Played Witcher 3 through the afternoon until I got a little tired of wandering cluelessly around the world, threw House of Wolves in and immediately had more fun doing the new story quests and the matchmade Prison of Elders variant than I'd had in the previous few hours. What a great boost of energy to the game, great rewards, great challenges, several new ideas and even bringing pieces of Vault of Glass into regular content.

edit: Apologize for opening with what seems like a bash on Witcher, it's going to take me a while to get fully involved in that one from what I can tell whereas House of Wolves is an expansion on a game i've already willing sunk a ton of time into repeating the same content, so it is doubly exciting to have new content and to have it be as fun as it is.

I play solo but I imagine anyone with a regular group now has no real reason to mess with anything else, even Patrol is profoundly meaningful now between the Queen's Bounties and need for Keys to get the most out of Prison of Elders. Plus regular groups are needed to access the higher level PoE content. Maybe it's about time I gave up on Destiny as my podcast game and got a little more cooperative...

I'll be jumping into Wolves this weekend, but I'm honestly looking forward to more Destiny. I sunk a lot of time in the game, but not to the point of insanity. I made sure to only have one character instead of maxing out 3 (like a crazy person), so it didn't get too old.

I think it's so cool we can now upgrade literally anything to max stats, though.

Is the expansion only worth it if you've reached the level cap? (I'm at 24 at the moment)

@thenine: It should actually make it easier for you to level as new regular legendary gear should be able to get you to 32.

@thenine: All the story missions are level 26 at their base and the matchmade Pillars of Eternity is level 28. If you smashed out bounties and Vanguard strike playlists you could buy the new armor from the Vanguard vendors and hit at least level 30 in just a day or two, though.

@nodima: @solidwolf52:

Thanks, think I'll give it a go.

I'm not entirely sure I get how Prison of Elders works.

I got a key after finishing one of the last story missions, then (i think) used that key in the treasure room in PoE? Do I need to get another?

@ottoman673: You have a chance at getting a treasure key as a drop in the PoE or from the Ether chests from the pack of wolves events. You need a key to open the big chest at the end of PoE. You do not need a key to get the armor or weapon core drops, those are on the typical weekly reset i believe.

Yes, House of Wolves is cool so far. I've wrapped my story missions and nightfall up for the week, about to jump into Prison of Elders today, very excited to try it out.

I'm kinda excited about the new stuff in House of Wolves, but it's come out at a terrible time. Witcher 3 just out and I'm still knee-deep in Mortal Kombat X and Bloodborne... I'm just not sure that I'm going to get around to it any time soon! I'd like to but there's just so many other games on my radar right now. Maybe once things die down a bit.

The level 28 matchmade prison of elders thing is really boring. I just slept walk through the whole thing twice and I don't ever want to do it again. Lvl 32 and 34 things are alright. It's really shitty we got that instead of a raid though since it's 90% recycled stuff from the lvl 28 mode but harder with a boss that has one unique mechanic at the end. Real bummer.

If I was only into PvE I would be REALLY bummed out by this expansion but I guess that's a thing you can say about any part of destiny. Fortunately trials of osiris seems really cool and will probably justify my purchase.

In the end, this expansion suffers from the same problem as the original game. It's just starved for content. From what I can tell there is 3 types of objectives in the prison of elders. THREE. And they're not complicated objectives at all. It's a ''kill that dude before he gets there kinda like events in patrols'', ''capture these points before they blow up'' and ''destroy these things before they blow up''. Dead simple stuff. You go through that thing a few times and already seen them all. Trials is also not what you'd call ''content rich''. It's an exciting new multiplayer mode with stakes but there is very little complicated new mechanics in there. It's the kind of thing a good mod team could've put together no problem or the kind of thing that would've been released for free just a few years ago.

Even 80% of story missions take place in old environment. To tell you the truth it didn't bother me since the enemy encounters were alright and who gives a shit about story missions anyway. But when all the other stuff is so thin and so stretched I just have to ask: what the fuck?

