Here’s when Destiny: Rise of Iron’s new raid goes live

The third year of Destiny has officially begun with today’s launch of Destiny: Rise of Iron, but as always, not everything is accessible yet — in particular, the expansion’s new raid.

The raid, Wrath of the Machine, will be available this Friday, Sept. 23. It will go live at 10 a.m. PT, publisher Activision announced today.

We know very little about the six-person exercise, which is just the way Bungie likes it. The raid pits your fireteam against Rise of Iron’s new enemy type: the SIVA-addled Fallen known as the Devil Splicers. (In Destiny lore, SIVA is the self-assembling, self-replicating nanotechnology that turned against humanity centuries ago, forcing the people known as the Iron Lords to seal it deep below the Earth’s surface — or so they hoped.)

Wrath of the Machine will begin in a public area in a patrol zone, just like Destiny’s original raid, the Vault of Glass. Presumably, it will take place in the Plaguelands, the new region of Earth that developer Bungie is adding to the game with Rise of Iron. As for what players will be doing in the raid, here’s what the studio told Game Informer:

We started with some highfalutin’ ideas and literary themes that we were trying to achieve, and through iterations it actually became about smashing shit into other shit. So I guess the smart version of that would be collision. But, it’s definitely about smashing shit into other shit.

In that same interview, Bungie also said the raid’s difficulty will "largely" scale with your Light level. That means that unlike The Taken King’s raid, King’s Fall — which is so mechanically demanding that it remains challenging even if you’re over-leveled for it — Wrath of the Machine will get easier once you outpace its suggested Light.

Speaking of which, Bungie recommends that Guardians reach 360 Light before they attempt to tangle with Wrath of the Machine, reports Mashable. That’s right between Rise of Iron’s new Light cap of 385 and the previous limit of 335. Once Bungie introduces the hard-mode version of the raid later this year, the studio will increase the cap again, this time to 400 Light.

For more on Rise of Iron, check out our initial impressions of the expansion.