Upon booting up the first story mission of Destiny: The Taken King, I'm greeted by a rare sight, at least in the world of this online shooter: No one is shooting at me.
In fact, no one's around at all. The enemy base I've been sent to attack, a brutalist alien installation dug into the surface of one of Mars's1 moons, is abandoned. Evacuated.
Sirens blare overhead, and in shadowed corners, strange portals open up to distant stars. This is all looking suspiciously like a carefully-crafted set piece, but for a game as bare-bones and formulaic as the first year of Destiny has been, it's a remarkable and welcome change of pace.
Taken King is Destiny revitalized, with new energy and renewed purpose. It's not better, exactly, though a number of changes in structure have made parts of the game less frustrating. What it is is a more urgent Destiny, more assured of its goals and more willing to take risks in the interest of keeping your attention. And while that energy fizzles the deeper into the expansion you get, it's welcome while it lasts.
When I was a kid, I loved Power Rangers. The thing about Power Rangers, however, is that it was objectively terrible, with only one exception: Each season, the costumed characters got a new power set, which required their old power set to be rendered inadequate.
So, every once in a while, something crazy would happen: They'd lose to the bad guys.
For an episode or two, dramatic tension would skyrocket as the heroes rushed around, desperately pooling their resources and trying to cobble together a solution to beat their new, overwhelming foes. For these fleeting moments, the kid's show crackled with energy and, even though you knew they'd win in the end, it was riveting to watch the heroes struggle so close to the edge.
The early parts of The Taken King are like those episodes of Power Rangers. There's a new threat in town: Oryx, the avenging father of a monster players killed in the The Dark Below expansion. Oryx flies in on his vast, labyrinthine ship, the Dreadnaught, and with a new set of minions, the Taken.
With their presence, Destiny marshals a new-found sense of dramatic tension into story missions that are longer, more plentiful, and more engaging than anything found in the previous iterations of the game.
It helps that the Taken are so intimidating. Your first encounters with them are tinged with horror, as they appear from nowhere, stealing familiar enemies and turning them into a shadow-tinged army to stand against you. They have new abilities and look like living wisps of smoke, weaving and multiplying around you.
To respond, your character is sent to claim a new set of class abilities: Sith Lord-style lightning powers for the versatile Warlock; a hammer of sunlight and fire for the brutish Titan; a bow of purple Void energy for the nimble Hunter.
These new sub-classes are the best designed in the game, each one offering a new play style that, for the first time, make different character types feel distinct and specialized. I play as a Hunter, and my bow lets me bind and manipulate large swaths of enemies, opening them up for my allies to rain down destruction.
Once you've gained your new powers, you have to stand against Oryx and his never-ending armada, traveling across the galaxy to scrounge up the resources needed to board his ship and stand against him. Destiny here showcases a renewed interest in actually telling a story (there's an honest-to-god antagonist!), helping to string together the player's various quests. The vendors in the hub area behave like characters now, chattering with each other while you go on missions, providing advice, exposition, and comic relief.
The more coherent new quest structure introduced in the 2.0 patch is well-utilized here, doling out regular rewards and working your mission tasks into a broader narrative structure. Instead of just doing a list of missions, you're fulfilling objectives, talking to the power brokers in the Tower, preparing for war.
What's more, there are secrets now, loose ends and open questions that make the new parts of this universe feel substantial and intriguing. The Dreadnaught is a space station reconfigured as an open tomb, its winding tunnels holding echoes of dead things from beyond and promises of treasure, if only you can figure out where to find the keys. Destiny has long promised a galaxy that will reward you for exploring, and Bungie has finally made good.
In time, however, the tension fizzles.
At some point, a few hours in, it may occur to you that the Taken aren't any smarter than the other enemies in the game, and a few clever new tricks don't make up for AI that's less likely to surprise you than the enemies Bungie designed over a decade ago in Halo: Combat Evolved.
When the main questline ends, less than halfway through the expansion's stable of new missions, it becomes clear that the storyline, with its ravings about the Darkness and the Souls of enemies that are already dead but maybe also immortal, is still pretty much gibberish.
And you might begin to wonder why no one in this world seems to care the slightest bit about the fact that Oryx is clearly still alive and waiting for you at the end of the new raid, "King's Fall."
Destiny is a game about repetition and regularity, work and reward, and nothing Bungie can do (save upending the whole thing) can change that. If you can reconcile yourself to that fact, The Taken King has ample rewards for you.
The grind of leveling up and getting new gear has been streamlined, and the game is more generous with its best weapons and equipment than it was in the past. The new quests amount to the same goals as before—run here, kill these things, go to Venus, kill this big guy, et cetera—but the framing of those tasks makes the repetition less insulting than it used to be.
It still feels wonderful, moment to moment. The guns sing with fire and light, and when you're running through a raid, a whole team of the highest level players unleashing their best abilities on hordes of aggressors, it's a space opera symphony.
Just don't expect something fundamentally different than what's come before. You'll still do the same missions over and over. You'll still replace weak guns for better guns for best guns, and then wonder what to do with them all. The worst monsters in the galaxy will still fall by your hand, and they will still re-emerge to fight you again and again.
This is Destiny: the good guys win, and nothing ever changes. In the end, it was more like Power Rangers than I initially thought.
1UPDATE: 02:44 pm ET 10/02/15: Turns out, the moon the writer explored was a satellite of Mars, not Saturn. He stands by everything else.
