Destiny: The Taken King’s new enemies are going to ‘change the way you fight’

If there’s one thing that Destiny excels at, it’s the various enemy types within the game. On the higher levels, Hive, Fallen and Cabal forces feel like deadly opponents, each with their own slice of variety to set them apart.

With The Taken King expansion however, those enemies are making a return with some fly new killer moves. Having been warped and corrupted by Oryx, the Taken forces are a mix-up of new moves and skills. Which you may not see at first.

“On a surface level, if you squint, you can say that they look the same,” Taken King executive producer Mark Noseworthy said. But you’ll see that they have a very cool look and aesthetic, they look tortured.

The goal is to make the player uncomfortable, to push you out of your comfort zone, to make the alien races of Destiny feel alien again. And each of these Taken units have a new ability, they do something different.

And so that game that you play, one on one with an AI and yourself that you’re accustomed to is now different. The Taken Scions they can split. They can split numerous times as you’re fighting. So if you come down a dark hallway and you run into a Scion, you don’t actually know how many Scions are there.

O the Taken Phalanxes. The game you used to play with them, you’d pop them in the foot and he pings a little bit and you shoot him in the face and you’re done. But now he has this shield, which has a force ability which can push you back.

And so when you come up on the Phalanx, you have to be really mindful of your environment, ‘’”what’s behind me?” because he’s probably going to push me ten or fifteen meters, backwards.

Am I going to hit a wall, am I going to get pinned? Each of the Taken units have new abilities and are going to change the way you fight and challenge you in new ways.

One thing that Destiny really doesn’t get right however? Story. The game has a notoriously light story, that is barely fleshed out, leaving players to explore its lore through the Grimoire feature on a smartphone or tablet device. It’s a neat idea, but one that has barely resonated with the community.

According to Noseworthy however, the next expansion will feature a simple but meaty story to get involved in:

Story is very important to us, and we’re taking big strides with The Taken King to make the story something that players can really sink their teeth into. We have Oryx as the clear villain, and your objective is to find his dreadnought, his capital spaceship in the sky, board it, disable and find its king and cut its head off.

And just that simple story, is something that we think everybody is going to appreciate and get into.

And storytelling is just like balancing weapons and tweaking Raids and fixing bugs, is one of those things that we’re constantly improving as we patch the game and have major expansions like the Taken King.

Destiny’s Taken King expansion kicks off later this year, marking year two for the game. It’s an expansion that’s asking for a hefty $40, so it needs to deliver. Especially to the year one players who are not very happy right now.

Last Updated: June 24, 2015