A Decade Ago, The Taken King Saved Destiny–And Then Cursed It

Destiny: The Taken King is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, September 15, 2025. Below, we look back at how it came to represent the years of Destiny, and live-service games more broadly, that would follow.

Ten years ago, Bungie performed a miracle. It also, unfortunately, invoked a curse.

In 2014, the studio renowned for the Halo franchise launched Destiny, which promised to blend its penchant for dynamic single-player campaigns and kinetic multiplayer gameplay with the framework and community-oriented features of MMOs. And while the game was released to an excited and impressionable audience, it floundered. Its opening salvo felt limp and incomplete–a sentiment that later reporting would confirm–but it maintained a playerbase through a spate of smaller middling DLC releases leading up to The Taken King, Destiny’s first major expansion and saving grace.

The Taken King launched on September 15, 2015 and–I say this without exaggeration–revolutionized the game, which felt aimless till its arrival. Destiny’s worlds, while large and beautiful, felt quiet and devoid of life. Its cast felt more like disparate archetypes thrown in a blender than a cohesive company. And its paper-thin plot…well, it was just that. Destiny wasn’t without merit–it excelled in gunplay, boasted an art style that blended sci-fi and fantasy seamlessly, and the level design of its strikes and raids were still exemplary–but all of that felt pointed at nothing in particular. The Taken King whipped it into shape.

From its opening mission through to the riotous end of its raid, The Taken King was sharp in a way the initial release of Destiny could only ever dream of. For 10 years now, I’ve been struck by the construction of the expansion’s first level, where the player must mount a defense of a besieged base on Phobos, and how much livelier it felt than anything Destiny had done in the year prior. Small touches, like an enemy ship cresting over a hill and shining its spotlight on the player, as well as the sights and sounds of explosions in the distance, finally broke up the almost glacial front that permeated Destiny’s destinations. It was like throwing a rock into still water.

The Taken King finally provided a worthy and meaningful antagonist in Oryx, whose impact and brood still have ramifications on the world of Destiny to this day. It breathed life into characters that could’ve fallen by the wayside, like Eris Morn. It provided a bounty of secrets nestled in the crevices of the Dreadnaught. Hell, it even gave players a quest log! It cannot be overstated how amorphous Destiny felt before The Taken King’s arrival, and how wonderful it felt to bask in it for the weeks and months to come. It hadn’t just come to life, but become even larger in scope. At last, I felt like I was taking part in the epic struggle between light and darkness that Destiny had been billed as while I flitted through the cosmos and used my spectacular powers and weaponry to live out the adventures of my dreams.

For all intents and purposes, Destiny had mounted the comeback it needed. With some narrative direction and goodwill on its side, it had enough gas to continue its ascent. So what curse could I possibly have been referring to earlier?

The unfortunate problem with Destiny is that it never stopped needing saving. If you’re at all familiar with the arc of the series, you may be tangentially aware of the bumpy road the games, as well as the company behind it, have been on ever since. For every high–every Taken King or Forsaken, which came at a similar time in Destiny 2’s lifetime–there have been some standout lows. Unfortunately, while Destiny’s history is marked by a long line of comebacks, it’s just as stained by these immense valleys, brought on often by frequent retooling and reinvention that steadily eroded any ground which could provide it stable footing. And even though Destiny had proven, much like Rainbow Six Siege and No Man’s Sky, that a live-service game could bounce back, it also stood as proof positive of how volatile ongoing games could be. It has typified the often harsh ebb and flow of the model.

You see, Destiny never really enjoyed a sense of stability. While Bungie devised a way forward for its ambitious series, the games suffered content droughts that turned its community against the game at several points in its lengthy lifetime. To solve this problem, Bungie figured out a cadence and template for content drops, like expansions, title updates, and seasonal events, that would supplement the community and feed the machine.

We often talk about the live-service treadmill from the perspective of the consumer, which is always a helpful viewpoint to contextualize its impact and potential harm. But what often feels under-discussed is the effect that this work has on the people who make the content for these never-ending games. And while some titles, like Epic Games’ Fortnite, seemingly have the capital to throw armies at the thing, the same isn’t true of every team.

The cadence of releases under the Destiny banner have seemed increasingly exhaustive on the workforce producing it, especially when factoring in the constant expectations for the next additions to the game to be bigger and better. The live-service treadmill isn’t the only thing killing Destiny though. Paired with the mismanagement of the studio under previous leadership, a toxic workplace culture, as well as constant layoffs and reinventions–some better than others–it’s no surprise that Destiny’s lineage is riddled with instability.

Sometimes that cadence of releases meant that game-changing updates like The Taken King would shake things up for the better. But just as often, it meant that the realities of developing such a big expansion for Destiny caught up with the team behind it. Things fell short. Other expansions like Rise of Iron or Beyond Light felt half-baked, even if they were well-intentioned. Seasons, which were introduced in Destiny 2, felt like a bit of triage that allayed many storytelling and content woes but opened up another can of worms entirely over the years due to repetitive tasks and the removal of seasonal content. Some system-level changes, like reworks to classes, were welcome while others, like the introduction of the Portal, were not. The gulf between Destiny releases has often left a lot to be desired and it has meant that for every two steps that Destiny appeared to take, it would constantly take one back.

Where does The Taken King fall into this, exactly? Well, it arguably set the bar pretty high for what Destiny releases should be, and though Bungie has lived up to that promise a few times over the 10-plus years it’s worked on the series, these ambitions have made for just as many misses as there have been hits.

It established an unfortunate rhythm of Bungie amending its errors, showing unprecedented strength, and then showing how that hubris could just as easily be the studio’s undoing. Like clockwork, Bungie has spent the last decade and change stepping on rakes and bouncing back better than ever only to further upset the balance of things in Destiny and inadvertently step on another five rakes, which only landed there by the studio’s own actions.

It’s unfair to place the blame for Destiny’s unevenness on one its earliest and best expansions. It would be a mischaracterization of the DLC and the intent behind it. The Taken King isn’t a stain on Destiny’s legacy because it’s too good. That’s a ridiculous thing to propose. But it certainly did set the game and the team behind it on a trajectory that has, at the very least, proved untenable for the studio and the health of the game in the long term.

So for all the good that Taken King did Destiny by saving it back then, it’s hard to deny that it has made for a tough act to follow, and chasing it after its highs has indelibly marked the studio. It is simultaneously emblematic of the best Destiny would offer, and the lows it would constantly have to recover from.