There will be no raid in the House of Wolves, the second expansion pack for Bungie’s massively-multiplayer first person shooter Destiny, the developer has confirmed.
Instead, high-level players will be treated to a three-player co-operative experience “focused on variety, replayability, and skill – a new battle arena called The Prison of Elders,” Bungie says.
The arena will be for three players, rather than the six who are required to play one of Destiny’s two raids, and is paired with a new competitive multiplayer mode called Trials of Osiris. Both will be available to play upon the release of the second expansion pack on 19 May.
Destiny, which fuses the FPS mechanics of games such as Bungie’s previous hit Halo with the trappings of a massively multiplayer online game such as World of Warcraft, currently has two raids as end-game content, available to players who have already mastered much of what the game has to offer.
The first, the Vault of Glass, was introduced a few weeks after the game debuted, and required a team of six high-level players to independently form a team and defeat the god of the machine lifeforms known as the Vex.
It was praised for introducing innovative new mechanics to a game which was, in the words of Guardian reviewer Keith Stuart, a “highly conventional old-school shooter”, but criticised for being largely inaccessible to casual players, requiring a large time commitment to reach the prerequisite level and an equally large commitment to put together a team and take on the challenge.
That raid was followed in December with Crota’s End, released as part of the game’s first expansion pack The Dark Below, and players had expected House of Wolves to introduce a third raid.
