Destiny: Rise of Iron launch woes force players into queue

UPDATE 2.45pm: Destiny servers have sorted themselves out after this morning's disastrous launch.

It took a couple of hours for Bungie to fix connection problems after the supposed roll-out time for new expansion Rise of Iron. But Eurogamer has now been able to complete the DLC's main story mission and experienced no further issues.

Rise of Iron's main campaign lasts around two hours, and is followed by numerous extra questlines to pursue (which can you read all about in our Destiny: Rise of Iron guides, tips and tricks hub). Speaking of which, we're off to do just that.

ORIGINAL STORY 11.30am: Good morning, and hello from a long queue of people waiting to play Destiny: Rise of Iron.

Bungie's big new expansion was supposed to have gone live an hour ago, at 10am UK time, but the vast majority of players still lack access.

The developer tweeted ahead of Rise of Iron's launch that players with all the necessary patches (there have been a couple over the past few days) should only have to return to the game's orbit screen to immediately start playing.

Alas, this was not to be.

10am brought a flurry of error codes and then a constant "tapir" error for anyone trying to connect. The long-snouted animal began trending on Twitter.

Half an hour later, players began to be placed in queues to let players into Destiny in the order in which people were connected.

But even this doesn't seem to be happening. Myself, our guides editor Matt and high-profile Destiny streamer Arrekz have all experienced our queues being killed off multiple times and the whole process restarting from scratch. I went from 48k in the queue down to 28k, only to then be placed back at 198k, with the process only seeming to cycle through a few hundred people every minute.

Are those leaving the queue simply giving up or getting disconnected again? Have you connected yet?

As I type this, my latest queue has now failed twice and I'm now at the back of the line again, behind more than 300k others. Oh dear.

Bungie has, historically, always had a smooth launch for its expansions. Destiny and last year's The Taken King both launched without fuss, which makes today's troubles all the more frustrating for those waiting.