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No vendors live in Felwinter, so you'll need to load into the mountain, do your business, load back out, select The Tower, load in to buy your equipment, and load back out again. Say you want to complete a quest in Rise of Iron, but you also want to buy a new piece of gear. These are all things you could already do in the game’s other two social hubs, except you have to schlep to Felwinter to visit the expansion’s three unique NPCs.įelwinter is somewhere between useless and a hassle to visit.
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Instead, you just use them for the necessities: to decode unidentified loot, pick up and drop off items, and turn in quests. The scare quotes are there because nobody playing Destiny uses social spaces for socializing. There's also a new "social area," known as Felwinter Peak. Advertisementįelwinter Peak is at least nice to look at.
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The interconnectivity is novel at first, but that wears off quickly as you realize how little novelty The Plaguelands have to offer. Once Rise of Iron let me wander The Plaguelands at will, I spent my first 20 minutes of freedom unable to discern between the old stuff and the new. In fact, you can walk all the way from one side of the new area to the opposite end of the old one and barely even notice the transition. They look nearly identical to what Destiny fans already know as The Cosmodrome-all snow, rusted-out icebreakers, and jagged metal strewn across post-apocalyptic Russia. While The Taken King's Dreadnaught was substantially different from anything else in Destiny-all bones, breathing walls, and slimy indoor cathedrals-The Plaguelands are just an extension of an existing locale. This marks the second time Bungie has bolted a new zone onto the main game’s original four. That recycled feeling is ever-present in The Plaguelands, the new in-game region for Rise of Iron. Almost nothing is actually new, and what is new rarely feels that way. It’s as though whatever Bungie employees not working on Destiny 2 were forced to cobble together one last dollop of content for the original game so 2016 wouldn't pass without something they could sell. The gear, the strikes, the enemies, and even the writing all feel like things we've seen before, many times over. Nearly everything in Rise of Iron smacks of recycled content. That’s not just because the expansion is lighter on content than I could have imagined, but because it seems light on care. But after a week with Destiny: Rise of Iron, the fourth expansion to Bungie’s endlessly injured shooter, I’m mostly befuddled. After so long, I’ve either given up on a game or still find it immensely satisfying. You’d think a game wouldn’t still be able to disappoint me so much, two years after its initial release.