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Three months is a long time in Destiny. Since the game launched, the cycle of shooting and looting has taken us around the galaxy many times and the repetition is not doing the content any favours. The bounties, dailies and weeklies have become overfamiliar, while the descent into the Vault of Glass Raid has gone from 'mythical aspiration' to 'a couple of hours on Tuesday night'. It seems contradictory to complain that a game I've spent 200 hours playing is running short of things to do, but such is the nature of MMOs: they take over your life, so they need to keep the content coming.Unfortunately, three months is not a long time in game development, so The Dark Below hasn't had much opportunity to address this. But Destiny's first expansion has a fair stab, introducing several new story missions, a Strike (two if you're on PlayStation, thanks to an exclusivity deal that runs until the back half of 2015) and a Raid, plus three multiplayer maps and a number of weapons and armour pieces. Can these things reinvigorate a game where the novelty of the content is wearing off for many players, leaving us to contemplate the emptiness of the gear grind that lies beneath?
The starting point for The Dark Below is Eris Morn, a new NPC who arrives in the Tower with news that the Hive are trying to awaken Crota, whose sword you got to play with on the Moon. Rather than sprinkling new mission icons around the galaxy map, Eris gives you fragmented tasks that resemble the original game's exotic bounties: sometimes you take on a new mission or Strike; sometimes you have to perform a sequence of tasks in different areas of the galaxy. As well as giving out quests, Eris acts as a vendor for items and materials and you need to level her up to obtain rare kit.
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