Destiny just entered Year Two. This is the phrase developer Bungie has been using for months to describe their overhaul of their beloved (and also much maligned) massively multiplayer online shooter, available for all four modern consoles. While the game has sold extremely well over the past 12 months, the passionate community has been more than vocal about a lot of the problems keeping the game from reaching its full potential. While it is kind of a bummer that a $40 expansion fixes the majority of these issues, for those invested in Destiny, the cost and time investment is well worth the price of admission. Here are the five best improvements found in The Taken King. 

Streamlined Leveling System

Potentially the worst part of endgame Destiny was the grind to the highest character levels. The extremely difficult and complicated raids were required to be completed multiple times with multiple characters just to have a chance at claiming the top weapons and gear. With The Taken King, Destiny goes back to Video Games 101: an XP bar. Once players fill up their bar, they level up, all the way to a max of 40. From there, the Light level kicks in. This system is extremely intuitive, as this triple digit number represents the average of all of your inventory. Have four pieces at Light Level 250 and another four at 300? You’re now level 275. This makes leveling up simple and easy to improve, focusing on individual pieces of gear that you can acquire in a myriad of ways. 

Actual Story

What’s this, a cutscene? Quality voice acting? No, it’s not a different game: it’s Destiny. Gone is Peter Dinklage and in his place is Nolan North, potentially the greatest voice actor in video game history. Also gone are boring moments in-between missions, and in their place are beautiful cutscenes that start to peel back the layers of Destiny’s lore. Even those that spent 100s of hours in vanilla Destiny probably walked away knowing very few character names or story beats, but the attention to narrative and progressing a singular story forward has gone a long way to establishing the rich universe Bungie always builds for its products. Oh, and if you don’t want to watch them, feel free to skip the cutscenes, which is also a new and welcome feature!

New Subclasses

While this is potentially old hat for anyone obsessed with MMOs, getting a new subclass is a big deal for Destiny players. The balance in the Player vs Player modes have been shaped and formed for months, and adding a new wrinkle in that formula is both difficult and exciting. Hunters now get a sweet bow that shoots arrows that restrict enemy movement, making them easy targets for your buddies. Titans get some flaming hammers that do exactly what a hammer engulfed in flames should do, and Warlocks get their Emperor Palpatine on with an electric storm that erupts from their fingertips. All three are exciting and offer new strategies for both single player and multiplayer experiences, especially during the insane new Mayhem mode, which lets Guardians unleash their super abilities over and over again.

Court of Oryx

Some of the best times in of Destiny was when random people came together for a greater good. While Raids were intense and involved, doing Patrol missions on the various planets let a few buddies team up with strangers to take down semi-random baddies. While those events still occur, the expansion’s new area The Dreadnaught has one very interesting twist on this premise. Instead of having missable timed events that require luck and chance to find an able fireteam, up to nine players can all enter the Court of Oryx. Named after the big bad in the previous expansion, Court of Oryx allows players to sacrifice various runes that summon unique bosses with mysterious mechanics that need to be figured out before taking them down. There is nothing like stumbling across various struggling buddies who desperately need your help to defeat some of the most interesting villains in the game.

Hidden Missions

While the first year of Destiny was a repetitive grind, filled with repeatable missions that spat out expected rewards, The Taken King has already shown that Bungie has many a trick up their collective sleeve. Take the second Heroic story mission in the game, for example, which offers an entirely new mission if players are clever enough to find a detour during the campaign. This detour leads to a timed event, one that rewards the victor with one of the most powerful weapons in the game. The people that found this did so nearly by accident, and Bungie has teased that this is just the tip of the hidden iceberg. Exciting developments like this that should give The Taken King a much longer tail than Destiny had.