Destiny: The Dark Below

In 200 hours of play we’ve built up a bit of a tolerance, and The Dark Below doesn’t do enough to top us off

360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

Bungie has long insisted that Destiny is not an MMOG, and just three months after release we finally know why. No MMOG maker would have the brass neck to call The Dark Below’s slender addition to an already-slight form an expansion. To a Blizzard or an ArenaNet, an expansion is a generous content drop, a restructuring project and balancing act based on player actions and feedback that results in something bigger, broader and better than what came before.

To Bungie, an expansion is three new missions, three additional multiplayer maps and two extra Strikes (though just one on Xbox), new weapons and gear, and yet another vendor with a reputation bar in need of filling. Destiny still only has three playable classes and four planets, apart from a new sci-fi bunker network set across the same battlegrounds you’ve crossed dozens of times before. Perhaps it’s churlish to damn The Dark Below for building on the base game’s established structure, and it takes a certain skill to make a wellworn space feel fresh by having you come at it from a different angle and fiddling a little with the spawns. But there’s little expansive about three missions that are over in barely an hour, or a questline that can only be triggered and handed in at weekends and that doesn’t last much longer. Even the better-off PS4 players will feel short-changed by their exclusive Strike, which pits them against a giant Hydra and constantly spawning mobs, reprising the structure of Venus’s Nexus Strike.

Of the three Crucible maps, one is big and has vehicles, one is tiny and shotgun-friendly, and the other is medium-sized. You can almost hear the sound of graphite on paper as Bungie quickly ticks three boxes before getting down to the real business of Destiny: its structure. Specifically, how it builds a network of economies around its slender framework to give its players the incentive to – and no alternative but to – repeatedly run the same Strikes, missions and bounties. Tot up all the different upgrade materials, currencies and rep bars and you realise that this three-month-old game now has more economies – over two dozen of them – than it does story missions.

Not all these changes have arrived with The Dark Below. Indeed, so regular have Bungie’s economy tweaks and additions been that it is impossible to consider that they have been based on real player feedback. These are surely built overwhelmingly on metrics, on Bungie analysing reams of data to see which materials players are struggling for and swimming in, and altering the game accordingly. It’s why upgrade materials no longer require lengthy planetside farming runs but are now available from vendors, and dished out from daily missions and bounties. It’s why Glimmer, the onceabundant base currency, has become the game’s most precious resource. And it’s why Strange Coins, used to buy exotic gear from Xur at weekends, have been made integral to The Dark Below’s most controversial change.

Xur’s new exotic shards will let you upgrade the game’s most powerful gear in line with the raised level cap, but doing so resets its progress to a vanilla state. This strips you of all your perks, whether you had fully upgraded it or not, and consigns you to another halfdozen hours of XP grinding to get yourself back up to speed. Bungie announced the change an hour after we’d needlessly fully levelled our Titan’s exotic chest piece, and rolled it out the next day. It totally misunderstands why players were sitting on piles of Strange Coins: not because there was nothing worth buying, but because Xur sold much the same selection week in, week out. Meanwhile, there’s no way of upgrading existing legendaries; they’re not quite obsolete, but when you’re fighting level-32 mobs, they’ll certainly feel like it.

As in the base game, reaching the level cap means running a raid, Destiny’s real endgame, in the hope of getting the most powerful armour from random loot drops at checkpoints. The Vault Of Glass’s miserly RNG has been tweaked, and in our first run through Crota’s End we secured two of the three pieces needed to get us to level 32 – something that took a couple of months of weekly VOG runs. However, raid gear now needs raidspecific upgrade materials, and while we were happy to run the core game’s marvellous raid every week, impressions of Crota’s End are less favourable.

VOG was hectic, sure, even punishingly difficult, but it was always readable: you could see where enemies were coming from and going. In Crota’s End, Bungie flings wave after wave of aggressive, fast-moving Hive with only one goal: ripping your party of six to shreds. There are some smart ideas here, with a sci-fi riff on the classic river-crossing puzzle, and a brave end-boss twist in which Bungie takes away the one thing it has let its players count on for a dozen-plus years. But a raid’s great thrill is in learning a set of puzzle mechanics, devising a strategy and then executing it perfectly, which is a lot harder to do when you’re shooting at a screen of screaming, onrushing God-knows-what.

As before, the fantastic shooter at Destiny’s core does much to dull the pain of the structure that surrounds it, but in 200 hours of play we’ve built up a bit of a tolerance, and The Dark Below doesn’t do enough to top us off. Rather than expanding on what came before, too often it punishes the committed player, their weapons rendered obsolete, their best gear reset, their flair for teamwork hamstrung by aggressive mobs. Viable, if cheesy, strategies are patched out, while longstanding bugs have not even been acknowledged, let alone fixed. For Destiny to become the game its mechanics deserve, Bungie must stop looking only at what its players are doing, but also at what they are asking for, and respond accordingly.