Destiny 2 gameplay reveal

In the wee hours of the morning for those of us here in Australia, Bungie held a live stream with over 200,000 viewers worldwide to premiere gameplay for their major upcoming release, Destiny 2.

After a fairly rocky beginning with the original Destiny, Bungie have been spent the last three years making minor changes with their expansion DLC. Destiny 2 now offers them a chance to rebuild from the ground up and really focus in on what people are looking for. So what can we expect from the new addition?

Story

First, one of the big concerns that came out of Destiny was their specific brand of storytelling. Destiny 2 promises much more “in-game story telling”. Grimoire cards are out and we’ve been promised a huge amount of cinematics.

The game will pick up as the last safe city of Earth is attacked and Gall, leader of the Red Legion, aims to take our very own power benefactor, the Traveler, for himself. The first mission will see you protect the city while leading an attack against the invading Cabal ships — of course, it doesn’t go well. The rest of the campaign will see us regrouping heroes from new planets  – more on that later – and unlocking new powers and loot to take back the Traveler and the last city.

Just in this first scene we are already seeing something new with NPC characters actually populating the gameplay area, including return characters Zavala, Ikora and “Sweeper Bot”. Zavala and Ikora were featured in some great set pieces that have them fight alongside the players and really fleshes out what previously felt like an empty space.

Gameplay

While the main mechanics will remain the same for Destiny 2, there have been some major tweaks.

Weapons have seen one of the biggest shake ups — gone are primary, special and heavy weapons and now welcome kinetic, energy and power weapons. Energy and kinetic weapons will be interchangeable for your first two slots and will include all the primary weapons you know and love but also sidearms and the new SMG’s, perfect for up close damage. Power weapons will include heavy weapons but will also see sniper rifles joining the ranks. The last two new additions to your munitions are what appears to be a mobile minigun and a pretty sweet grenade launcher.

Classes have not be changed so thankfully my beautiful Warlock remains amazingly intact. Sub-classes are seeing some new additions; how they will fit into our existing subclasses is yet to be seen however. The three new classes Dawnblade, Sentinel and Arcstrider seem to be focused on weapons, with a flaming sword for Warlocks, a void Shield that can be Captain America flung at enemies for Titans and Hunters seem to be a whirling dervish with an arc bowstaff. Spotted in the gameplay but not clarified was what seems to be some kind of AOE buff the Warlock was dropping; it appeared to be registered like a melee or grenade so hopefully more info will come forward about that.

For anyone that played Destiny originally, we can all remember the pain of going backwards and forwards into orbit to get anywhere. Well, rejoice, as you can now travel to and from locations without having to jettison yourself to space first. The maps seem to be bigger with much more of a focus on exploration and discovering hidden dungeons and events.

And speaking of exploration you’ll have to throw some hiking boots on to traverse three new “planets” and a new zone of Earth. Titan holds a human Utopia that is slowly sinking into the ocean covered moon. Io is a holy place for Warlocks as the last place the Traveler touched before landing on Earth. Nessus is an icy Vex machine world filled with plateaus and canyons. Then finally, The European Dead Zone found on Earth promises to be the largest space Bungie has ever made.

The world looks lush, varied and filled with things to do; orbit does still exist and looks like it will be used to group up and choose activities you want to do with your fireteam.

Crucible will be seeing a new mode that seems to be about capturing an area and then defending it, but the biggest upset to Crucible is the change to 4v4 for all game modes, which will surely change the dynamics there.

Community and System Info

In exciting news, clans will now see in game support — clan rewards for members activities and custom clan sigils will be a whole lot of fun for anyone like me who runs a tight knit little clan of friends. Also supported will be matchmaking for all activities including Raids and Nightfall. Single players will be able to join a clan for a single game to get assistance from a group who is just looking to help or greed one or two more members.

Destiny 2 will also be launching on PC and while console appears to still be running on 30fps the PC build will be pushing out 60fps and can support 4k graphics. The game will be available via Battle.net as opposed to something like Steam, which is exciting, as Destiny is now part of the Blizzard family. As of yet there is nothing to confirm the rumours that you will be able to save data the cloud and switch between console and PC.

Final Thoughts

As someone who has been playing Destiny on a regular basis since Day One, I’m very excited! Bungie have really shown over the last three years their commitment to updating their game to give players everything they are asking for and it will be exciting to see what they can do with a fresh start. I have already been signed up for early access to the Beta which we are still waiting on a date for but once it is out I’ll be sure to give you all a breakdown on how I think it has delivered on its promises thus far.

What are your thoughts on all of this juicy Destiny 2 information?