Joystiq talked to Jonty Barnes at Gamescom about the first Destiny Expansion, the Dark Below. No story details (thankfully in my opinion) but some details about what kind of content to expect and the ideas behind their expansions.

This is good stuff. Kinda lame that I am already excited about the Expansion without having played the real thing! 25 days to go...College Football will help me manage through that last week.

"We call it an expansion because it has one of all the activity types from Destiny, so it's story, strike and beyond"

Does that include a Raid?

"We call it an expansion because it has one of all the activity types from Destiny, so it's story, strike and beyond"

Does that include a Raid?

I had the EXACT same thought when they said that.

Man. Isn't each raid supposed to take up 3-4 hours? So, that's a significant amount of content right? Do we want raids with expansion packs?

I'm for it. I want as much content as possible.

Do we want raids with expansion packs?

Yes. Yes, we do.

- No text -

So, I get the feeling they are delineating between what they consider an expansion and DLC. It sounds like expansions will contain content for lots of aspects of the game whereas DLC may only focus on a specific aspect of the game, such as multiplayer maps or weapons (or Hunter capes even. :D)

Good theory?

Has any game done this before? I haven't really played any MMO so I don't know how it is usually done. The HALO and CoD DLCs are normally maps and maybe some cool gear here and there.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were Expansions and then DLCs. What would DLCs add you think? If Expansions add story missions, strikes, and possibly raids, are DLCs adding Crucible maps?

I haven't played a lot of MMOs, but the one I have played, EVE Online (a sci-fi spaceship combat MMO) would add major new features like twice a year or something like that. Not just a new ship or a new mission, but they'd rebalance entire classes of ship at a time (with a class being something like "Battleships" or "Destroyers" which represented very roughly 1/10th of the ships in the game), they'd redo the interface and rules for triangulating deep space treasure troves, they'd significantly alter the combat rules or take a rule set like the rules for bounties that weren't working and completely redo them so they were. It wasn't like what we're used to with Halo where we got maybe one title update that at most slightly altered the weapon bloom or the way the game computed simultaneous melees.

If Bungie could alter Destiny like a real MMO I think we'd all be very pleased.

Has any game done this before? I haven't really played any MMO so I don't know how it is usually done. The HALO and CoD DLCs are normally maps and maybe some cool gear here and there.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were Expansions and then DLCs. What would DLCs add you think? If Expansions add story missions, strikes, and possibly raids, are DLCs adding Crucible maps?

Well, I was thinking that expansions would have a broad focus and DLC might have a more narrow focus of content. For example, expansions would feature new gear, new story missions, new strikes, new raids, and new crucible maps. DLC, or whatever term they use to describe non-expansion content, might only feature content of singular nature, such as gear, without any of the other stuff.

I don't know if any developer has taken this approach. Mass Effect 2 had DLC that featured weapons and armor as well as other DLC that featured story missions. As far as MMOs are generally concerned, DLC in the past has been expansion only, but recently I think they have included microtransaction DLC as well.