Destiny image reportedly reveals major Plague of Darkness expansion
Hive Ship! New subclasses! New weapon types! More!
There's an image doing the rounds on the internet today that allegedly reveals Bungie's plan for Destiny, its expansions and more during 2015.
The image, below, reportedly was taken during an internal meeting, and first appeared on an Italian Destiny community's Facebook page on 1st October 2014 - at least that's the earliest publication date I can find. It has since been posted to the Bungie.net forum, a Destiny-focused Twitter account and, more recently the Destiny sub-Reddit, which is why it's only now getting attention.
So, it's worth pointing out that the information it contains, such as release dates and windows, may now be out of date.
On to the good stuff: the image shows House of Wolves, the already-announced Destiny expansion two, as due for release on 10th March 2015. That's a Tuesday, which tallies with Destiny release dates for the main game and expansion one, The Dark Below.
According to the image, House of Wolves contains three new story missions, one new strike, one new raid and four new player versus player maps, and is set on locations the Cosmodrome, the Moon, Venus and the Reef.
DESTINY SPOILERS AHEAD.
The mention of the Reef here is interesting. This is an area players visit during Destiny's story - such that it is. But it is currently not a playable area. Videos released by Bungie before Destiny's release showed a Guardian walking around an area set in the Reef, so the community had expected it to show up at some point, perhaps as a second social hub.
Moving on, we have Comet: Plague of Darkness due out September 2015. The mention of Comet rekindles memories of the leaked contract between Bungie and Activision for Destiny, published in 2012. The contract stated Destiny game one would launch autumn 2013, with a Comet release in autumn 2014. We know the initial release plan didn't work out, as Destiny game one ended up launching autumn 2014, pushing back the 10 year content plan by 12 months.
In the contract, Comet releases were described as "major downloadable content expansion pack-type software releases". So the community expected these to be significant in terms of content.
According to the image, the first Comet release is called Plague of Darkness, includes 12 story missions, four strikes, one new raid, six player versus player maps and one new location. Under the list of locations is Moon, Venus, Mars and Hive Ship. Could this Hive Ship be the new location?
Under "Investment" we see three new player builds and two new weapon types. The community has expected the addition of a third subclass for each Guardian type for some time now, given each class (Titan, Hunter and Warlock) has three subclass slots, one of which is currently unused.
Beyond Comet, things get a little fuzzy. There is a mention of Expansion Three, which revolves around the Vex. Locations include Venus and Mars, with three story missions, two strikes, one raid and an unknown number of PVP maps.
Then we have Expansion Four, called Forge of Gods. There's no mention of what this includes.
Current speculation suggests Plague of Darkness will act as a re-release of Destiny of a sort, with existing players able to buy it separately and new players able to buy it bundled with all that's gone before. Given the existing Destiny expansion pass includes just expansion one and expansion two, we expect a new expansion pass will be available for expansions three and four.
While the image is no doubt outdated, and release dates and content plans have no doubt changed, there's reason to believe it is legitimate. Back in October players datamined Bungie.net as they searched for information on The Dark Below. A number of enemy names were discovered. At the time they were thought to be part of expansion one, but they never materialised.
If we go back and look at the tags associated with the enemy names, we see mention of Hive Ship - the new location listed in the image as part of Plague of Darkness.
We've asked Activision for comment and will update if it responds.