That new sidearm is dope.

I don't have House of Wolves but I noticed running around on the moom there are new enemies and then at some point a key countdown timer appeared. I think I'm supposed to find chest somewhere? Would that have anything I can use.

I have to agree. I really was not having much fun with Destiny after buying it last week on sale. After yesterday's patch, progression from 20 to the relevant and fun levels seems much, MUCH faster, and the new strikes and story missions are a lot better than all of the strikes and story missions that came before. This is what the whole game should have been more like.

@jaycrockett: nothing important if don't have HoW. You get ammo, blue engrams and the rare chance to get a treasure key you can only use in HoW.

To acknowledge the possibility that this sentiment is true is to deny my values and beliefs as a member of the Undestined, or Those With No Path Before Them. As a devout convert, on behalf of my religion and my people, I therefore must decry this opinion as "bologna". May Happenstance have mercy on your soul. Destiny sucks, forever and ever, amen.

I'm really curious how easy it is to go from 20 to 30+ now. I see some people have mentioned it already, but I guess it'll be a few more days to really get a feel for that. I stopped playing before the first expansion and only got to like 21 or 22. I still like the look and feel of the game, and I already paid for the content *sigh*, so if I can jump back in and get up to a reasonable level in a weekend that'd be great.

Maybe this is a dumb question to ask cause it's destiny, but what is the general story for this expansion? I know the last one was about trying to kill that one hive guy. What's this new one about?

@original_hank: you try to capture the one fallen guy. So yeah,

destiny.

The Fallen under The Queen of the reef's rule have betrayed her and she is sending guardians after them. You take missions/bounties from Petra Venj of the Queen's Guard, primarily about tracking The Fallen Wolves' leader, Skolas. You also regularly hear from one of the only (if not the only?) Fallen to remain loyal, Variks. The story might actually be the best stuff in the game by Destiny's standards. Petra is a really likeable character, as is Variks, and Skolas is an enemy that you get to know a little better than your regular Destiny target thanks to Variks translating his chatter for you.

I've been really enjoying the new content, it's faaaaaar better than The Dark Below.

Sweet, can't wait for the live quick look in 9 minutes.

@original_hank There was a war called the Reef War between the Awoken and the Fallen House of Wolves. The Awoken won with the help from their allies, the Nine, (Xur is part of it) and offered "mercy" to the surviving members of the House of Wolves by allowing them to live with them in Reef and serve under the Queen. I believe this also included capturing and imprisoning their Archon and now the House of Wolves have started a rebellion and freed the Archon from the Prison of Elders. The Queen opens the Reef to the Guardians to help capture / kill the House of Wolves and their Archon. That is the gist of it, I think. I could be wrong.

I think this DLC is pretty good. You can get some nice drops from the chest in the Prison of Elders. I got an exotic weapon and it seems other people are too, but I'm not positive if it's guaranteed or how often it can happen. The story missions are okay. It took, maybe, 2 hours to finish. The PvP stuff is something I don't care about because I only do matchmaking and it requires you to make your own fireteam with two other people. The other changes to how gear upgrades, etc. are nice changes but that feels like more of a patch than new content.

Overall I think it's pretty cool but I disagree with the stuff I have seen on reddit and other sources where people are losing their minds over the new content, saying that this DLC completely changes the experience of Destiny. It still feels kind of like the same to me. You're still running through some of the same areas. The story quests are definitely better than The Dark Below and there were 2 missions in this DLC that are probably my favorite in the entire game now. Either way, if you thought Destiny was boring as hell then you're probably not going to, suddenly, love it.

The new Strike...well it took me a few minutes to even realize I was in a strike when I played it. I wasn't paying attention and thought I had just started the next mission. It's pretty easy but it's not a bad addition. I'm not bothered by the lack of a Raid since I haven't ever been able to do one because I don't have enough friends playing Destiny.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I'd really love to see a DLC focused on strikes. Something like 10-15 new strikes in the rotation would be great. That's my favorite content in this game. Rumor has it the next big thing is Jupiter. Jupiter is mentioned in this DLC too.

