Banifest Destiny – Part 3: Why The House of Wolves was essential

The day the House of Wolves released, nearly one million players defeated Skolas in the final story mission. Contrastingly, fewer than 10 thousand killed him in the 35 Prison. Three weeks later, that number had risen to 378,511, as Bungie confirmed in a June update. That is still a paltry handful given Destiny’s average concurrent users, and the reason was clear: Skolas was not only absurdly difficult, but not worth the effort.

A solar burn modifier all but guaranteed Skolas’ flame cannon would one-shot players, while arc burn made the endless waves of enemies three times as deadly. On top of his laughable health pool and criss-crossing countdowns, this made Skolas insanely difficult, reliably beatable only with a trio of Gjallarhorns. This reinforced the underlying flaw in the Prison: absolute solutions. Sitting in a corner with Gjallarhorn can down every Prison boss, which overrides their otherwise interesting mechanics.

Skolas was even worse in this regard, because the stupid answer was also the best one. The inexplicable lack of a checkpoint system, which forced players into either completing a Prison in one run or losing their progress entirely, made things considerably worse. It is never a good idea to lock players into a game, which is somewhere Prison fails spectacularly. In any case, Skolas had to be nerfed, and he was.

But a reasonable difficulty level didn’t help the meager loot doled out by the Prison. All-important Etheric light was the headlining act, but the poor quality of most Queen weapons and low chance of Exotic rewards made most everything else fairly worthless. The three unique Exotics obtained via Prison-exclusive Elder Ciphers are average at best, so there really is nothing at the finish line. The option to buy specific pieces of gear from Variks is nice, but it wasn’t enough. The Prison was, and still is, all stick and no carrot, unlike raids. As a result, it quickly fell by the wayside. After the novelty of new content wore off, it was rightly deemed a poor, repetitive source of loot.

Bring out your dead

Intension really is the word for the House of Wolves as a whole. Even with equipment and upgrading, it looks inward to refine and reinvigorate instead of overwriting with new systems. Rather than repeat the broken Radiant/Ascendant system, it introduced the Ascension mechanic, letting players bring any gear up to speed—that is to say, to Light Level 34.

Ascension ushered in an age of 365-Attack Fatebringers and Vision of Confluences, and of maxed Vault and Crota gear. It blew end-game loadouts wide open, letting players choose their gear based on what they liked rather than how much Light it gave them. Just as importantly, unlike the original Exotic upgrading system, it did so without erasing experience. In this, it was a precursor to the upcoming Infuse mechanic, which will be added in The Taken King.

The House of Wolves also added gear of its own: an arsenal of Queen weapons so pink you’d think it came from Borderlands, and a suite of Prison of Elders armor so spiky you’d think it came from RAGE. Unfortunately for this new gear, it arrived alongside the return of Fatebringer and Vision of Confluence and so on. And, well, they just don’t make ‘em like they used to, so most of the new stuff never saw the light of play. This illustrates an unintended side effect of Ascension: obviating new gear. I suspect this is why Bungie will only allow Year Two equipment to be Infused, lest everyone hang onto their antiques once again.

Reforging House of Wolves weapons was another welcomed addition, simply because it ensured quality skill rolls on weapons. It also made the Gunsmith considerably more valuable as a vendor, and weapon parts as a material. But like Ascension, it was double-edged. Many reforged weapons proved to be overpowered in Crucible, which is something we’ll examine in-depth next week.

The Gunsmith also benefited from the addition of experience-boosting weapon Telemetries to his inventory, which led the House of Wolves’ raft of quality of life improvements. Equipment upgrading was made less material-intensive, faction Commendations were ditched as the arbitrary limiter that they were, and Heroics and Nightfalls started offering different Strikes. That’s to say nothing of the Speaker’s aforementioned exchange system, which smoothed over the Ascendant/Radiant debacle. It was patchwork—long-awaited patchwork, no less—but it worked. The opening of the Reef, a new hub, made these all the more refreshing.

With the introduction of these features, Destiny became more accessible and streamlined, and, in the grand scheme of things, more fun. Why weren’t these features implemented on day one? You’ve got me. They seem so obvious now, and looking at many longstanding MMOs and RPGs, they should have been obvious before Destiny was even finished.

Bungie has admitted they don’t have a detailed road map for Destiny. The studio is totally new to MMO-esque design, and the entire industry is new to Destiny. Naturally, there have been some speed bumps along the way. But the core product has stayed fun, and it has gotten better. That doesn’t excuse its blunders, but it does make its future worth looking forward to.

By the way, the Crucible is up next. Most of my Destiny play time has been spent in PvP, so its dedicated installment will be a doozy. Trials of Osiris, waves of weapon imbalances, disproportionate rewards and more inbound.

