During a livestream today, Bungie shared a bunch of new information on the upcoming second expansion pack for Destiny, a video game named after a Calvin Klein fragrance. Although House of Wolves might not have a raid, it will bring along a few new features that Destiny needed really badly.
The most important news: you’ll be able to upgrade any legendary or exotic weapon or armour piece to the highest level possible, thanks to a new upgrade path that Bungie’s calling “Ascend.”
Check it out:
Ascending a weapon takes it up to 365 Attack, while ascending a piece of armour will bump it up to max light and armour value. And you’ll get to keep all the perks and upgrades you’ve already unlocked — no more grinding weapon levels over and over again like you had to do when The Dark Below came out. Bungie’s learned from their mistakes for this one.
To reiterate, you’ll be able to upgrade any purple or orange gear, which solves a ton of Destiny’s biggest problems. For one, you won’t be limited just to the highest-end gear if you want to hit max level — all that old armour you found in the Vault of Glass and Crota’s End will now actually be worth keeping around. And you won’t have to worry about which of your exotic pieces is vanilla and which got an upgrade in the first expansion.
We still don’t know what Etheric Light is or how we’ll get it, but it appears that exotic weapons will instead require Exotic Shards for a proper upgrade. No Xur necessary.
(Yes, you’ll be able to upgrade the Vex Mythoclast. Joy of joys.)
On top of all this, Bungie’s also adding an option for more hardcore players called Reforge. Check it out:
In other words, you’ll be able to reroll the randomised perks on any new weapon until you’re happy with the ones it’s got. Like ascend, this new reforge feature will require resources you’ve probably been hoarding for months now, like glimmer and motes of light. (Seems like you can only reforge new House of Wolves weapons, though.)
During the stream, Bungie also walked us through the new social space, called The Reef, which will work like the Tower in some ways (with vault access and a bounty tracker bot) but will also introduce new vendors for Queen’s Wrath bounties and House of Judgment gear, both new to the expansion. (We saw Queen’s Wrath bounties late last year for a week or so, but we haven’t seen them since. They will be totally new this time around.)
Over at the Tower, the Speaker will now serve as a dump for all your old materials — you’ll be able to exchange ascendant shards and energy for glimmer and motes of light, for example.
Bungie says they will elaborate more on the big new activities — called the Trials of Osiris and the Prison of Elders — in future livestreams over the next few weeks.
House of Wolves will be out on May 19. You can watch the whole archived stream here.
Comments
26 responses to “House Of Wolves Will Change Destiny In Some Huge (Possibly Great) Ways”
Crazy idea but I really think they should be making this free in the same way they did for all of Titanfall’s DLC when they realised it was dying/ dead.
Lots of people enjoyed Destiny for a little while but the way it slowly burnt players out meant that a lot of people seem to have a really sour taste in their mouths by the time they stopped playing.
If the new changes actually make the game a far better product then they should be rolling them out for free and hoping that the increased goodwill towards the game makes new players come onboard to enjoy it the way the game was originally intended. Very few players are going to be excited for Destiny 2 if they don’t ever go back to the first game.
The stuff like the weapon and armour upgrades are free to anyone without the DLC, it’ll just be the new missions and strikes that they won’t be able to access as far as I’m aware
destiny is not dead or dying. There is still a huge player base so why would they give it away for free?
Well, at least they’re listening. The big things though will be the extra gameplay. That needs to be substantial until the raid comes along and then until Comet hits, hopefully in/before September
They teased another “raid-tier activity” they’ll announce in a few weeks… I’m not so sure there will be an actual raid with this expansion. Seems after the reception to CE, they’re trying to broaden the gameplay options a bit – can’t say I blame them. The weekly changing of the PoE might mix things up a bit, add to the longevity.
Another “raid-tier activity” and another $20, most likely…
I expect weekly “changing” of the Prison of Elders will just mean cycling it between 3 or 4 preset maps.
Yes, I’m a cynic.
Yeah sick, cant wait for a new corridor to run down and two lines of dialogue. Take my money.
Woohoo!
This is very sensible. I look forward to a 365 attack Vision Of Confluence. That’ll deal with those horrid Nightfall solar shanks…
If I hadn’t already bought the expansion pass (included in the Ghost edition), there is no way I would get this. Even though I own the expansion pass, I’m not even sure I’ll bother.
Upping the damage on weapons is useless when there’s so much scaling/normalisation/whatever the hell they’re doing that results in a level 29 character with appropriately leveled gear doing such pathetic damage to a level 8 enemy.
If the levels were switched, you wouldn’t even be able to do damage to the level 29 enemy. 🙁
Oh, don’t mind him – that vandal is widely known to have buggy health. As a 32, it took 7 Gjallarhorns and a full 6-shell shotgun clip to take him down. Contrast with two shotgun shells to take down a level 26 praetorian (from full health and shields) on Venus at the same level, same gear. A fallen vandal major in another area, who isn’t bugged. For clarity.
