Destiny: Rise of Iron's New Social Space, Weapons, and Cooperative Mode Detailed

Destiny's new expansion, Rise of Iron, comes out next month, and up until now developer Bungie has been relatively tight-lipped about it. Now, however, Bungie has shared a lot of detail on what you can expect from the expansion. In Game Informer's extensive and in-depth cover story on Rise of Iron, the studio lays out the changes, additions, and features coming to Destiny.

One of the more mysterious additions coming in Rise of Iron is the new social space, called Felwinter Peak. As Bungie has stated before, you'll have to complete a quest to take back the area from the expansion's new enemies, Fallen Devil Splicers. But when you do, you'll be greeted by a large social space with new vendors providing gear and bounties. In addition, the expansion's creative lead, Christopher Barrett, told Game Informer, "There are lots of secrets. There's this whole portion of Felwinter Peak that is normally locked, except during special events. There may be some secret ways to get back there."

Felwinter Peak is located near the Plaguelands, the new explorable zone that Bungie is adding to the game. As with every Destiny area, there'll be a bunch of things to do and discover in the Plaguelands. It sits near the Cosmodrome on Earth. You'll fight the Devil Splicers, which are mutated forms of the Fallen. As such, they fight with tweaked abilities and have different aesthetics. For example, mutated Vandals have a berserk ability which triggers when they're low on health.

You'll explore the Plaguelands and other parts of the game in the expansion's campaign, which tells a new story about the Iron Lords and Lord Saladin over five missions. It's not lengthy, apparently, but it will feature a bunch of cinematics exploring the background of the Iron Lords. And when you finish the campaign, you'll be greeted with numerous other missions and quests, similar to the structure of the campaign in the last expansion, The Taken King.

Rise of Iron adds a new cooperative arena to the game, too. Archon's Forge has rounds that are shorter than Prison of Elders', but more robust than Court of Oryx's. It's accessible after completion of the campaign, and you trigger it like Court of Oryx. Bungie stresses the collaborative nature of this mode--it allows your Fireteam to work with other random players. Its rounds end in a boss that drops exclusive gear. To trigger it, you'll need SIVA offerings (the SIVA virus is what the Fallen used to mutate into Devil Splicers). These work similarly to the runes required for Court of Oryx.

Gear and armor have been changed and upgraded, too. You might remember from Rise of Iron's announcement trailer that a Guardian was using a flaming axe. This is actually a Relic that you'll come across in the game. It recharges ammo when doing light attacks and uses ammo more quickly when doing heavy attacks. If you keep ammo above a certain level, it does double damage.

In addition, artifacts actually matter now. There are eight new artifacts that give you actual abilities. The Memory of Radegast artifact, for example, adds an ability to swords that lets you deflect energy-based projectiles.

Not surprisingly, the Light cap has increased to 385, and the Light level of gear has been scaled to match. Thankfully, all the gear added in The Taken King or afterwards can be infused up to 385. The cap will be raised to 400, too, when the hard mode for Rise of Iron's raid is released a few weeks after launch.

Following the Chroma items that Bungie added earlier this year, Rise of Iron includes more cosmetic items that are currently referred to as Ornaments, although this name might change. These items do more than the Chroma items. They're basically different gear skins that you can apply to armor and weapons.

Bungie also spoke to Game Informer a bit on the design philosophy behind Rise of Iron and the studio's plans for the future. Talking about the new narrative focus in the expansion, live team director Jerry Hook said, "The thing a lot of players have been asking for is give us more of the story. Give us more of the background... What the heck is he doing in the Tower once a month? What's he doing with the rest of his time? Where are the Iron Lords? To me, those kinds of questions are fundamental."

CEO Pete Parsons explained, meanwhile, that Bungie's had to scramble to keep up with the popularity of the game and players' voracious appetites for new content. "A hard skill we've learned is how to be more nimble and agile," he stated. "I'd love to be able to publish what we're doing for Destiny for the next two years. I think internally that's a goal that we have. We were playing catch up so much on just figuring out what we had made and how we were going to support it, and what tweaks we needed to make. We're getting ourselves in a position where we can start doing that."

There's a lot more in the cover story, which you can check out here if you have a Game Informer subscription.

Rise of Iron launches on September 20 for PS4 and Xbox One, but it's not coming to last-gen consoles to allow for more "bells and whistles." Keep an eye on GameSpot for more about Rise of Iron in the coming weeks.