As I'm sure many of you know, the second Expansion for Destiny, The House of Wolves came out today. There's a lot riding on this Expansion for Destiny's future. There's still a lot of people out there that feel that Destiny needs to step up its game in order to live up to its full potential and deliver on the pre-release hype.
Have I played all of House of Wolves? No, not yet. I've finished all of the missions, and I'll be upgrading this post as I finish more of the DLC.
However, given what I've played so far, I would give the House of Wolves a 9 out of 10. Check out why below (spoilers, obviously).
So let's just cut to the chase.
I'm fairly surprised with House of Wolves. I expected it to be a lot like the Dark Below in terms of content and story. At the time Dark Below came out, I thought it's narrative structure was a slight improvement over Destiny's original narrative structure and methods.
Even though HoW shares a lot of elements with DB, it's another noticeable improvement in my opinion. There's much more exposition and explanation of what's going on. Throughout the story missions there's a lot more dialogue from characters along the way giving you details about what's going on and what you're seeing. At time's the dialogue even gives some insights into the lore of Destiny, which is a nice change of pace from the Grimoire being the sole source. There's also a lot more tension and urgency throughout the missions. In short, its the first thing in Destiny that feels like an actual story. It's by no means perfect, but it is definitely much, much better than what we got in the base game, or even DB.
Just like DB, HoW uses a series of Quests to tell its story. These Quests require you to either complete story missions or do things like Patrol Venus and complete the new Strike. And this time, the non-mission Quests are actually integrated into the story, even taking place between Missions, rather than after the main story as a pointless, disconnected activity.
The story missions featured in this Expansion offer a wide variety mechanics and encounters that mix up the gameplay and actually make it interesting. Every mission isn't a copy and paste of the last one, like in the base game where (what seems like) every mission involves protecting your Ghost from wave after wave of enemies. And that's saying a lot, because unlike DB, there are a total of five new story missions. The Expansion missions feature Scorch Cannons, Heavy Pikes, trip mines, jumping puzzles, and even a trip into the Vault of Glass to fight Fallen (!!). Combined with the fact that many of the missions take you to totally new or under-used areas, there is a very nice mix of new content for these missions. All of these elements were integrated very seamlessly together and combine for a very diverse, challenging and fun gameplay experience.
There were also a number of other additions and changes that made this Expansion noticeably better than Dark Below. HoW features more new areas than DB did, not the least of which is the Reef itself. These new areas are much more expansive than the areas found in the DB missions and feel much better executed. There's also the new public event, which is also an improvement over the DB public event with the Blades of Crota and is an exciting feature that mixes up the monotony of Patrols. I also liked how the Expansion took the liberty of adding new variants of enemies. Unlike DB where every enemy is the same as ones you can find elsewhere in the game, HoW features multiple new variants of Shanks, including long-range snipers and exploders, and cosmetic variants of a few other enemies.
So far, I still haven't even attempted any of Petra's bounties, the strike, or the Prison of Elders, and there is still more to come this weekend with Trials of Osiris. But, even though I still haven't even played half of the Expansion, I am so far very pleased with it. It is a noticeable improvement over Dark Below, offers a decent amount of new content and features, and overall just seems to be better executed than Dark Below.
Overall, my final score for House of Wolves would be 9/10 and I highly recommend that anyone craving some more content to play in Destiny give it a go. It was very fun and satisfying and overall is a very good sign for Destiny's future.
(I'll be adding other posts as I complete more of House of Wolves, so check back.)
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