At long last, Destiny: Rise of Iron has finally arrived on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and in a surprising twist, the launch has been less than stellar.
Announced on Feb. 11, 2016, Rise of Iron was poised to bring a variety of new features that players had been looking forward to, such as a new campaign, higher max Light level and brand new weapons and gear, as well as the return of an old favorite: the Gjallarhorn.
Naturally, the community was excited to be able to continue their journey, but it's possible they were too excited, and now, hardly anyone can actually play the game. As with many large server-based games (The Division, Diablo III, etc.), too many people have tried to log into the game and the servers simply can't handle everyone at once.
It all began earlier this morning when the servers went live. Players, who Bungie had advised would simply need the necessary patches (several had been released over the past few days) and return to the game's orbit screen to start playing, tried to connect to the game, but soon found themselves besieged by a stream of error codes and then a constant "tapir" error.
Of course, this prompted the long-snouted animal to start trending on Twitter.
Oh so you wanted to play Destiny did you pic.twitter.com/uFnZwcKOuX
— Tom Phillips (@tomphillipsEG) September 20, 2016
Unfortunately, this was merely a precursor of what was to come. Sometime later, players began to be placed in queues to let players into Destiny in the order that they were connected. However, not only was this an exceptionally long queue (up to 300,000), but disconnections were frequent, meaning that if you happened to be waiting for a long time and managed to make serious progress, a single disconnection could send you to the back of the line.
@dvanboom hahahaha pic.twitter.com/usp5C3AxjS — Neggy Gearo (@bortofdarkness) September 20, 2016
As of this writing, there are several reports of people managing to play, but for the most part, much of the community is still stuck in the queue waiting to get in.
Interestingly enough, while instances like this aren't uncommon (aspiring The Division players had it out for "Mike" when the game first launched in March), this is the first time this has happened to Destiny during the launch of a major expansion. Both House of Wolves and The Taken King launched without any issues, so this entire spectacle is a frustrating first.
