As most Destiny players know, today is a big day for Bungie’s latest and hugely successful MMO/FPS hybrid. Yes, next Tuesday marks the release of Destiny: The Taken King, the first major expansion for the title, but today is when Update 2.0 hit, and with it a ton of major changes to the base game.

Chief among those changes, at least as far as the story is concerned, is a game-wide replacement of Peter Dinklage’s voice work as Ghost. Now, and moving forward, Nolan North is the voice actor for Ghost, and any trace of Dinklage’s performance has been wiped from existence.

In addition to replacing Dinklage’s voice, Bungie claimed that Nolan North also recorded new dialogue for Destiny that’s meant to further enrich the story. However, it seems those claims might be a little more exaggerated than previously thought. Based on our time with Destiny Update 2.0, it doesn’t seem like much of the dialogue has changed at all; really it’s Nolan’s performance that adds a different tone to some of those scenes.

To give readers a better idea as to what we mean by that, Game Rant has two videos below – one featuring the first mission of the game with Dinklage’s Ghost and the other with Nolan North's. As most will notice, North’s performance has a bit more emotion to it, and feels less like an actor reading lines from a page. In later scenes, Nolan’s performance also comes across as more sympathetic, as players encounter insurmountable odds and dangerous enemies.

Peter Dinklage

[HTML1]

Nolan North

[HTML2]

It’s certainly going to take some getting used to, having North narrate instead of Dinklage, but we’re sure that this will likely be seen as a good thing for the franchise moving forward. According to Bungie, working around Peter Dinklage’s busy schedule proved difficult when it came time to record new lines of dialogue, so having someone like North, a proven video game voice acting veteran, on-board is sure to make things much easier.

North also knows what it’s like to commit to a franchise for more than a decade – he voices Nathan Drake in Uncharted, for those who might not know – and if Bungie does plan to stick to their 10-year plan for Destiny, they will likely need to rely on him more and more. Even so, it’s still sad not to hear Dinklage anymore. For as much as players maligned his delivery, those veterans among us came to know his performance so well. Now it’s strange to have someone else saying, “We’ve awoken the Hive!”

What do you think of Nolan North’s performance as Ghost so far? Do you prefer it to Dinklage’s?

Destiny: The Taken King releases September 15, 2015 for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.