'Rise of Iron' is proof 'Destiny' series will never end

In a promotional video accompanying “Destiny's” announcement in 2013, studio co-founder Jason Jones said the project had been driven by a desire to occupy as much of their players' time as possible: “Like, how do you keep a player going for 50 or 100 hours over some number of months? And to not just want to play the game, but to want to play it with their friends?”

When “Destiny” was finally released in 2014, it felt like a game motivated more by scale than any specific creative vision. It was huge but repetitive and narratively incomprehensible. Players seemed to come to it for its unfinished quality and for the hopeful space of imagination it offered, like a bunch of teens sneaking into a high-rise construction site.

“Destiny: Rise of Iron” is a reflection of how successful Bungie has been in its original plan for occupying players' time and it's another attempt to finish what it began in 2014. The downloadable expansion tells the story of Lord Saladin, a side character from an earlier expansion who handed out armor and weapons for completing special feats in the game's player-versus-player matches. In “Rise of Iron” we learn that Lord Saladin is the last surviving member of the Iron Lords, a Teutonic band of warriors who watched over the abandoned wastes of the Russian Cosmodrome, the original game's first major zone, while trying to defend against the last remnants of The Fallen, one of the four enemy races in the game.

All of the Iron Lords except Saladin were wiped out 100 years ago during a suicide mission to prevent The Fallen from taking control of SIVA, a metastatic nanotechnology that strangles the landscape in fiber-optic cables and causes powerful mutations in any lifeform it infects. Subsequent generations of The Fallen have rediscovered this magical SIVA stuff and suddenly Saladin is in need of recruits for another suicide mission. What better volunteer than someone who has spent 100-some hours playing a first-person shooting game?

As with the game's three other expansions (“The Dark Below,” “House of Wolves,” and “The Taken King”), the pretense of new story missions is the biggest selling point for “Rise of Iron,” but it turns out to be the least significant piece. The five missions -- most of which take place across a new snowy zone on Earth called the Plaguelands -- can be run through in two or three hours and are hard to distinguish from any of the game's other missions. But there is no finishing “Destiny.” After resolving Saladin's story, there are a half-dozen long and laborious questlines to chase, most of which involve returning to the game's older areas to sniff out a few new collectibles: pieces of the core SIVA hardware, or lost fragments of armor left by the original Iron Lords.

The biggest incentive to stick around is the new raid “Wrath of the Machines,” which, like the game's other raid levels, takes what could have been a 15-minute single-player level and floods it with infinitely re-spawning enemies, obscure puzzles which involve running artifacts back and forth across a sea of enemies, and bosses who are invincible until you stumble across the one obscure condition that causes them to lower their shields. It's fun in the way that binge-watching a season of a television series is, a triumph of gluttony that focuses the senses and leaves one drained and almost numb to the touch.

“Destiny” might have failed to live up to the dramatic heritage of the “Halo” games, but it has excelled in creating an economic honeytrap, an inescapable web of overlapping currencies to ensure that even when you've played everything there is in the game, you feel like you haven't done it all. There's always an item withheld, a leftover sidequest that you forgot was in your queue.

With “Rise of Iron,” Bungie seems to have perfected the art of baiting expectations and then postponing them, making a game out of the waiting itself. To paraphrase what O. Henry said of New York, “Destiny” is really going to be something when they finally finish it. “Rise of Iron” makes it feel like Bungie is only just starting.