Editor's Note: The following is a continuation of GameZone's "Banifest Destiny," an in-depth analysis of the year-long journey of Destiny, how it came to become the game it is today, and what to expect with the release of The Taken King as we move into Year Two. You can read Part 1 of the series, which analyzes Destiny's pre-release and launch woes, here. Part 2, which focuses on The Dark Below's failed attempt at righting the sinking ship, can be found here.

The phrase “one step forward, two steps back” is often used to describe problems. You don’t need that one step back; it just makes things more painful. Even so, things get better as long as you keep taking those steps forward. It’s only when you also take two steps back that things get really hairy, because then you’re just stagnating, repeating the same tired mistakes And as we discussed in Part 2 of this column, Destiny’s The Dark Below expansion was, at the very least, two steps back. So it was with a heightened but familiar sense of urgency that The House of Wolves made its debut.

Destiny’s expansions have always been reactive, viewed as a way to fix it rather than properly expand it, but a blunder from the Wolves could have been the death knell for the game. Players already had a bad taste in their mouths after trudging through a bird cage of vanilla content and the slim pickings of The Dark Below, treading hastily released patches all the while. Another failure could cull the player count considerably. The House of Wolves had to be a knockout, for its own merit and that of the Destiny experience Bungie and Activision are hell-bent on pushing. It had to be more than just two steps forward. Thankfully, it was.

Back to basics

Destiny has a lot of problems, and The Dark Below plays like an itemized list of them. At the top of that list are the game’s half-hearted dalliances with storytelling, which Eris’ grandstanding whispers didn’t help. The game just doesn’t have any likeable characters; they’re all about as approachable as wet cats. At least, it didn’t until Petra Venj and Variks, the full-time side characters of the House of Wolves, came along.

The fact that two side characters beat out every single character before them would usually be a problem. After all, if you don’t like the protagonist of a book, you don’t like that book. But for Destiny, Petra and Variks were a good thing, because they proved how Destiny's characters should be treated: with personality.

You could wring the Speaker dry over a funnel and not collect an ounce of levity. I can’t even describe him. There’s nothing to him; he’s a dude in a mask. With the advent of the House of Wolves and the introduction of material exchanging, he became a vending machine in a mask. But Petra Venj, the Awoken Queen’s confidant and the Reef’s bounty coordinator, is a genuine person. She’s a vicious and upbeat partner for the Wolves’ campaign missions, contributing useful context to your adventures as well as genuine laughter—a first for Destiny. She talks to you, not at you, so it’s actually fun to listen to her. Who would have thought?

Variks, too, is a great character, but for different reasons. His broken speech is endearing, certainly, but it’s his Fallen origins that make him intriguing. His existence alone does more for the credibility of the four tribes of the Darkness (Vex, Fallen, Hive and Cabal) than all the pre-rendered trailers in the world could hope to. He abandoned the Fallen to escape infighting, instead siding with the Awoken queen. That’s infinitely more engaging than some hum-drum good-against-evil spiel, and paints a different, more involved picture of the Fallen and their apparent Houses. It also means the Awoken get to be more than the blue people that showed up in two cutscenes.

This is echoed by several of the House of Wolves’ story missions, the most prominent being your return to the Vault of Glass. Hot on the heels of a squad of Wolves, you wind up blasting Oracles to stop the Fallen from claiming Vex technology. The scene is bonkers: you, a Guardian, defending Vex creations that you destroyed in countless past raids. The wrongness of it is palpable. It’s also brilliant.

It’s the best mission in the game, in fact, because it meaningfully retreads existing areas and concepts in order to flesh them out. Like the expansion itself, it grows by intension, by delving into rather than tacking on. The Dark Below added yet more unexplored backstory to the pile, but The House of Wolves shows that there’s actually something going on in Fallen Houses and in Vex minds. And it does so by letting you play it. Characters with character and stories in story mode: those are two solid steps forward.

Prison of Elders

It’s only fitting, then, that the House of Wolves’ PvE addition, the Prison of Elders, stem from longstanding lore. Indeed, the Prison was first discussed in a vanilla strike. Remember that Archon Priest? It’s his old apartment.

The Prison blends arena and horde combat with specific objectives like destroying or disabling key targets, all of which is woven into Destiny’s weekly reset. This led to a variable list of activities. Playing up to three different Prison configurations (between the Light Level 32, 34 and 35 difficulties) each week added quite a lot to the weekly routine, something a traditional raid couldn’t have done. They’re significantly smaller on their own, but together the six different Prisons are well worth a single raid of content. They are also much easier to rearrange, meaning new Prisons could easily be added in future expansions.

Its diversity is also the Prison’s weakness, if only in the sense that it proved to be its most underused aspect. For all its variables, roughly half of the Prison plays like existing Strikes—simple, easily solved encounters. Many bosses are just piles of health, requiring torrents of bullets rather than any degree of strategy. Most of them can be defeated by simply hiding in a corner and slugging away. Variables like elemental burns created problems of their own, which were never more obvious than in the LL35 Prison featuring Skolas.

Read on for more on the Prison of Elders, and the relief of the Wolves' many new features.