#Impression artwork series
This skeleton crew, the “Live Team,” collapsed the progress made in The Taken King with a series of empty fan-baiting events. What I hadn’t predicted was that Bungie would near-abandon Destiny over the next year, to be run by a skeleton crew with the absurd objective of treading water for an entire year. I also predicted that the year ahead would be a tough one for Destiny post- The Taken King, with a need to capitalize the plot lines and systems it set up, to make the most of this renewed sense of direction.
When The Taken King released last year, I called it their “grand correction,” an expansion that seemed like Bungie finally getting hold of what Destiny was, and starting to move this tanker-like behemoth against the inertia, turning it in the right direction. Being a regular Destiny player over the game’s life up to this point has meant watching as Bungie tried to hammer systems unfit for their purpose into some kind of shape, struggle with providing enough for its eager players to do, and roll out “quality of life” updates that exchanged one thankless grind for another. It’s hard to tell if this an ornate in-joke, an attempt at reparation, or a thoughtless coincidence, but looking back at the game’s history it’s quite possible that it might be all three. The first mission in Rise of Iron, for example, has you climbing a mountain, one tellingly situated in the general area indicated by the host during that E3 demonstration more than two years ago. That idea of a return seems central to Rise of Iron as it cack-handedly attempts to gather together two years of u-turns, revisions, confusion, and frustration into a legacy. The bitter cherry on top of that year of dangling plot threads However, unlike The Taken King, whose infusion of narrative into every activity and sense of mystery invigorated Destiny, Rise of Iron has the feeling of being a dulling second run for these ideas, less interesting and more dysfunctional than before. There is the Archon’s Forge, an analog to the group battles of The Taken King ’s Court of Oryx, as well as a set of collectibles linked to lore, much like the Books of Sorrow. Consisting of a handful of missions laid out in a slight campaign, a new area to patrol, another more truncated raid and the usual handful of multiplayer maps, loot and items it is a slimmer package than last year’s The Taken King, though it imitates much of the same structures. Structured around the Iron Lords, the strangely medieval-themed band of warriors that predated the player’s guardians, it is the backward-facing bookend to two years of Destiny grind. I had forgotten about much of this before the release of Destiny ’s most recent, and perhaps final expansion, Rise of Iron.
Or perhaps that was just the atmosphere surrounding Destiny at the time that it could be unbelievably vast, beautiful and filled with promise. It was also an oddly unnecessary lie the game was impressive enough as it was, why not let people assume that this beautiful vista is theirs to explore? Why lie? It’s almost as if the demonstrator was operating on autopilot, cracking out the age-old PR line of “see that mountain, you can climb it!”-a line that has become a kind of running joke. Its audacious because the person who delivered it must have been completely aware that, not only was that not playable terrain, but that there was no plan to ever make it into playable terrain.
This feels like one of the most audacious lies I have encountered in my time covering games. “This is all playable terrain,” he added, gesturing to what I now know to be little more than a backdrop. So as they carefully rotated the camera to face away from the level, pointed to a shape on the horizon and said something like “you can climb that mountain,” I guess I believed him. But back then I had no idea where this sprawling landscape ended, where its invisible walls lay. The person demonstrating the game spawned at what I now know-after hundreds of hours in Destiny ’s world-to be the hard edge of the map. In that theater, we would be taken through the opening to the game: the wall, the breach, the first areas of the Cosmodrome. I remember being shepherded into a theater, the outside marked with huge printed artwork, among a group of whispering journalists. I was at E3 when Destiny was first shown to the world in 2013.
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