When is the best time to review an expansion for a massively multiplayer online game? If you ask developer Bungie, they'll tell you Destiny isn't an MMO, but its shared-world questing and shooting, its collecting and grinding and levelling and looting, make it similar enough that there is little real distinction. And with The Taken King, Bungie has embraced a new vision for Destiny - one that many hoped it would deliver last September - following an overhaul, expansion and polish for the game.
The Taken King has now been out over a week, and I've seen numerous appraisals arguing that its changes progress the game into the experience it originally should have been. But it's not been a sudden turnaround. Slowly but surely, Bungie has been edging Destiny into this state ever since its first add-on launched last December. That's not to say that all has gone smoothly - first expansion The Dark Below had its own missteps - but Bungie has continued to note feedback and found ever more solid footing in the follow-up House of Wolves add-on last May. Patch 2.0, released a week before The Taken King, must also be given credit for laying much of the expansion's groundwork, whether you pay for it or not.
In some ways, The Taken King is also a regression: a step back to an earlier version of Destiny that the public never saw. This version of the game once included more story, had more personality, but for whatever reason it was retooled a year before the game's final launch. It's still tantalising to think that the plans for this version of Destiny still lie somewhere in Bungie's vaults - that it once might have seen the light of day had things turned out differently. It's the version that we hear about now and then from former employees and the version that many fans were expecting when Destiny eventually did launch, with so much character and class excised. But it would be unfair to say that The Taken King has just reverted to that earlier version of Destiny. The expansion has used ideas from it, along with improvements cooked up throughout the game's subsequent year of development while the game's story was retooled, plus every bit of learning from the past year post-release, too.
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