Destiny: The Taken King (DLC)

My first hours with The Taken King landed with an odd mix of relief and mild embarrassment, relief because this is clearly what Destiny should have been at launch, and embarrassment on Bungie's behalf that it took a third expansion to get here. Released in September 2015, The Taken King is the largest piece of Destiny content Bungie had shipped to that point, and the gap in quality between it and its two predecessors (The Dark Below and House of Wolves) is not subtle. Where those earlier packs felt like holding patterns, this one overhauled the leveling system, rewrote the quest interface, gave each of the three classes a brand-new subclass, and handed the whole thing a storyline with actual character beats. The new subclasses are worth singling out. Warlocks get a Stormcaller arc-lightning super, Hunters summon a Void bow from gravitational energy, and Titans throw a flaming Sunbreaker hammer that works both at range and as a brutal melee finisher. That alone reshuffles how each class feels in both PvE and the Crucible. On the enemy side, the Taken army is not just a reskin, corrupted versions of existing factions show up with genuinely new behaviors: Taken Psions split into duplicates, Taken Phalanx shove you back with a shield-based force blast, and Taken Thrall warp across the arena instead of charging straight at you. Adapting on the fly feels good in a way earlier Destiny combat often did not. The new Dreadnaught location, Oryx's enormous warship, is the best-designed area in Year One Destiny by a clear margin, full of hidden passages, locked treasure chests, and a public event system called the Court of Oryx that pulls in nearby players organically. The story, finally, has a pulse. Cayde-6, voiced by Nathan Fillion, carries most of the charm here with sardonic delivery that actually lands. The campaign itself runs roughly four to six hours, which is short for a standalone game but long compared to anything Destiny had offered before in DLC form. After the main missions wrap, there is a thick stack of post-campaign quests with varied objectives: patrol kills, Crucible completions, item hunts, and the King's Fall raid, which is the real endgame carrot. The new quest log and Progress tab, both part of the accompanying 2.0 patch, make tracking all of this far less painful than the Year One systems. The leveling overhaul is equally welcome: character rank now climbs through XP, while Light (averaged across ten gear slots including weapons, Ghost, and Artifact) handles power scaling separately. That said, a few older complaints survive the update. Raid matchmaking is still absent, which means coordinating a six-player King's Fall run requires either a pre-formed fireman or external LFG tools, a barrier that still filters out a chunk of solo players from the best content in the game. Oryx himself is a bit of a stock villain when you get up close, better as a looming presence in the setup than as a final boss encounter. And this is still a game where grinding is the primary activity loop; if repetitive PvE was your reason for bouncing off vanilla Destiny, The Taken King smooths the edges but does not change the fundamental rhythm. For anyone already holding a copy of Destiny on Xbox One or Xbox Series X, this is the expansion that makes the whole thing worth revisiting. For a complete newcomer, the Legendary Edition bundles everything together and represents the cleanest entry point into the first game's lifecycle. Just know what you are signing up for: a cooperative loot shooter built around long-session play, at its best when you have a reliable fireteam and the patience to chase exotic weapons through the endgame.

Alex · Scout Team

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