"In the very near future, humanity is visited by a mysterious, moon-sized sphere. We call it the traveler. It breathes new life into our solar system, paving the way for massive human expansion. We rush into the stars, building great colonies on Mars and Venus. It's an amazing era of unbounded human progress. We call it the golden age. It's a time of miracles. But it doesn't last, for the traveler has an enemy. It's a great evil that's been haunting it for eons. It's a darkness you couldn't possibly imagine. And when it finds us here on Earth, it nearly destroys us. And just when all hope is gone, just when the darkness has taken everything, the traveler sacrifices itself to save us all, and the darkness is defeated, at least for a while. The traveler's sacrifice leaves it silent and immobile, hanging above Earth. Beneath it, we begin to rebuild."
The Devil's Lair
Return to Old Russia with a Fireteam for a Strike in Destiny. See the action through the eyes of our heroes.
Fight the Fallen. Burn back the Hive. Clear a path that leads straight to E3, the Beta, and beyond.
Previews
GameSpot: Discovering Destiny: What Awaits You in Bungie's Upcoming Shooter
But it's not just the built-in narrative that Bungie hopes draws players to Destiny. The game's designers want the stories that players create for themselves to be at least as important as the fiction that Bungie has developed. Tyson Reed, the game's investment lead, said, "We want to make sure that there's a story that people tell about sort of the longer-scale game, where they say, 'Were you in the tower on this day when that happened?'... That is something we're excited about. That's how I think we want to evolve the, I guess I would call it the metastory of the game. There's a narrative that we're gonna tell that's really core to the campaign experience but there's a metastory that's gonna be, I think, core to the actual player experience."
IGN: I Played Destiny, and...
Eurogamer: Getting to play Destiny: better than Halo?
A shooter is only as good as its sniper rifle. In Halo, the UNSC Sniper Rifle System 99 thunders with each pull of the trigger, as if Zeus himself has hurled a bolt of lightning down from the heavens and into the skull of your enemy. Zoom. Thundercrack. Headshot. Reload.
In Destiny, the sniper rifle - whatever its level, whatever its rarity, whatever its name - also thunders. Zoom. Thundercrack. Headshot. Reload. Except in Destiny, you see the word "Critical" pop up when you score that headshot. And you see a life bar evaporate. And you earn experience points. And maybe you see a message letting you know you've unlocked an upgrade for your sniper rifle, so you go into your character page, have a gander at the upgrade and buy it with the in-game currency, Glimmer.
But the feeling is the same. The common sense that governs Destiny's sniper rifle is the same that stood the SRS99 in such good stead for so long. It is the sense that the bullet really does travel across the map, hitting where and when it's supposed to, the sound of live fire echoing around a chasm, a virtual thud with real world impact. It's a familiar, reassuring feeling, and it's quintessentially Bungie.
Quintessentially Bungie: that's Destiny right there.
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