destiny universe.
But there’s already been two expansions to Destiny, we hear you say, why is it different this time around? Well, whereas The Dark Below and House Of Wolves extended the existing gaming universe, The Taken King looks set to open a whole new chapter within it, and there are several ways it’s doing that.
For the first time, new sub-classes of Guardians are being added to Destiny’s character pyramid. Each of the three playable classes – Titan, Hunter and Warlock – are getting a sub-class with new abilities. Titan has Sunbreaker, which unsurprisingly involves a lot of fire-based actions, Hunter has something called Nightstalker, while the Warlock class now has Stormcaller.
Alongside these new sub-classes there’s some new gear being introduced as well. The most eye-catching is a new range of swords, but there are a few other things too, including artefacts – small pieces of content that can impact the stats of your character. Those who have had hands-on time say they haven’t seen too much of these yet, but there do appear to be different tiers of artefacts, each of which is likely to have a increasing effect on character traits.
You would think there’s nothing Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage could do wrong at the moment – but apparently video game voice is one such thing. Tyrion Lannister has been replaced as the voice of your personal Ghost for The Taken King, with Nolan North (Uncharted’s Nathan Drake) stepping in to the role.
As already touched upon, this is a full story expansion for Destiny, with The Taken King the new enemy. He is Oryx, father of Crota – a name those who played The Dark Below will be familiar with. If you completed that piece of DLC then you’ll have killed him, and now Oryx is out to avenge the death of his son.
He’s bringing a massive army of new enemies, as well as existing ones that have been convinced to join his cause. This creates a nice twist of familiar enemies but with new abilities.
One of the first new missions takes players to the Martian moon of Phobos, and serves as a perfect example of the host of new locations to explore in The Taken King. Not least the new PvE (player versus environment) area of the Court of Oryx, where players can activate public events and take on waves of enemies from Oryx’s ship, the Dreadnaught.
That ship is what you’re aiming to infiltrate, and there are strikes and a new raid, “King’s Fall”, to look forward to as well.
If that’s got you suitably intrigued you’re in luck – The Taken King launches at midnight tonight.
