Destiny’s elegant construction as game and machine has kept players in a lovely loop of gunplay and character improvement. Its structure has bounds, though, and can eventually start to feel static when hours of Raids and Strikes start blending together. Developer Bungie wants to bring a ghost into Destiny’s machine now, and earn the “expansion” label for its next project, The Taken King.

The Taken King will pull up to Destiny on September 15 like a dump truck and unload a rattling avalanche of new guns and armor. There will be no shortage of MORE, but that’s to be expected. What we want is more different.

Your successful mission to kill Crota in the previous DLC has consequences, beyond the rewards that spill out of him. Bungie essentially casts Crota’s body into the foundation of The Taken King, connecting the premise not to an uncontrollable galactic event, but to something you accomplished yourself. Crota’s god-like father is furious in the aftermath of your deeds, swiping a ghostly hand across the galaxy to wipe you and your regicidal guardian out. Also, his name is Oryx. Has there ever been a nice person with that name?

As Oryx lands his “Taken” armies on the rocky Martian satellite of Phobos (no stranger to demonic invasion in games), your perception of the Cabal changes. They’re hit hard by the corruptive effects of Oryx; their defeat shaking their standing as a strong faction in Destiny and making Bungie’s new villain appear even more threatening. The actors are shifting positions, albeit subtly, in Destiny’s story.

Destiny: The Taken King introduces three new sub-classes as ‘lost Guardian arts,’ with a standout going to the Warlock. Bungie’s knack for on-the-nose naming still thrives with Stormcaller, which lets you summon maelstroms of electric energy and charge forward, blue lightning flowing from your fingertips, just like Emperor Palpatine leaning forward on a Segway. Do we really need to go over the appeal of that?

The Titan gains Sunbreaker, which lets you hurl a big ol’ hammer like a boomerang, while the Hunter obtains a support class in Nightstalker. Summoning a glowing bow from the ether gives the Nightstalker a quick step up in combat, but the utility of the power isn’t as cool as the flashy looks. Between your transformation into an electric wraith as Stormcaller, and the Nightstalker's ethereal magic bow, I feel like Destiny is subtly tilting its sci-fi/fantasy balance, and maybe even making a case for guns not being as cool as instant storms.

The regular enemies in Destiny are so numerous and so effortlessly destroyed after a certain point, they all start blending together. Knights and Phalanxes can’t escape Oryx’s influence, returning in The Taken King as his corrupted thralls.

This is bad news for you, a Guardian, but good news if you’ve long stopped thinking of aliens as anything more than snarling sacks of XP. Their appearance is striking and creepy at the outset, forcing you to face a perversion of the old and familiar.

Destiny’s Crucible matches get a distinct air of intergalactic sports with the Rift game type, which Bungie sees as the long-awaited answer to a capture-the-flag style objective mode. It’s simple: get the spark and dunk it through a space-time rift (video games!), or do a backflip dunk to get extra points.

Meanwhile, “Mayhem” mode amps up the silliness by boosting the recharge rates of supers. The resulting fireworks, especially with the flashy new sub-classes in the mix, is meant to be thinly veiled chaos. The mechanical basics of Destiny’s PvP combat are still there, but they feel heightened to an extreme degree in Mayhem - perhaps to the point where more balanced matches seem mundane in comparison.

Oryx’s quest for revenge initially brings you to Phobos, where you’re sent into a crumbling Cabal vestige to investigate. The interior is pockmarked with explosions and strange slices of three-dimensional distortion, with debris weightlessly suspended in the moment of impact. The hmm-what-happened-here setup is eerie and well executed, eventually leading to your first glimpse of Crota’s big bad dad.

Bungie says it wants to drive players into further environmental discovery in The Taken King, later sending them into Oryx’s dreadnaught, a “giant, evil mausoleum.” If the developer follows through, it’ll resurface one of Destiny’s most romantic concepts: the guardian rummaging through mysterious, fantastical places, his or her footsteps bringing otherworldly machinery to life.