Well, this is unexpected: Bungie just confirmed that Destiny‘s House of Wolves expansion won’t include a six-player raid when it comes out in May.
The game will receive a third raid at a later date, but it won’t be part of the expansion. In a new update to the company blog, a Bungie rep had the following to say:
House of Wolves will not have a Raid activity. We didn’t make this decision lightly. Our team has been humbled by the reception of Raids in Destiny and we are creating a new Raid for a release later this year. House of Wolves will have a new cooperative end game activity focused on variety, replayability, and skill — a new battle Arena called The Prison of Elders.
Raids are difficult, high-level dungeons designed for teams of six players. Destiny raids offer the game’s stiffest challenges, and reward players with some of the best weapons and gear. At the moment, Destiny has two raids: The Vault of Glass, which was added to the game shortly after it launched last September, and Crota’s End, which was the culminating challenge for the first expansion, The Dark Below.
In a way, Bungie’s decision makes sense: The Crota’s End raid had its share of problems, and a lot of us who gorged on it eventually burned out on the game in general. I’m interested to see what the Prison of Elders will look like, and have a feeling that if done right, that kind of thing could be a terrific addition to the game.
I’ve asked Bungie PR for clarification about the mysterious third raid, specifically if it will be included in the Expansion Pass players already bought, or if it will cost extra. I’ll update once we know more. In the meantime… jury’s out until we know more about this new arena mode. What do you think?
Comments
29 responses to “Destiny’s House Of Wolves Expansion Won’t Have A Raid”
A battle arena? Sounding like a wave survival mode to me. There does need to be more game modes in Destiny, hopefully this is the first of many.
I can’t imagine they’d charge extra for the new raid though. This makes sense though in order to stagger new content a bit more instead of having 3-4 month waits between DLC and people getting starved of new stuff to do. Now people can concentrate on the new stuff for a month or two, hopefully this new arena is substantial enough to keep us busy, and then a new raid drops before Comet.
All this hype is making me want to pick up Destiny again, I only just got started on my backlog last week… Halp.
I’d still hold off on it if you have other stuff to play. The more content is out for Destiny when you come back to it, the less likely you are to remember why you stopped playing in the first place 😀
Resist! Resist! Remember the way it held your life in its grasp and called you endlessly back…….. then you stopped and can’t remember why you played it so much…..
I stopped thinking I would get back in when the expansions came….. then realised I was really just level and gear grinding without much extra happiness from it. Games are meant to be more than just grinding…..
You get it man, when you pick it up and remember how smooth the game feels you forget that you are setting yourself up to grind.
I… I won’t play it again… *Looks at the Destiny case out of the corner of his eye, longingly*
We have been calling for a survival wave mode since launch pretty much….if they deliver on this…..oh man, I will be so so so so happy and so will plenty of others. Defend the Walls hopefully. Bring it on!
It’ll be interesting to see how it’s done. After all, they’ve had the building blocks in place for a while… every other story mission is mini-horde mode after you set your ghost to doing something, and so are the satellite public events. Something a bit more structured, Halo Firefighty isn’t a bad idea.
I’m normally not keen on those horde/wave defense type games, but the more i think about it the more awesome it could be. I’m hoping some fresh maps and environments with this new mode!
Horde can have a lot of potential to it.
Choose your enemy types, choose combinations of them, have them fight each other.
Choose your location, choose whether you just stand your ground or if you have a defensive objective, or if you have to reach a certain point, past a wall of enemies.
Choose your waves – do you culminate in a boss fight (or multiple!), or just steadily increasing waves.
Offer rewards based on how many waves you got through. Run events where you choose which side to thin out, or where to focus and have a reward based on how the community as a whole performs. Run frequent and short-term changes in the population of the worlds in the solar system based on which missions are available for guardians, and adjust enemy values based on collective performance.
Frankly, look at ANYTHING Warframe has done, and fucking steal that.
One thing playing Destiny did for me was give me a renewed appreciation for just how deep, clever, and innovative Warframe is by comparison. One of the only strengths Destiny has over it is artistically, and the sense of ‘place’ that comes from a static map instead of procedurally-generated ones. But even then, static lacks the variety offered by procedurally-generated. Shooting is fun, I guess? But it is in Warframe, too. Just different.
But almost everything Destiny does in its meta-game, Warframe does better by an order of magnitude. Classes and abilities. Cosmetic customization. Weapon/class ranking up, customizing attributes (movement, rate of fire, armour, utility, mag size, crit, damage), damage types, choice of weapon types, acquisition methods… everything Destiny does around these is not even half-assed by comparison. It’s quarter-assed at best. Warframe’s personal ship and clan dojos are functional owned spaces, rather than a cosmetic effect for your lobby/loading screen.
If Destiny could see its way to stealing even a fraction of what Warframe does, it’d be dramatically improved.
But as it is, we get developer blog posts about how difficult it is to find somewhere in the UI to put a fucking toggle-helmet button, and how difficult it is to increase bank space without breaking the last-gen platforms.
It’s like Bungie doesn’t even know what ambition is.
Well stated,
I know it’s frustrating as all hell just how good Destiny COULD be but for some reason(s) the Bungie Devs put out this blank slate of what could of been an absolutely amazing game then just abandoned what they were doing after the hardest part of the work was already done – It’s like an artist getting their paint tray filled with amazing colours then painting a straight line on a canvas and calling it a day. Whats even worse is that dataminers keep finding tonnes of unreleased content that’s been there so long its growing mould on it (not literally).
It’s like they are too afraid to release actual content – maybe afraid of overbloating the game or just simply holding out for the next installment but it just feels held back – overly restrained.
