As well as new missions and gear, Bungie is making sweeping changes to the very fabric of Destiny with The Taken King. Everything from levelling to the potency of weapons is being tweaked — and in some cases changed drastically — and many of those differences came into effect via the 2.0 patch released last week.
However, it appears that the patch also gives players access to some content from the expansion that perhaps shouldn’t have gone live just yet. YouTube user funkyfxxker uploaded a video over the weekend that demonstrates how Guardians can trigger an encounter with the Taken, the primary antagonists of the new expansion.
The plot of The Taken King centers around Oryx, the villainous God-King of the Hive that travels to our solar system after hearing that his son Crota was killed by Guardians over the course of The Dark Below. He brings with him the Taken, an army of corrupted versions of other enemy classes from the game.
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Players will be challenged with taking care of the Taken across the new setting of Oryx’s fearsome Dreadnaught cruiser, as well as fighting on some of the battlefields already familiar to veterans of the first year of content. This video demonstrates how the Taken will show up in patrols of Old Russia.
The patrol in question in entitled ‘Turn Off the Blight’, and begins with a report of ‘scouts on comms yapping about inbound Taken’. The player is then tasked with neutralizing several Blights — the interdimensional portals that the Taken use as a method of transport.
One Reddit user pointed out that the location that this particular patrol takes place in is rather apt, as it’s also the setting for the very first story mission in the game. That bit of content saw an Archon climb out the walls, but the Taken look to be a far deadlier foe set to challenge even the most experienced Guardians.
This enemy encounter isn’t the only piece of The Taken King that inquisitive players have managed to preview ahead of time. There’s also a previously inaccessible area of Earth that can now be explored via a glitch, which will presumably be used as a setting in the expansion.
The lengths that players are going to preview The Taken King only reiterates just how much excitement there is for this expansion. Destiny has come along in leaps and bounds over the past year — and there looks to be a very bright future ahead, despite the rocky road that the first Guardians to the party had to endure.
Destiny is available now for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The Taken King is set to release on September 15, 2015.
