We spent several hours playing the Destiny 2Beta, and even played a little futbol.
We are big fans of Destiny around here and some folks have logged in over a thousand hours of game time. The lure of grabbing that next great weapon, or trying to get our Hunter to the highest light level, or trying to make our weapons as powerful as possible, kept drawing us back into the game to hit the Weekly Nightfall or maybe play the Daily Heroic level. It’s a draw that still has us logging an occasional gaming session back in the world of Destiny so getting those closed beta invites from a PR rep made some folks around here practically giddy as a school girl. Needless to say, we had the beta pre-loaded and folks were jumping in as soon as the servers went live last week.
We started out using a Hunter (a huntress in this case since the beta gave us a female character) and we jumped into the opening story sequence to the game. Our character was already maxed out at level 20 with max light of 200, and all of her armor and weapons were already maxed out as well. We were hoping for the ability to progress a little in the beta to maybe give it a little replayability, but nope. Already maxed out with no need to grind kills to reach new levels.
The opening story was told through cut scenes and chatter while you played through the level and it was intriguing. The introduction of the new bad guy Ghaul was enough to make you want to blast the guy right there as he totally stripped you of light, but all you could do was watch as the traveler was also blasted with a strange weapon. It was sad to see our ghost go down as it was drained of all its power, and it’s looking like Destiny 2 will have us starting out with no light, weak weapons, weak armor, and a dead ghost. Sounds like fun to us.
The few weapons we were introduced to in the beta were new and fun to play with. Each one seemed unique with its own quirks that you had to learn. One of the few exotic weapons we were given was a mini-gun that got better the longer you held the trigger, and would even reload itself if you were firing it and walked across an ammo pick-up. A new type of weapon for Destiny 2 is the grenade launcher, and that thing is a beast. Taking out a group of bad guys that were dumb enough to stand too close together is a breeze with that thing. Here are screenshots of nine of the new weapons, with two of the new exotics shown.
The main social space for the beta, called The Farm, was only available for a short time on two occasions, but we were able to dive into and explore the area. There wasn’t much to do as all of the interactive portions had been disabled, with the exception of the futbol pitch. With a goal on each end, and a goal counter built into each goal, you could play against other guardians with an oversized soccer ball. First team to three goals wins. We found a great place to relax and watch a match and recorded it for your viewing pleasure.
The game really needs an announcer and teams of three or four, but two-on-two works OK. The fireworks for the winning goal isn’t quite as dramatic we would like, but it will have to do.
As Destiny 2 gets closer to launch, we are hoping for another round of beta testing with even more folks jumping in to try it out. This is mainly for selfish reasons because the game’s initial success will be determined on how well the game handles the overall server load. We tried playing No Man’s Sky at launch and that didn’t go well as we couldn’t play more than 15 minutes without the game freezing our PS4. Turns out they didn’t plan very well for server load issues and avoidable errors ensued. Even Destiny ran into some server issues early on and we are hoping that developer Bungie is prepared to address any possible server issues promptly.
The Destiny 2 Beta gave us a glimpse of where Bungie is taking this franchise, and so far, we are ready to continue on with them. If you haven’t pre-ordered the game yet, you may want to do that.
