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Talk to Bungie about Destiny and it will readily admit the game's imperfections. Speak to the Destiny's passionate fanbase and they will likely tell you many of the same gripes, only louder. Plenty played Destiny during its inaugural year and kept playing through the game's many ups and downs. Others did not. By Bungie's own metrics - three million loyal players logging on every day - the game sounded nothing short of a success. But many who tried the shared world shooter left for good, feeling burned by expectations of the vision Bungie had laid out. "Level 20 was a shelf point," Destiny: The Taken King creative director Luke Smith says to me. It's been a couple of months since our last meeting at E3 2015 and I'm at Bungie headquarters in Seattle to play through all of the new expansion on the developer's test servers. Well, all of the expansion apart from its new raid - there are still folk at Bungie yet to be allowed into that.
The Taken King arrives today, a week after Destiny's 2.0 update made sweeping changes to the game regardless of whether you shell out for its new expansion or not. Chief among 2.0's alterations was a retooling of the confusing Light system that originally gated the top third of Destiny's levels. Progression beyond level 20 meant learning the game's secondary gameplay loop: grinding old content, playing raids and hoping Bungie's random loot generator was feeling generous enough to hand over a full set of raid gear.
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