vFour months into its existence, Destiny is a better, more frustrating, more expansive—and ultimately, expensive—game than it was at launch. It’s also very different, because after months of tweaks, it has become clearer than ever who we’re really playing against: the people who made it. The player’s greatest adversary in Destiny isn’t an alien warlord or a reanimated moon monster, it is Bungie themselves.
The Destiny of early 2015 is a notably different game from the one Bungie released last fall, and so I thought it was time to essentially re-review the game. Much has changed. Destiny has been improved, in some ways significantly. It has been expanded somewhat, though it still feels stretched thin. It has all-new levels and bosses, with all-new bugs and loopholes. And it has been thoroughly mastered by players around the world, creatively exploited in ways its creators could never have anticipated. The collective effort to creatively break Destiny down and wring it for all it’s worth has easily been the game’s most fascinating aspect.
When I reviewed Destiny back in September, I had played about 60 hours. The Vault of Glass raid was brand new, elite players were level 28 or 29, and “Crota” was just a name we sometimes heard on the moon.