Edit: About new gear...remember having to get shards and whatever to upgrade weapon damage and armor defense? The new HoW gear is literally just upgrading the perks. The defense and weapon damage is already maxed, as far as I have seen, and you are only using the shards on your old gear. Your old purples can be ascended so that they are in line with the new gear stats. They did this so that there is some diversity in the gear everyone is using. The Vanguard, Crucible, and Faction stuff all jumped to HoW stats. I think this means you can hit 32 or 33 pretty easily if you have currency for that stuff banked. Prison of Elders gear seems to be better than the normal HoW purples. Not sure why exactly, but that does give some incentive to play around a bit in PoE. Actually, that gear requires you to have armor and weapon cores that are locked (this is the only way to get cores, I think) behind the non-matchmaking instances of Prison of Elders so that is probably why they are a bit better.

Tried Trials of Osiris last night - definitely thought my group and I would be alright since we have high level gear. But it looked like the majority of players were minimum light 34, thus higher armor and harder to kill. We got stomped. It's a fun mode but I'm not sure how much we'll play.

There were some really thrilling moments, though. Having a single life, but being able to revive, really gets the blood pumping.

I really love the Trials of Osiris mode, although I play a lot of Crucible so that's probably to be expected.

The whole last man standing thing makes for some incredibly epic games with clutch moments, especially when there's gear on the line. Finally getting my 9-0 flawless run felt fucking fantastic. My squad was so elated, and walking into that Mercury area was a great fist pump moment that I'll remember for a long time.

There's definitely still life left in this old decrepit Destiny girl yet.

I'm super confused about this opinion. I stopped playing in December, literally the week the expansion came out. I spent 3-4 hours doing expansion content (even though I blew through the "story" missions in less than an hour) and I realized Bungie wasn't even trying anymore. I just came back this week to try the new expansion because whatever, I owned the content anyway. So now, after playing the new content for about 4 hours I'm level 31 and I feel like I saw about 30 minutes of actual new content. Hearing how people talk about Destiny and the expansion you would think they released something akin to Burning Crusade for World of Warcraft :|

So, I'm confused about why people think the new expansion is amazing...because honestly, I heard a bunch of people say the same about the last expansion (only for them to complain about that expansion now). I mean...what does Bungie do all day? They have 1 IP/1 game to work on (though we all know they are working on "Destiny 2", no significant content has been released since launch... Destiny 2 could be released tomorrow with the same mistakes and depth of content that the first had and people would like it just the same. I'm just legitimately confused because normally I understand people's opinions on this stuff even when I disagree but Destiny is the first time that's not the case.

I did get more loot, but not as drops...only rewards for doing the whole story, finishing prison of elders, and leveling Vanguard again. I got plenty of blue drops...like an insane amount, but that's irrelevant for my character and has been since like October.

Also, isn't this expansion $15 normally? Really disappointing when I'm pretty sure that all of this content was probably supposed to be in the full game originally :|

@sammo21: I think it is $20 actually...

I'm loving the new stuff, I wouldn't go so far to say its "amazing" but I played the hell out of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, and that is basically what Prison of Elders brings to the table. Also, if you aren't into pvp, then yeah this expansion gets cut in half for you with no desire to play Trials of Osiris. However, Trials is a lot of fun and really nerve wracking if you have a good crew.

As far as more rare blue drops, yes there's more and I don't need them. But I've also decoded a few of them into legendaries, which happened ONCE prior to this expansion.

@nickhead said:

Yeah, this actually happened to me too. Before the new DLC, it had happened twice before out of the hundreds of blue engrams I have probably decoded across 3 characters. And this was when the game first released before they adjusted anything with engrams and RNG. I managed to get a Proxima Centauri II scout rifle (still one of my favorite guns, when I get some etheric light, this one is getting ascended post haste) and Invisible Hand M7 shotgun. Both carried me through a lot of early game content. Then nothing for a long time. Even legendary engrams were just giving me shards or energy.

