Sadly for those who have been enjoying the game, Destiny's beta has officially come to a close.
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The last of the Cosmodrome exploring, Tower mingling and Crucible matches concluded last night before Bungie took the beta offline, meaning you won't be able to play the online shooter again until its September 9 launch date.
The beta originally launched on July 17 for PlayStation 4 and PS3 only. The release was rocky, marred with a PSN outage and extremely slow download speeds once the system finally accepted users' access codes. By the night of the launch, though, Bungie and Sony had mostly righted the ship, and several days of smooth sailing allowed players to see what the game had to offer.
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"The Destiny beta was a tremendous success from where we sat overlooking the Tower," Bungie stated on Facebook. "If you played, Bungie thanks you from the bottom of our hearts. We learned so much about our game, and how we can make it better."
There was more story content compared to the alpha, with four campaign missions, a special cooperative strike mission, and a free-roam mode that allowed you to explore the Cosmodrome, an old area of Earth now desolate. The Crucible--the competitive multiplayer--was mostly the same as the alpha, with one of the two maps swapped out for another.
Bungie closed the beta for planned maintenance on July 21, with re-launch plus Xbox One and Xbox 360 release set for the 23rd. The team finished its work early, however, and the beta was back online and launching on Microsoft's systems just the next day.
Bungie also ran an event, Iron Banner, multiple times during the beta. This expanded some content, most notably adding two Crucible maps to the multiplayer cycle and an additional game mode, which took level advantages into account. The campaign content on the moon was also temporarily unlocked, allowing players to experience a new mission for just a few hours.
We will be writing more full impressions of the beta soon, but the time spent with it was largely enjoyable. There are some issues (which will also be discussed), but I had no problem putting plenty of hours into this limited slice of Destiny.