Yesterday, a group of six Destiny players beat the game's first Raid. It took them ten hours. Ten hours!
The Vault of Glass, which developer Bungie describes as the "most elaborate mission ever created by [them]," opened for the first time yesterday, and it sounds crazy. It's a six-person adventure with Tomb Raider-ish puzzles, ambiguous objectives, and nails-tough boss battles. The first group to fight through the Vault died a total of 1,605 times (and killed thousands of enemies along the way). You can take breaks and come back where you left off, so that potential ten-hour completion time can be separated into chunks, though your progress will be reset after a week.
Though I haven't had a chance to test out the raid for myself yet—I'm a paltry level 14, and this thing is designed for levels 26 and up—I've been watching videos and streams of people playing, and it looks way more interesting than any of Destiny's other missions (which usually follow the same pattern: deploy Ghost -> listen to stupid dialogue -> kill waves of enemies -> repeat).
To quote Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton, who I was just texting with about the raid: "it was like this crazy Indiana Jones cave with huge rooms and environmental puzzles and crazy bosses, like this one that kills you if it sees you, or places where it looked like if one person died the entire party died. It was like co-op FPS Dark Souls."
Let's take a look at some videos, shall we?
For starters, here's IGN taking a glimpse at the beginning section of the Vault, which involves a rad environmental puzzle that you'll have to figure out how to solve as a group:
Here's a run-through of the Gorgon's Labyrinth, a crazy maze full of invisible enemies:
Here's a fun look at how much coordination and teamwork it takes to kill one of this raid's bosses [Warning: lots of curses in this video]:
And here's a team taking out the final boss:
If you see any other cool videos or walkthroughs, post'em below.