Then, this dlc hits and I decode 3 blue engrams into legendary gear. New legendary FWC boots, an auto rifle (can't reember what it's called atm) and a Zero Point LOTP scout rifle, which I rerolled to get better perks - explosive rounds, triple tap and hidden hand. My RNG has been much better since the dlc released. I may reroll it again to see if I can get full auto and firefly. But I don't want to waste my motes either.

Well my RNG has been better for the most part, besides getting a No Land Beyond from my PoE chest. It's a weird exotic, don't know if it's worth the slot yet, especially with how much I love my Invective...

I imagine for people that really liked Destiny all along, this is more of that. For those that never liked it or fell off for various reasons, Bungie isn't making any radical changes that will help bring those people back. I agree with Jeff's comments on the latest Bombcast that they are being really stubborn towards community feedback in a really weird way. As a person that fell off that game in a very major way with mixed feelings of exhaustion and resentment, the changes that Bungie keep implementing exacerbate the issues that led me to quit in the first place. Things such as DLC's that invalidate your past efforts and continuing to introduce new treadmills in the form of even more arbitrary currencies and materials.

Yeah, that's been kinda bizarre. There are 3 changes that seem relatively simple that would go a ways toward making the game better for me: add matchmaking to everything, increase loot variety, and add a goddamn in-game codex. The first two they seem to be doing to some degree as they update the game, but that last one, sheesh.

Reading @ninjaparttime talk about the story almost makes me mad. For fuck's sake Bungie, I'm not gonna to log in to your website to piece together the story.

@humanity said:

Yeah the currency thing is ridiculous. I have three separate currencies (token or flight, judgment and another one) that I can’t even use until I level up the PoE vendor dude. I mean, I was all excited that I got a token for a new cape, and I can’t use it until I grind PoE. Thank goodness I like the Prison of Elders stuff, because if I didn’t I would not want to play it and those currencies would be absolutely useless. Also, shards and energies are pretty much pointless at this point. People are converting them to motes and then rerolling guns for better perks or buying exotic engrams from Xur, hoping to get one of the new exotic armor pieces. The new exotic weapons are all only available from bounties that randomly drop on boss kills in level 34 and 35 Prison of Elders matches.

Holy crap, that was quite possibly the geekiest paragraph I have ever written, and I ran a Sailor Galaxia fansite in the late 90s.

Anyway, that grindy part of it is no fun to me. I am resigned to the fact that I will probably never get much beyond level 32-33. I just don’t have the time or the inclination to grind for the new stuff to upgrade armor (etheric light) especially when that’s gated behind relatively high end content that requires specific exotic weapons to complete. So if you haven't had much luck with RNG, TFB I guess.

Destiny - the only love / hate relationship I can tolerate at the moment. :D

@theht: Don't worry none of the codex really explains anything anyway. Just like their naming conventions for all items - its weird, esoteric anecdotes and half-explanations. In a way it sort of makes me like the universe more though. More mysterious I guess?

I know, I'm a thrall to Bungie at this point.

@theht:Don't worry none of the lore is that clear on their website either. I logged in at one point, because I wanted to make a clan and all that stuff controls through the website (and barely shows up in game) and looked through the cards. All the cars are just as unclear and pointless. It's been a while but the Queens card was something like "a mysterious queen, no one knows her true origins" or something to that effect. So just like @nickhead said, you don't learn anything more than you do from playing the game.

@jadegl: See the thing about shards being useless now is something that bothers me to no end. I spent weeks farming shards with my group by doing raids, weekly and daily missions, all in hope that I even get a shard in a drop so I can upgrade my stuff. I never got the first DLC so I don't even know how that stuff works, but it sucks that the moment Below DLC dropped my entire Vault of Glass set became obsolete. In a way it always was though, because that Raid gear never really had especially great perks on it for the regular game, it was mostly raid-specific bonuses. Maybe they changed that too.

