Destiny's beta was a "tremendous success" and will lead to changes being made prior to the full game's release on September 9. If you're hoping for those changes to be substantial, however, it sounds as if you'll be disappointed.
As part of an Activision Blizzard investors call this week, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg talked about what Destiny's beta means for the final game. Reiterating that it was the biggest beta ever for a new IP, Hirshberg said, "[W]e were able to test everything at scale and everything held up well. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that feedback was nearly universally positive.
"I would describe these as tweaks and not major changes as we saw the fundamentals of the game to be very strong" -- Eric Hirshberg
"That said, as you might imagine, we learned a lot by watching players engage with the game and hearing their feedback and Bungie is now making tweaks to optimize the game and they actually did so after the alpha as well, so that's going to be, I think, an ongoing process to make it a better experience and nothing is more important to us or to Bungie than delivering a great experience to our community and the beta certainly helped us do that."
Without identifying what kind of changes will be made, Hirshberg offered some sense of how significant they will be, saying, "I would describe these as tweaks and not major changes as we saw the fundamentals of the game to be very strong."
It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that, with the game just over a month way, Bungie won't be completely revamping it. If you weren't a fan of something like the game's structure or gunplay, you'll have to hold out hope that things will be changed in one of the yet-to-be-announced sequels coming as part of the studio's 10-year deal with Activision.
Bungie hasn't yet gone into great deal about all of the changes that will be made to Destiny following the beta. A recent Bungie Weekly Update post on its website did, however, mention a few tweaks, such as reducing the Interceptor vehicle's rate of fire and reducing the blast radius of rockets.
More than 88 million games were played during the beta by upwards of 4.6 million players. Activision has very high expectations for Destiny, having publicly said it believes the game will become the best-selling new IP ever. (One analyst has projected potential sales in the 10-15 million range.) Activision said this week that, despite being in the same first-person-shooter genre as Call of Duty, there is room for both games to succeed.
What kind of tweaks are you hoping Bungie makes in the full version of Destiny? Let us know in the comments.
| Chris Pereira is a freelance writer for GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @TheSmokingManX |
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