When Lord Saladin told me it was time to “finish this” I was genuinely confused – I’d barely started it.īut the end of the campaign is only the start of Rise of Iron. From the start of the first mission to the end of the last, it took me a shade under three hours, and I wasn’t rushing things. Not quite so vast, though, is the main campaign. But a few minutes zooming on your Sparrow vehicle and you’re actually there, up on top of the guns, trying to disable them. The first time you enter a zone of the Plaguelands called Lord’s Watch, and see guns firing off in the distance, you think it’s a classic Bungie skybox. It’s extremely vast, a facet of the fact that this is the first Destiny expansion limited to current generation consoles (PS3 and Xbox 360 players will still be able to play Destiny, but their game world is forever frozen in September 2016). Just as 2015’s Taken King introduced players to the Dreadnaught, the floating home of Oryx, so Rise of Iron has its own new area: the Plaguelands, a section of Old Russia that’s been warped by the presence of Siva and colonised by the biohacker Fallen. Rise of Iron feels like it was built from the ground up by looking at what players actually spent their time doing. When the Fallen (that’s the alien race that has a personality, as opposed to the bug demons, the robots or the Space Marines from Warhammer 40K) reappears in a part of Earth that’s seen little combat for years, they unearth Siva, a forgotten technology that lets them reprogram their bodies, running the risk of Earth falling for good. In its place is a new, stand-alone yarn about the Lords of Iron: figures from Destiny’s prehistory whose last surviving member, Lord Saladin, is already known to fans through his association with the elite multiplayer activity, Iron Banner. The two-year-long arc that saw players follow the Hive from Earth to the Moon, descend into the Hellmouth to defeat Crota, and then fly to Saturn to take on his daddy Oryx is now over.
Rise of Iron brings Destiny into its third year, and picks up with the game’s wider story in a calm position. But what Rise of Iron, the fourth expansion to the game, reveals is that developer Bungie has only just figured out what’s going on. It’s not a tricky concept to get your head around.
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