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Join us as we take on the Destiny 2 beta live right here


Every Wednesday, staff writer Brad Bourque and content manager Hanif Jackson take on a different video game, streaming their victories and embarassing defeats on Facebook live. Not wanting to fall behind on current trends, the pair is taking on Destiny 2 during the closed beta, which began on Tuesday, July 18th.

There are a lot of changes to Destiny 2 from the last game, and not just in the sense of graphical updates and a new story line. There are wide-reaching balance changes to weapons, which will allow players to equip two primary weapons, instead of a primary and secondary, with shotguns and sniper rifles moving to the heavy weapon slot. In Destiny, shotguns dominated the Crucible scene while sniper rifles like Black Spindle kept the best players well equipped to defeat the hardest raid bosses. Ammo is now harder to come by for both, forcing players to make tough choices, and rely more heavily on primary weaponry like rifles and hand cannons.

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The story is also a bigger part of the in-game experience this time around. There have always been brief cutscenes and cinematic events in the game, but the longer, more involved story pieces will take center stage during missions and firefights now. That’s a big change from the previous title’s grimoire cards, which provided lore information outside the game.

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Patrol missions have also been beefed up, with new secrets to find, and a wider variety of tasks to complete. Add in the fact you don’t have to jump back to orbit to run missions anymore, and the game should feel a lot more seamless than it ever did before. During the beta, players have access to introduction mission, a multiplayer strike, and of course, the PvP Crucible, where they can try their hand at taking down other Guardians.

As always, you can join us here for the live stream and watch it above, or head over the Digital Trends Facebook page to catch the action. Let us know in the chat if you have any questions. We’ll be streaming from 4:00 PM PST to 4:30 or 5:00, with coverage from our TechPop event in New York afterward!

Brad Bourque
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad Bourque is a native Portlander, devout nerd, and craft beer enthusiast. He studied creative writing at Willamette…
Destiny 2 studio Bungie hit by layoffs, internal game delays
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Amid a wave of layoffs at Destiny developer and Sony subsidiary Bungie this week, Destiny 2: The Final Shape and Marathon have both reportedly been delayed.
On Monday morning, tweets from developers revealed that Bungie, which was acquired by Sony in January 2022, was suffering layoffs. This was followed up by a report from Bloomberg that went into more detail about the layoffs and their impact on Bungie's future games. Sony and Bungie have not officially commented on the delays yet, although the Bloomberg article mentions that Bungie CEO Pete Parsons will hold a team meeting later today to discuss the layoffs further. This all follows contractor layoffs at Sony studio Naughty Dog earlier this month, which happened as that studio struggles to develop and release a The Last of Us multiplayer game. 

Bloomberg suggests that these layoffs, like others at Sony this year, are tied to internal game delays. While Destiny 2: The Final Shape is publicly slated to come out in February 2024, Bungie reportedly told staff that it's now going to come out in June 2024. Meanwhile, we learned that Bungie's revival of Marathon was apparently targeting a 2024 launch -- although no release window was given officially -- but will now come out sometime in 2025. These delays make the PlayStation 5's 2024 game lineup look pretty sparse right now outside of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and it suggests that Destiny 2's next season will be one of its longest.
As of now, Sony and Bungie have not publicly commented on the layoffs or delays, but we will update this post when they do say more about it.

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Destiny 2: Lightfall fails to deliver its Avengers: Infinity War moment
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The comparison between Destiny 2: Lightfall and Avengers: Infinity War is immediate from the opening moments of Bungie's latest expansion. There is no more exposition to get through; the Witness, a mythical villain that represents the root of the Darkness that Guardians have fought against for close to a decade, is here, and the Traveler who has given our heroes the Light and their god-like abilities is under direct threat. The stakes couldn't be higher, but Lightfall doesn't live up to that moment.

I'm not drawing connections here that shouldn't be made -- the bombastic opening moments of Lightfall call back Infinity War's unrelenting momentum in its first act. The Traveler is under siege in Lightfall and Guardians are dismantled by a flick of the Witness' wrist, echoing the immediate slaughter brought by the hands of Thanos moments before he arrived on Earth. That feeling is the same; our antagonist is here, and there's nowhere else to run. In the final moments of the campaign, a member of my fireteam even exclaimed, "hey, that's a line from Infinity War."

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