Destiny 2’s Beta is less of a bite and more of a sip of water. You get the flavor, the gameplay, but you are not given the chance to analyze it more. The beta only came with the first story mission, a single strike or dungeon and a single multiplayer map. Two if you count the one for competitive, but it is still tiny. It also happened in the middle of the work week and only for three days.
What I did get to see what the polish that Bungie has in their product. At its core it is still Destiny 1: a MMO-like game with loot and shoot mechanics. For the uninitialized, think Borderlands crossed with Warframe, minus being a gag and space ninjas respectively.
First impressions upon booting the game was, word for word “Is this 144Hz?”. Upon checking, it was indeed running 144Hz at ultra settings. At first I thought maybe it was because I have an overkill rig, but after confirming with other friends, the game is indeed well optimized. A good sign of the care Bungie put to bringing the once console experience to PC. Sadly the game is locked to 30 FPS on consoles due to “design” choice, so your mileage may vary over there.
Onto gameplay, I would say it is the same. Your character feels weighty, the guns take good amount of skill to master. I mean, are we really going to question Bungie on how they do shooter mechanics? They have been doing this for a decade now. On the surface the three classes, the Titan, Hunter and Warlock, are more or less the same. The game finally frees grenades and movement abilities from subclasses, and adds class abilities to the mix. Class abilities are spells, but compared to the super which takes orbs of light to charge, the class abilities run off a cool down like grenades. It gives the classes unique play outside of their supers, like the Warlock can either choose to drop a light node that heals health or buffs damage output.
The only issue I see with the game is how small the multiplayer is, which is at the all time low number of 8 players in a match. For reference, Destiny 1 can have up to 12 players in a match. Yikes. That aside, the singular map I played on was fit for the smaller scale gameplay. Still though: 4 vs. 4 matches, I sense an e-sports pitch may have something to do with this but I digress.
To be honest, I would want to write more about it, but there is not much to go on about. If you have played Destiny 1, it is more of that with improvements. If you have not though, Destiny 2 might be a good buy, that is if Bungie have learned their lesson from the first one on giving regular meaningful content and if you are not a stickler for knowing what happened during the first game. For the PC players, this is it guys.
