Destiny Beta Over: Was Played By More Than 4 Million People; Bungie Thanks Community For Support And Promises To Meet Expectations

Bungie and publisher Activision released a statement on the Destiny beta following its conclusions, praising its success and giving us some statistics on the 10-day test.

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4,638,937 unique players from July 17 to 27 participated in the beta, which offered slices of the online cooperative story missions and competitive multiplayer.

"This is the biggest beta of this console generation by a wide margin and the largest console beta ever for a new video game IP to date," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. "Hosting a beta at this scale is an incredible feat, so we're thrilled to see the phenomenal response. But the beta is just a taste of what's to come. We're counting down the days to our launch day, September 9th."

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"We were totally blown away by the number of people who played the beta," said Pete Parsons, COO of Bungie. "We surpassed even our own goals and the feedback was invaluable. We cannot thank the community enough, the response was humbling and in the weeks ahead we'll be working hard to ensure that Destiny lives up to the expectations at launch."

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 23^rd. The team finished its work early, however, and the beta was back online and launching on Microsoft's systems just the next day.

Hopefully Bungie uses the feedback in an impactful way, even though there is a relatively short amount of time left until the full launch. It's not clear how significant any changes implemented in just more than a month will be, but the developer will likely try to address both player concerns and bugs in that time.