Destiny 2 First Gameplay Details

At an event held at the Jet Center in Hawthorne, CA, Bungie developers presented the first public look at Destiny 2's gameplay and revealed new details on the game. Luke Smith, Game Director, opened the event by presenting Bungie's vision for the game which is captured in three core principles:

• A world that pulls you in
• Amazing things to do
• Always someone to play with

This set the tone for the rest of the content of the rest of the event, as everything new that was revealed hit on one of more of these touchpoints.

Destiny 2 opens with a complete disaster for humanity. The last city on Earth and home to The Traveler, is assaulted and defeated by the Red Legion, a Cabal faction led by Ghaul. Ghaul is driven by indignation and jealousy, believing that he was the rightful one to receive The Traveler's gift of the Light, and he has decided that he will take by force what he was not given. The campaign begins during the invasion, and while you may complete the opening mission you won't win the battle. The Tower will be destroyed, and The Last City will be lost.

After the defeat, the Vanguard scatters, each moving to a different world. Cayde takes the fight to Nessus, a world completely dominated by the Vex and transformed into a machine world filled with the canyons and caverns loved by the Vex. Zavala travels to Saturn's moon Titan, a world with no land masses and awash in methane oceans. Titan is home to a failed utopian human colony, the ruins of which protrude above the seas. Lastly, Ikora Rey retreats to Jupiter's moon, Io, a sulfur-covered volcanic world that's the last place touched by The Traveler before the collapse. She hopes that Io will be the key to warlocks reestablishing the connection to The Traveler.

The defeat of The Last City obviously means that The Tower is gone and will no longer serve as the central game hub in Destiny 2 ' everything has been lost, including your vault from Destiny. The new hub on Earth will be in the European Dead Zone, or EDZ, a zone larger than any that were a part of Destiny, and it won't just be humanity that will be starting over. While Bungie didn't specifically say anything about character transfer from the original game, they certainly implied that everyone will start over when they first play Destiny 2. Your powers will be gone, your gear standard issue, and your character level will presumably start out at level one again. Bungie wants to welcome new gamers to Destiny 2 who never experienced Destiny, and to make their arrival as welcoming as possible everyone will start out on the same footing.

As part of their "world that pulls you in" ethos, Bungie has filled Destiny 2 with more cinematic content than there was in all of Destiny and its expansions. You'll more meet more characters during your travels in the campaign, too, breathing more life into the story, universe, and the game's locations.

Destiny 2 will continue Destiny's tradition of providing solo player content beyond the campaign missions, but this content will be greatly expanded. There will still be patrol areas ' zones in which players converge to fight enemies and complete small random missions. Public events will return, some as heroic adventures. New activities include treasure hunts, exploration expeditions known as Lost Sector missions, and side missions that include their own self-contained storylines. The treasure hunts will have you following treasure maps while the Lost Sector missions involve boss fights in which the boss holds the keys to opening new areas. Bungie wants players to get into all of this new content as quickly as possible, so the maps have been revised to make it easier to navigate between the locations. All activity locations will be marked on the map with icons indicating the activity type, and when appropriate the time the activity will begin. You'll no longer have to jump to orbit to change locations, not just on a planet but when moving between worlds as well.

Strikes, special co-op missions with higher difficulty and bigger rewards, will be a part of Destiny 2 as well, as will raids. No information on the new raid in Destiny 2 was revealed, but the new strike will be called Inverted Spire, and it will take place on Nessus and so the Vex will figure prominently in the strike.

Multiplayer PvP will once again take place in the Crucible, but some changes are in store for it. All game modes will now be 4v4, a change Bungie has put in place to place an emphasis on skill mastery in PvP battles. I'll miss Mayhem Rumble, though. There will be a new HUD which will provide you with more information on the enemy team, including which players have their supers charged and available. New modes and maps will be available, but the only new mode Bungie revealed at their presentation was Countdown. This is an attack/defend mode, the first time a mode of this type has appeared in a Destiny game. Teams take turns either trying to plant a charge in one of two locations or preventing the other team from doing so. There are no respawns, only revives, so eliminating the other team will win the round as well. Rounds alternate until one team wins six matches. A new map was also revealed, Midtown, an urban environment with a mix of tight indoor and narrow outdoor spaces.

Destiny has a strong player community, but with Destiny 2 Bungie wanted to make it easier for gamers to connect and to make it a lot easier for individual gamers without friends playing the game to become part of the community. Destiny 2 will have full in-game support for guilds, providing all of the tools players need to form and join guilds, as well as to customize things like your guild's banner. There's a benefit to joining a guild beyond community and friendship, though. As guild members play the game in any mode, they will contribute to the guild's overall success, and that success is rewarded with loot for the members. There will also be what amounts to a private hub area for each guild, a space on Earth run by the new character Hawthorne. If you're not sure which guild to join, there's a new feature called Guided Games which will give you the chance to play with a guild before joining. Guilds with an open roster spot in a game can make it available to all gamers through Guided Game. Players looking to join a Guided Game can browse the open ones and join in.

The last revelation of the day applied to just the PC version of the game. Activision is taking advantage of its partnership with Blizzard to offer Destiny on the PC exclusively through Battle.net. You'll update and launch the game through the Battle.net launcher, and the game will support all Battle.net features such as cross-game chat.