Destiny’s The Dark Below DLC locks players out of Nightfall and Heroic strikes

With the release of Destiny's first expansion, The Dark Below, the game's community has effectively been split: those who have purchased the DLC and those who have not. Normally, this isn't a problem for most games, as people who opt not to buy the extra content can still enjoy the full base game. With Destiny, that doesn't appear to be the case as two of the game's key activities are locked behind the DLC.

Both the Weekly Nightfall and Weekly Heroic, two activities that are key to character progression because of their high-end rewards upon completion, are currently set to missions that are only available to those who have unlocked The Dark Below DLC.

Each week Bungie chooses a different strike for the Weekly Nightfall and Weekly Heroic; seeing as how today marks the release of The Dark Below, it makes sense that they'd want to highlight the new DLC strike. The problem is, Bungie doesn't have anything in place to offer players who haven't purchased the DLC, so there's nothing they can do. There's no separate Nightfall or Heroic list for those without The Dark Below. And a lot of players are pissed off because they've essentially been locked out of a key part of the game, one that has been in place since the game's launch in September.

What's more, the Weekly Nightfall and Weekly Heroic are the only activities in the game that guarantee Strange Coins as a reward; these Strange Coins are used to purchase powerful Exotic Weapons from the weekend vendor Xur. So not only does the DLC mean less things to do this week, but it also means it'll be harder to collect Strange Coins before Xur arrives this Friday.

Now an obvious fix for this would be for Bungie to offer some sort of separate vanilla strike for the Weekly Nightfall and Weekly Heroic, but so far that doesn't appear to be the developer's thought process. Over on Twitter, community manager David "Deej" Dague said the featured Heroic activities will be a mix of old and new strikes, meaning there will be other weeks where the have-nots will be locked out again.

It's not uncommon for DLC to split a playerbase, but this is the first I've seen of add-on content actually rendering portions of the original base game useless if you haven't upgraded. To Bungie's credit, they've been pretty open and willing to listen to player feedback, so there's a chance they could address this issue. Like most of Destiny's problems early on, this could be nothing more than a feature that was overlooked before launch.