Way back on Sept. 9, 2014 developer Bungie released Destiny, their first new franchise since the extremely popular Halo in the early 2000s. Despite the game’s beta version generating significant amounts of hype, the released version of Destiny launched to overwhelming amounts of negative criticism. However, Destiny has since evolved into a much deeper game, destined to take the time of gamers.

We’ll start from the beginning. On Destiny’s launch, the single largest complaint was that the game did not feel nearly as large as it appeared in the marketing for the game. The beta had one explorable world while the full game had just four. Additionally, many players noted that the missions were the same thing over and over again: launch the mission, shoot some low-level enemies, shoot the boss, get rewards, rinse and repeat. As a result, the actual plot line of the game seemed very non-cohesive and made for repetitive, boring gameplay.

Regardless of this, there was one thing that Destiny had going for it that not many other games had: a raid. In normal terms, a raid is a mission with significantly higher level enemies, but instead of just one person tackling the job a total of six people have to come together and play as tactically as possible in order to succeed. This raid was given the name The Vault of Glass and resulted in players having end-game content that provided gameplay with much more variation than the standard story missions provided.

Then, just as players began to get bored with the base game, Bungie announced the first major expansion: The Dark Below. Featuring several new story missions, a new raid, a plethora of new gear and an overall better game, players thought that this DLC would provide allow Destiny to become as good as it appeared originally. However, similar to the release of the base game, The Dark Below proved lackluster and had about four new story missions that could be played through in under an hour as well as a raid that had many flaws in it that allowed it to be easily completed with less than the six-player requirement. All of this combined to make Destiny appear to be a dead game.

Despite the issues with the content of The Dark Below, the issue of loot arose to be bigger than ever. All the rewards in Destiny are at the mercy of a random-number generator (RNG). In other words, no matter how well a player performs, he or she is just as likely to get a certain piece of equipment as anybody else. This caused a lot of people to become upset and feel the game to be unfair, especially when someone ‘less deserving’ got a reward that a ‘more-deserving’ player does not have. On top of this, in order to be the maximum level, a player could have just one gear set equipped, which mitigated any sort of variety in gear among end-game players.

Fast-forward to May 19, 2015 and Bungie releases the second DLC, House of Wolves. In this DLC Bungie not only were many more missions added than in the first DLC, but also they attempted to increase variety by allowing any gear piece to reach maximum level and also made loot drops contain loot that a player doesn’t have to have an increased chance of dropping. The result of this DLC was far more positive feedback than anything that Bungie have seen before on Destiny.

For the next several months the game continued at its normal rhythm with players happy and satisfied with all that the game had to offer. Then on Sept. 15, Bungie released The Taken King which was a DLC of a caliber several times larger than any of the previous two. Unsurprisingly, The Taken King had several elements in it that were drawn almost exclusively from player feedback, which led to even more enthusiasm about the game than before.

Now with the year coming to a close, Bungie has hosted several free-to-play events, which promise to entice players to continue playing and having a good time while doing so. While the next paid DLC is currently unannounced, it has been hinted by Bungie to be coming in the next couple of months. Given all the things that Bungie have improved upon in the last year and a quarter, the next DLC installment is sure to continue the upward trend of providing fantastic experiences for the players.