Destiny's Rise Of Iron Expansion Introduces Major Changes For 'Legacy Console' Players

It's been a pretty interesting year for Destiny so far, for better or for worse. The year kicked off in a rather interesting way when Bungie's president Harold Ryan stepped down, being replaced by Pete Parsons, the company's former COO. The move caused a bit of concern among those in the Destiny community, but when the mammoth April update got pushed out, with its revamped Prison of Elders mode, increased Light Level, and the introduction of new items, it helped smooth over some concerns and gave the impression that things would be alright.

Thankfully, nothing has changed since then. The future of Destiny looks bright, and its upcoming Rise of Iron expansion looks to be the biggest update to date. ROI will feature yet another Light Level boost, the introduction of Plaguelands, a new area that splits off of Earth (Cosmodrome), a new raid, and of course, a slew of new items to collect.

There's one thing Rise of Iron won't include that has the community in a bit of a buzz, though: there will be no support for 'Legacy' consoles, as Bungie calls them. That means those playing on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 will need to mull their options right now, if ROI is in their future.

In a new blog post, Bungie reveals that it's really not going to be ideal to be stuck behind, as in August, the company will be splitting the paths between your characters on both platforms.

The gameplan: in August, Bungie will essentially copy and paste Destiny accounts from the Xbox 360 and PS3 to the current consoles in the same family. At that point, you can move over to a current platform and continue from where you've left off, or treat both characters as completely separate, and play both.

It seems very unlikely that many would opt for both, however, as the communities on the older consoles are already very small in comparison to the newer ones, and that situation is only going to become worse once this transition takes place. Destiny's world on legacy consoles post-ROI might seem really cold and desolate.

What's even worse for legacy console Destiny fans is that a lot of what makes the game so good is going to be winding down as well. Once ROI drops, the very popular PvP modes Iron Banner and Trials of Osiris are going to cease to exist. You will however have limited access to some future updates, but we're not sure at this point what those updates could entail.

At the end of the day, if you are a serious Destiny fan playing on an older console, you shouldn't waste time in putting funds aside for the current version of the same console type (unfortunately, Xbox gamers can't move to PlayStation, and vice versa). It's a tough pill to swallow, but it'd be hard to imagine anyone being unhappy with their upgrade.