

The expansion content takes place on Earth, dashing the hopes of those hoping for new planets this time around. Or teleported? Or maybe from attacking Earth? Like most of Destiny's plot, the whys and wherefores of what's happening are vague. Swinging over to Eris put me on a path to start the story content-stopping Crota, one bad alien with a wicked sword-from being resurrected. A notification at my mailbox informed me I had received a gift from Bungie that might "be useful in the days to come." It was a pair of totally worthless blue engrams. A survivor of some tragic battle hinted at in the lore of Destiny’s main game, Morn provides you with the new story missions. The tone is set immediately after landing in The Tower (the game's vendor hub) to meet with Eris Morn. More than that, the expansion actually makes previous content meaningless or simply unavailable. What I didn't expect was for the changes to feel so wrathful, so mocking of all the effort I had already put in.


You'd expect purchasing the new content ($20 whether you buy it on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, though the latter gets more content thanks to timed exclusivity) to raise the ceiling. Perhaps the most important piece of The Dark Below is that it raises the game’s level cap. Looked at another way, the expansion renders meaningless the several hundred hours we all spent addicted to bounties, upgrading exotic weapons, and slamming into bugs. Looked at one way, Destiny's first expansion, The Dark Below, finally fixes those kinds of problems going forward, for me and many others. Instead, my inventory was filled with literally more upgrade materials than I could use. While I spent dozens of hours running that raid on both difficulties, the random number generators at Bungie never decided to grace me with the helmet or chest plate I needed. Getting to the "hard" level cap relied on random drops from the endgame raid, The Vault of Glass.
