Bungie claims that Destiny is much bigger than it appears at first glance

Everybody has been talking about the Destiny Beta these last few days and reviews have been mixed thus far. A primary point of concern is that the game only features one explorable location per planet and there are only four planets, or rather three planets and the Earth’s Moon. Each location breaks down into multiple areas so technically speaking there are plenty of places to explore, but this isn’t the main problem. A lot of people take issues with the fact that Destiny promises to be an epic space adventure, and yet you’re only traveling to the Moon and our closest neighboring planets, Mars and Venus. This hardly seems epic, does it?

However, Bungie claims that the game is much bigger than people are giving it credit for. Additionally, they plan on releasing new content post-launch, which will presumably include new locations for players to explore. Community Manager Eric “Urk” Osborne made a few statements on NeoGAF aimed at assuring fans that Destiny will live up to all the hype. “Destiny’s pretty big. It’s the biggest game we’ve ever made, by far, and we’re sort of known for making games you can play for months, years, and even decades if you’re a little bit…dedicated.  With Destiny, we’re looking to exceed what we’ve done before, not just in terms of scale – the Moon is our smallest destination – but in terms of scope and breadth of activities. That’s true for day one, as you expect, but it also means we want Destiny to have super long legs.”

He then goes on to say that players will find plenty of things to do months after launch and suggests that there are still lots of activities that haven’t been revealed yet. The community manager also says that Bungie has learned a great deal from their experience with Halo and are using it to provide good support for Destiny post-launch. Osborne concluded by saying that we barely scratched the surface in the Beta testing phase. “Beta was water wings. Level 8 is nothing. You barely scratched the surface, and it seems like some folks had fun with what was there.  If you did, good news. More soon.”

Meanwhile, a lot of players also seem to be disappointed by how short the missions are. So if the main story can be beaten in a day or two and there are not many locations to explore what can Destiny truly offer? We’ll just have to wait until September 9th when the game launches in order to find out.