Rise of Iron

Lords of Iron Return

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Apparently last night while I was completely oblivious, the trailer for the new Destiny expansion… Rise of Iron leaked out on the internet.  All of these leaks of course beg the question…  if everything comes out before E3… then why the hell have E3 in the first place?  You can watch the entire leaked trailer here, that was apparently ripped from a Snapchat advertisement of some sort.  I used VLC Media Player to snap a few pictures from the trailer for use in this blog post.  Firstly I am a little disappointed that it seems like we won’t actually be travelling to a new planet or moon.  As was originally suggested by many of the youtubers based on the leaked image from around a month ago… this does in fact deal with the twilight gap wall area.  It seems like it was repaired at one point and the wall has once again been breached.  In the meantime apparently a giant army of mutated Fallen have been amassing on the other side, and we as players are going to help quell this threat.  Now the first thing that really stands out is that these fallen seem to have a “taken” like thing going on… but instead of black and white and shaky… it is all dark red and pixelated.  Which makes me wonder if the virus is somehow like a digital version of the sword logic that has corrupted so many other things in the Destiny universe?

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Regardless… I am pretty damned ready to say goodbye to the taken invasions, and I guess I can accept if that now means we are going to start getting Fallen ones instead.  I would have rather seen them spend more time fleshing out the Cabal, but since the Vex and Hive have seen their day in the sun… I guess it is perfectly okay for the Fallen to get theirs.  However it seems like we have already spent so much time fighting the Fallen since they literally appear in one form or another on every planet.  While they are not extremely active on Mars, there is a spot in the Rubicon wastes where they show themselves for a quest.  I guess considering that they are a race that was once chosen by the Traveler as well, it would make sense why they are constantly scavenging in its wake.  The other thing that I find interesting is it seems like they have somehow compromised some of the areas that Rasputin might have controlled.  There is definitely a Warmind-esc look to some of the areas that they have shown… but again they contain the same dark red contagion look.  All of this makes me wonder if… this is really just some sort of an infection that Rasputin has been fighting off.. and it is also why considering his obvious power that he really doesn’t end up lending us all that much help.  Maybe he has been busy with whatever is happening in the above screenshot.  I would say maybe this was an unknown Warmind, but I think lore wise there is only one per planet.

Gjallahorn is Back

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The most controversial point of the trailer however will be the announcement of “Iron Gjallarhorn”.  This rocket launcher was the be all end all weapon from year one, and was as beloved as it is reviled.  Unfortunately I didn’t play enough in year one to actually use one.  In fact the ONLY exotic I managed to get in year one was The Last Word, and I think the game just gave me that one because it felt sorry for me.  I am absolutely a year two baby when it comes to this game, and while I played at launch… I only played for a few months before fading into the background and finding something else to do.  I’m not a huge fan of rocket launchers, but I have always though that at least on looks the Gjallarhorn looks amazing.  Now I seriously doubt they will be bringing back the weapon with the power levels that it apparently had in year one… but just the fact that it is coming back at all makes me extremely happy.  I want to be able to use this and see what all the fuss was about.  Maybe this will be the rocket launcher to change my tune and make me love rocket launchers?

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The controversy that is waiting in the wings however is that this is that getting Gjallarhorn is a pre-order bonus for the Rise of Iron expansion.  I personally don’t have a problem with it, because I was going to pre-order the expansion regardless.  I like having the peace of mind that the game is there waiting for me whenever I want to participate.  This is a side effect of living through an era when copies of games were actually sometimes difficult to get.  I remember having to go from store to store to try and find several games in the past, and had that happen as recently as the launch of TERA.  The other big benefit in a pre-order is it often comes with the option to pre-load the content so literally at midnight you can pop in and start playing.  Granted my ability to stay up for midnight launches is not what it used to be… and I often times only make it through character creation before crashing.  What is going to cause the drama in the coming days is the insinuation that this might be your ONLY way to get Gjallarhorn.  It is my hope that Bungie is just giving us access to the weapon ahead of time, and that it will exist in the normal exotic rotation from engrams, or at the very least a similarly complete-able quest once the expansion launches.  Gjallarhorn is this iconic weapon, that even people who have never played Destiny have often times heard of it.  When you have something like that…  it just doesn’t seem fair to wall that up behind a pre-order bonus.  So hopefully during the E3 presentation they will do some massive clarification on that point.

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At least with the September 20th date… we won’t have all that long to wait until we get to experience it all for ourselves.

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