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. Or more reductively, you play as a space wizard and shoot aliens in the head to get cool new guns and make numbers go up. B y now, you know what Destiny is: a hybrid first-person shooter and massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, it throws players into a vast space opera as they fight four alien races to defend an embattled future Earth on the verge of collapse.

Destiny rise of iron campaign missions