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They're reskins of existing enemies, but with a whole suite of new powers that makes fighting them tense, strategic, and more than a little bit stressful. Take The Taken (har), the new enemies, or, at least, sort of new.
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Combined with that unassailable gameplay base, it makes for a game that's finally beginning to realize some of its early potential. The game has a certain kind of confidence that it just didn't have at launch, and it plays out in the level design, the enemies, the writing and the quest system. That's what I noticed more than anything out of my first day with The Taken King: there's an energy here that's only built over the course of the past year. It's not Metal Gear Solid or anything, but still! We're not quite at the levels that Bungie achieved with the single player campaigns in Halo, but we are a long, long way from Dinklebot's tired dronings in the Cosmodrome. And there was mission variety! A stealth mission, of all things, right there in the middle of Destiny. There were characters that didn't sound like they had been huffing Hadronic Essence. As with most expansions, I cruised through the story first, and unlike other installments, I was pleased to find there it actually had some substance beyond being a prelude to loot. O, the possibilities! But that's not what I spent most of my first day in The Taken King doing, at least not so specifically. It sounds almost oxymoronic, but there's something almost liberating about beginning the endgame gear grind all over again.