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Destiny’s Age Of Triumph Details Revealed
After last week’s big news about Destiny 2, Bungie took today to pull back the curtain on at least some aspects of Destiny’s forthcoming spring content release, entitled Age of Triumph, coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on March 28. Over the course of an hour-plus live stream, Bungie developers Ryan Paradis and Joe Blackburn joined community manager David “Deej” Dague to discuss some of the specifics of the free online update, coming at the end of March.
A significant chunk of the recent stream focused on the new Age of Triumph record book. This is the largest of these achievement tracking books yet seen in the game, most of which appears to be focused on highlighting activities from throughout the life cycle of the Destiny game. One page focuses on playing in activities during particular periods of time, such as engaging in an in-game activity between Destiny’s launch and the release of The Dark Below. A second page focuses on story achievements. Each of three pages offers achievements to complete for the three classes – Warlock, Titan, and Hunter – and offers chances to use each class’ unique powers. A dedicated strike page, Crucible page, and raid page follows. Another page focuses on collections, such as ships and emblems. The Wanderer page focuses on things like dead Ghosts and SIVA fragments, and”disturbing the remains” in the old loot cave from Year One. The Allegiances page offers a chance to showcase how far you’ve ranked up with the various factions. And the Trials of Osiris page focuses on that particular competitive game mode.
The stream went out of its way to communicate that you won’t need to complete all the nodes in the book in order to unlock all the rewards. The team feels that Age of Triumph should reward all types of Guardians, and that means some people have been more focused on one activity over the other. Bungie was also clear in communicating that the Age of Triumph record book would be account-wide; completing an activity on one character will populate that achievement across all your characters.
The other major topic for the stream is the reintroduction of old raids. Vault of Glass, Crota’s End, King’s Fall, and Wrath of the Machine are all going to be at light parity with each other at 390 light level, meaning that all four raids will be able to offer meaningful rewards. Old rewards are returning, including apparently a Vex Mythoclast and Vault of Glass elementary primaries, all of which can drop at up to 400 light level. There will also be new ornaments and other rewards to collect, such as Ghost skins and Sparrows.
Loot tables across the board for these raids are said to be “generous as heck” in live stream-friendly language.
These raids will mostly be the raids that players are familiar with, without major changes to structure, other than the likelihood that some of the old “cheese” methods of completion are likely to be removed. However, these older raids are receiving new challenge modes to test your group. In addition, a featured weekly raid will offer a particular challenge for formidable groups, and come with exclusive rewards, like the new ornaments. The first weekly featured raid for the week of March 28 is Crota’s End, followed the next week by Vault of Glass, and then King’s Fall the week after that.
The overall light level across the game is not rising past its current limit of 400, a decision that reflects Bungie’s desire to let all players have the chance to hit the cap if they put in effort with Age of Triumph content.
Throughout the presentation, it was clear that Bungie is viewing Age of Triumph as a chance to relaunch old content with some degree of new challenges and rewards, and that the event is meant to be a culmination of the life of the first Destiny game. During the stream, it was also clear that the team has some other aspects of the content drop to discuss, which they will go through during the live streams on the next two Wednesdays leading up to launch.
Our Take
I’m excited to return to the old raids and have them feel challenging again, and I’m particularly stoked to hear about the return of some of my old favorite Year One raid weapons, though I have some concerns about the ways in which elementary primaries may once again affect the game, if they do indeed arrive with those elements still attached.
While I’m pleased about having a reason to return to a game I really enjoy, I was a little disappointed that so much of Age of Triumph appears to be focused on repackaging older content, rather than introducing something new. Destiny as a game has always been about a timeline that is moving forward and not backward, so I would have loved to hear about some new adventures in addition to a return to nostalgic favorites.
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