Either way I don't care much. It was a fun game to play with friends, but at some point I felt like Bungie was striving to set me back as much as they could so I had to grind a little more with each update - and that became to much, not to mention all the DLC stuff I mentioned above that made me feel like I basically wasted a lot of time. And it was practically wasted, because after the first 2-3 times I did the raid, everything else was just boring repetition hoping for that final helmet drop. A drop that within one DLC pack became pointless.

I am convinced that all the core assets of these "expansions" have been finished in advance. I do not think Bungie has done any additional asset generation or animation. I would guess that there is a very small live team with a limited mandate, while the rest of the studio is working on the sequel.

The "support" for Destiny post release has been either shocking or hilarious depending on your tolerance for bullshit.

@nickhead: If they put out a stand-alone version of ME3 multiplayer on current gen consoles and sold it for $15-20, maybe adding new maps and stuff, I would probably drop Destiny completely.

The Bombcast nailed a lot of things, in my opinion. It feels like they are rewarding part of their community and shunning the rest. It sucks if you don't have friends who play this and miss out on a good bit of the content. On the other hand, matching making is so damn awful, like Brad said, and isn't really a good alternative. This is on PS4, so I don't know if it's any better on Xbox One..but almost every other game I get into is complete garbage. There is almost always someone just standing around at the start or people rage quitting (presumably) after one defeat. I even had someone send me a colorful message the other day because I got 3 different legendary items at the end of a strike. As if that is anything within my control. Yet, I've been playing the early bounty stuff since a few days before official release and continue to and still haven't found a single Key for PoE.

I'll continue with it until I can't stand it anymore, so if anyone wants to friend me and group up for whatever just send me a friend invite. PSN:Tripaholic

@ninjaparttime: I also don't understand the "no matchmaking" aspect of Destiny. Brad makes it out that getting randoms is objectively bad...it is not, and I would bet money the vast majority of people who had raided, do nightfalls, etc do it through sites like DestinyLFG. Some people may have a bad time or two, but I consistently raided for months using only DestinyLFG and came out perfectly fine.

I need to get in on those Destiny team up sites. My fps friends dropped Destiny pretty fast, for totally understandable reasons, but I'd like to see at least the raids. I'm having a fun-ish time getting back into the swing of things though. I just got an exotic bounty, so I guess that's cool?

@sammo21: I've had great success with LFG also. In fact, it is essential for me and a buddy because normally we don't even have a group of 3. It may seem small, but the people willing to go to the LFG site and join random players kind of shows a bit more dedication than someone just "messing around" in matchmaking.

I totally see both sides of the issue, and just don't know if there's a definitive answer to it. Personally, the current format has caused no issue with me enjoying any of the game's content.

@ninjaparttime: have you given warframe a try?

@sammo21 Sorry, I forgot Brad said both LFG and in-game matchmaking were terrible. In-game matchmaking really is awful and what @nickhead is saying about dedication actually makes a lot of sense because I get the general feeling that the majority of people I get matched with don't really care about what they're doing. I'll definitely give LFG a shot. Thanks duders. Have either of you used the reddit fireteam one? I've heard a lot of good things about that one, too, and it was recently promoted by Bungie on one of their weekly update things. Edit: Wow, nevermind. Fireteams is dead in comparison to LFG.

@ripelivejam I have and I've been meaning to go back to it to check out the changes but I always forget to.

Need Some "friends" to play some house of wolfs my psn name is : soulcakegiantbom
feel free to add me i am on ps4.

I have enjoyed house of wolves! I am new to the game, but I have friends who just absolutely rips! I look forward to gearing up! check out these clips from Shipit9, he earned Flawless is ToO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqbb6hiVALY - team kill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkTX4Wa62Rg - montage of the Flawless run!

Great Expansion!

I love how in 30 minutes I jumped from level 28-32. My 5 months of not playing has hurt me none. Enjoying the hell out of PoE.