Yes, I know that’s an odd case (but is it really not even fixed after 6 months?), but take any level 8 enemy, and they could conceivably kill a level 30 player in a handful of shots, whereas a level 8 player could do nothing against a level 30 enemy.
I never really felt like I became powerful in Destiny.
The damage scaling is so a higher leveled player can play with his lower level friends and not completely steam-role through everything so easily.
It’s still far easier being a high leveled player doing low(er) leveled missions though.
It wouldn’t make sense the other way around, having a low leveled player jump in with a high level friend to help out.
I’m fairly certain other games (I want to say Borderlands did it?) have scaled player damage/health based on the host’s level, for exactly this reason.
I prefer not being invincible when I run bounties – god mode is boring, that’s why it’s classically a cheat code, not a game mode.
You never became powerful? Don’t know about you, but my hand cannon rips heads off every red-bar enemy at or below my level in one shot. I have weapons that can disintegrate, incinerate, vaporise or blow up anything in my path. My warlock can slap something and have it, and every enemy nearby, explode in purple light or an orange inferno; I can raise from the dead and lay waste to everything around me with miniature suns. The hive majors under the Steppes that killed me a few times early on, who I couldn’t even scratch? I routinely obliterate them every few days to fill a bounty, without a care in the world.
My only gripe with the progression is that there is literally no difference between fighting something that is four levels below me, and something that’s thirty levels below me – same damage either direction, same rewards in terms of glimmer and XP… but that just means levelling up expands my options, rather than just exchanging a 10-20 area for a 20-30 area like most MMOs.
I’m not asking to be invincible, I just wanted to feel like my character had become stronger.
I wanted to go back to the starting area, and watch my shield go down by 5% each shot, rather than 50%.
I have 10 times as much defense as when I started, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
Apologies for the reductio ad absurdum, but I feel that having that much difference would suck the fun out of replaying those areas – what’s the difference between invincibility and it taking that many hits to kill you when you can kill anything in 1-2 shots? There aren’t enough enemies on the map to take you out either way (unless there’s a phalanx to knock you into a wall, I guess).
The shield goes down the same way, true, but from what I can tell, your health below the shield (ie. that final third) seems to go down much more slowly as you level up – I certainly feel like I can take more hits when on patrol as a 32 than I could at level 10. But that might just be my imagination, and I’m getting hit less because everything dies that much faster – last time I was below level 27 was the 10-12 hours I spent in January levelling a titan… and he was (and still is) a bit of a tank; too many variables to say for certain.
Actually I believe that they did fix Randall at one point and heaps of people complained on reddit about missing out on the novelty of him so they changed him back to his godlike nature. The link to the petition is here https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2moy2c/petition_update_the_sidebar_to_read_x_guardians/
That’s randal the vandal.. Don’t mind him.. He’s special and in no way represents the garden variety enemy of that level.
“He on your little list?”
“He can’t be. I don’t know his name.”
“What’s your name?”
“Randal.”
“Thank you” *stab*
…
“You’re learning.”
I thought exotics were yellow not orange.
Great new systems, too bad there isn’t actually going to be much new CONTENT to use it with. 😐
Don’t care. I had my fun with destiny. Now i will not be returning. Their pathetic attempt to milk money out of me with DLC will not happen. The base game was fun for about 2 weeks, before the grinding, idiotic game play decisions and lack of a cohesive narrative got to me. I hope this game fizzles out and bungie and activision learn their lesson on how to make an engaging game with a story that is more then i can’t tell you why I can’t tell you.
It’s a bit too late for Destiny (although I might argue that it’s already fizzled out), as it sold ridiculously well, but I expect the sales of Destiny 2 will be considerably lower (the same goes for this Comet expansion, assuming it’s true).
Destiny: “Hey you, how’ve you been”
Me “Ou, uh hi, good thanks”
D: “I thought you might like to meet up”
M: “No, we broke up remember”
D: “Yeah but things are different now, I’ve changed”
M: “You mean like all the other times?”
D: “I’m not lying…..this time”
M: “Look, I’m glad you think your getting your shit together, but even if you’re telling the truth, we are done”
D: “Don’t be like that, remember how much fun we had?”
M: “Have you forgotten how you blamed me for your problems? Or how you asked me to forget your lies but believe everything after that?”
WHY IS DESTINY MY EX GIRLFRIEND?!?!
‘Learning from mistakes’ should be Destiny’s sub-title. I wouldn’t really mind if the mistakes they made hadn’t been so mind-bogglingly obvious; e.g. engrams originally having a chance to decode to a *lower* colour to add an element of excitement. Feeling dicked around and feeling excited are very different things. The list got too long for me some time ago, but I hope those people still playing get value from this. Have fun, guys.
love how they have added the ability to upgrade purple gear after everyone has already trashed all their purple pre-expansion 1 gear. sigh.