I genuinely hope the only reason is because they want the game to work the same across older platforms – but at the same time I think it sucks if it is the only reason because its overly detrimental to the games longevity.
I was talking to a friend about this the other day. Even when Warframe does someting I don’t completely agree with I can see and understand why they did it. Destiny on the other hand…
Bungie has introduced gameplay mechanics/systems seemingly for the hell of it. I have no idea how they arrived at the the choices they made or even what they are supposed to be doing. I would love to sit down with a designer at Bungie and have them explain them to me.
I love survival modes in games and I could see this perking up my interests for Destiny once again.
I just hope the new mode has matchmaking… Still haven’t been able to do a raid, because I’m a loser with only 3 others friends that play destiny
I had NO friends that played Destiny. Then I joined the Kotaku clan. Now I have new friends, from playing Destiny. 🙂
Haha woops – I haven’t checked up on that clan in ages. I think Eccentric’s been maintaining it in my laxity.
I haven’t checked the clan page in ages, but I met enough people that there’s usually someone on to jump in with if I need company/help.
Actually, it’s the KotakuAU clan. Just in case you go looking for it. 🙂
If one of these new modes is basically Firefight, then I will get waaaay more play out of it than I would have out of a new raid. I’ve played Crota maybe 2-3 times (not counting cheesing the first sections for easy weapons).
Also they’ve indicated we’ll be able to upgrade existing weapons to the new damage cap!
Ohh that makes sense…it wont be part of the season pass so they can charge ppl for the raid even if they have the season pass….very clever bungie
Yes to the un-intelligent that’s probably how this looks.
To those who are intelligent enough, you will realize that nowhere does it say anything about paying for it, also they could be talking about the new Raid coming in the comet release which was not included in the season pass and will basically double the amount of content in the game.
So it’s un-intelligent to assume they are going to charge for it? Just because a price isn’t mentioned doesn’t mean it’s not safe to assume there will be a fee involved.
I’d be clutching at straws if I was a Destiny fanboy too.
wow really, you could have made your point without the intelligent/unintelligent banter at the beginning only assholes pull crap like that!
Very disappointed that there wont be a raid at launch of the HoW. It’s great they’re adding this new mode (sounds like a survival wave mode?) but I would’ve been much happier with a raid and this mode as an added bonus. The best part of Destiny is the raids, a wave mode, while fun for a while, isn’t going to hold my attention.
The clan I play with use to always have at least 2 raid teams running 3x a week, now it’s a struggle to get a single team together. This DLC doesn’t look like it’ll change that.
That’s probably why they’re trying to move away from Raids and towards an alternative PvE end-game option. Attendance dropped hard and releasing Crota’s Raid didn’t appear to do more than a very short spike. I think they expected more from Raids. There’s not really any sort of competitive scene, a lot of people abandon them the second they have the drops they want, burnout hit players hard and fast, and Bungie seem a little blindsided by the fact people would rather find a way to cheat through the encounters to skip as much as possible instead of just having fun with the fights (while at the same time complaining the content is too short/easy).
I get the impression they though they thought Raids would be like a co-op campaign version of the infinitely replayable content they had with Halo’s multiplayer, without realising that FPS players will respond the same way that MMORPG players do when you add gear based progression and random drops. I think no matter how fun they make the Destiny Raids they’re going to struggle to hold the sort of player numbers Bungie want considering the work that goes into creating and maintaining the Raids.
A Horde mode may seem like a cop out but the open ended nature and easy content production might take the pressure to perform off the Raids. With any luck you’ll see more PvE players logged in and playing day to day which should make it easier to form a Raid group on the spot. Hopefully this conflict is just because it takes more work to implement the new mode than it does to make new content for it, and we continue to see Raids get proper attention with Arenas being filler content between DLC.
The biggest problem with Raids is replayability. It’s the same exact raid every single time. The Arena seems to be a solution to this. End game content that changes up every time you play it.
While I definitely want to see more raids in the game. I think if done well some sort of coop survival mode could could hold my interest much longer than one more raid.
Some good team based end game content that I can run with just a few friends and challenge ourselves that isn’t the same mission, strike or raid over and over sounds refreshing.
I want to love Destiny, but at this point the main attraction will be a fuller, better-realized open-world, and/or a deeper, longer, more compelling and better-told story.
For me personally it is almost the opposite. While I definitely agree on a better realised open world would be amazing. What kept me playing so long was I just enjoyed playing the game, the story got in the way for me. Replaying the missions structured around the story made them get old incredibly quick.
So I am cautiously optimistic that these new endgame modes will focus on gameplay and replayability and will be on the right track for me.
Replaying strikes got old pretty quickly too. One day I rage-quit after getting Cerberus Vae for the sixth time in a row, but even changing up to Devil’s Lair or the Archive – while feeling fresh at the time – simply resulted into slipping into old patterns again. The fact that we could only do the raid once a week (if you wanted to get anything out of it) was a great life-extending measure, but if you could reset it whenever you wanted, I think you’d quickly grow just as bored with that, too.
In the end, replayability outside of the crucible (which I barely touched initially before abandoning entirely) is some kind of distant dream that I have doubts they’ll really be able to achieve. Maybe horde mode will help? If they steal more from Warframe than they do from MMOs, they might be onto something.
Yeah I agree. I am not going to get too hopeful just yet because most systems they have implemented so far have been half baked. But the idea of not fighting the same wave of enemies at each section of the mission/strike/raid could be really good.
Like you said they should be looking to warframe for inspiration over MMO’s because it is a much closer model to theirs and works much better than theirs does.
Damn, was hoping for a new raid. Although a wave mode sounds fun, imagine taking on a bunch Archon Priests.
The last DLC had some great story missions, I hope they continue to raise the bar on the next lot.