The most important fact about Destiny: Rise of Iron, the fourth and likely final expansion for Bungie’s groundbreaking massively multiplayer shooter? You cannot pet the wolves.

The two gigantic canines, pictured in promo art flanking Lord Saladin, leader of the Iron Banner tournament and central figure in the newest expansion, are not pets. They are wild animals – a fact drilled in to Bungie by the Washington State wolf sanctuary, the team recruited to help with the motion capture, audio and visual modelling, according to the game’s director, Christopher Barrett.

“They wanted to make sure that the wolves in the game were represented in a way that benefitted wolves in general, and how they’re perceived. They didn’t want to promote them as something that you’re supposed to engage with, or turn into pets” he said.

Rise of Iron sees Destiny take a brief departure from its overarching plot line to tell a relatively self-contained story about Saladin and the Iron Lords, the mysterious figures which are already partly mythical by the beginning of the first game. It’s a new tack for Bungie, which has previously built up the world’s narrative in a fairly interlinked way, telling the story of the player’s fight against the techno-organic Vex in the first game, then the overarching battle against the Hive (think: space devils) split between the first and third expansion. Sandwiched in between those is expansion number two, the House of Wolves, an exploration of the Reef and the Fallen and the third of the four enemy races.

Those wolves, then, are a good pointer for the thematic drive of the latest expansion. “The Iron Lords are a huge thing,” said Shiek Wang, the game’s art director. “We love a certain hit HBO TV show, we love the whole wintery warrior theme.” Game of Thrones might seem an odd touchpoint for a series about shooting four types of alien with energy weapons in various extraterrestrial locales, but Destiny has always had an element of the medieval to it, from character classes like the Warlocks (space magicians) to special weapons like the Sword of Oryx.

But while Rise of Iron tells the backstory of the Iron Lords, it also pushes the games story further forward than ever before. For the first time, players can enter a version of the world explicitly changed by events, as the Cosmodrome becomes the Plaguelands. The Russian outpost where players of the first game start has been transformed by the arrival of mutated Fallen, twisted into new forms by the mysterious Siva technology which is at the heart of the game’s plot. The wall has collapsed, the area has doubled in size, and there are Fallen everywhere. But for those who want to visit the Cosmodrome of yore, don’t worry: it will still be accessible. Bungie aren’t keen to remove content from the game just yet.

The new strike, The Wretched Eye, offers a chance to see Siva up close. Demoed at Bungie’s studios in Washington state, it takes players on a tour through the Plaguelands as they seek out and destroy Siva nodes, which the mutated Fallen are using to empower themselves. The ongoing battle between Fallen and Hive continues around you, as you dig deeper into the corrupted zone before arriving in a gigantic battlefield where you face off against a Fallen Kell – and the Hive Ogre that the Siva technology has enslaved.

It’s a fast-paced ride, and shows the Destiny team continuing to incorporate in the strikes some of the lessons learned from the best part of the game: the raids. The huge vaults in which the second half of the strike takes place are vertiginous, and place with verticality well enough to make the seemingly simple task of hunting out the Siva nodes (big glowing red things that you shoot) a tricky game of hide-and-seek. Meanwhile, the Ogre in the final battle is less “second enemy” and more “environmental hazard”: it can’t be damaged, requiring the fireteam of three to fall into loose roles for the fight, with one person drawing off the Ogre while the other two damage the main threat.

Eventually, of course, even the best designed strike falls into the same routine as all the others; there’s only so many times three people can shoot a massive alien in the head before it becomes rote. But at first glance, the Wretched Eye is more Sunless Cell than Dust Palace.

One strike doesn’t an expansion make, of course. The two new multiplayer arenas also shown by the team look – and play – nice enough, but it’ll take a good deal more time than the hour and bit we were given before the real features become clear. Icarus, a Sony map exclusive set on Mercury, was visually impressive but felt like it was slightly out of balance, with most of the combat taking place in the wide arena outside, leaving half the map unused. Floating Gardens, a Vex outpost, played more coherently, but that might be because it was heavily reminiscent of The Dark Below’s Pantheon.

Also added to the Crucible’s line-up is a new mode: Supremacy. A twist on Rumble (Destiny’s version of a death-match), Supremacy sees freshly killed players drop glowing engram-style tokens. Those tokens can be picked up by the opposing team – giving them a point – or by the defeated player’s own team, denying the enemy the point for the kill. Its team version encourages players to stick together and move around the map in squads, while the free-for-all offers a neat twist on kill stealing from traditional death-matches: getting the last hit no longer matters if you can’t make it to the token to secure the point. It also rewards close combat, as opposed to hanging at the back with a scout rifle and taking potshots at people’s heads.

There will be more strikes and crucible arenas coming, of course. Taken King, the last expansion of this size, launched with four strikes and eight arenas, so we’ve only scratched the surface of the launch. Destiny is rapidly becoming the sort of huge game that you can fall into for weeks on end. That fact is not lost on Bungie, which will sells Destiny: The Collection, containing the base game and all four expansion packs, alongside the Rise of Iron, for just £50 – the company is clearly hoping to pull in a few new players before it launches Destiny 2.

But they won’t be able to stroke the wolves.