The Destiny announcement many have been dreading has unfortunately arrived: your characters from the beta will not carry over to the full game.
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Bungie has been mum on the topic since the beta ended until now, saying during the test that they had not yet decided if characters would carry over. In a rather lengthy blog post, the developers have officially announced that they will not be transferring progress due to changes made to the game. The post led with a goodbye to the writer's Guardian, before painfully cutting to the chase:
"If the rest of you haven't gathered the painful truth from the eulogy yet, our beta characters won't transfer to the final version of Destiny. The vaults have been cleaned out, too. Step away from this update and take a walk. Have a good cry, or howl at the Moon. We'll be here when you're done...Welcome back.
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"What you just experienced is something we've been through countless times here at Bungie. We feel your pain, and then some. Making a game requires iteration and progress. When we reinvent the world where the Guardians live, sometimes we have to leave them behind."
What is it exactly that led them to this decision? A sum of smaller changes, rather than any sweeping one, has rendered some characters unbalanced or broken.
"Since the beta, we've continued to tune and adjust the game," Designer Tyson Green explains. "The way you earn experience has been adjusted up and down a bunch of times. Items have been added and removed. New features toggled. Although there's no single monumental change, the sum of the tweaks leaves characters from the Beta Build in strange shape that would be confusing at best, broken at worst."
This is bound to upset some fans who sunk hours into their characters during the beta, while others won't mind starting fresh. Bungie never promised the data would transfer, though, so it's difficult to feel too hard done by--look forward to starting anew when the full game hits on September 9.
"We've been asked many times if this was a real beta. It was. We learned a lot from your participation, and we're going to tweak, adjust, and in some cases, make some significant alterations that ultimately mean your Beta Guardian can't go home again.
"This is the last time we'll ask you to part with your hero. On September 9, you can create a Guardian who will keep you company for a good, long time. On a long-enough timeline, you might decide to delete him or her and start over again--but that will be your call to make."