Millions of players might have been hoping — assuming, even — that all the work they’d put in levelling up and customising characters during the Destiny beta would continue on in the final version of the game. Nope. The characters built in the recent pre-launch test are being wiped, and all players will be starting fresh.
News of this decision comes from a post on the official Bungie blog, with reasoning provided by designer Tyson Green:
Since the Beta, we’ve continued to tune and adjust the game. The way you earn experience has been adjusted up and down a bunch of times. Items have been added and removed. New features toggled. Although there’s no single monumental change, the sum of the tweaks leaves characters from the Beta Build in strange shape that would be confusing at best, broken at worst.
More than 4.5 million people played the Destiny beta during the weeks it was running. That’s a whole lot of people who’ll need to start from scratch, and get to that ominous Moon mission the hard way. It’s probably fairer to wipe all those characters but it still hurts.
[via Kotaku UK]
Comments
42 responses to “Destiny’s Beta Characters Aren’t Transferring To The Final Version”
You mean I have to spend two hours getting to where I was during the beta again? Someone hold me.
Did anyone think it would? I was clearly a test run. It sux but hey a beta is just a beta.
Yeah, bungie were really unclear on it though, they actually said “we dont know if we will wipe the content yet”. Probably getting more people to invest more time, pretty shitty move by them really. (it doesnt bother me of course because I only spent like 3 hours playing).
How is that unclear? They warned you right from the start…
Warned you that it was a possibility.
The warning itself should’ve made people skeptical. There is miniscule reasons why companies should let users retain their beta accounts to their live accounts. I dont know why people still expect these things to happen…
Well I think the logic was people would just have to repeat the start of the game and its really just like all those games nowadays with early access.
I don’t know why bungie didn’t make it clear oh wait, yes I do, to get more people playing to drum up their marketing crap.
Over 15 years of online gaming the internet has bought us, beta testing has gone from the select few to test games in development in closed betas to ever increasing load test open betas before they go gold, … and the answer to beta character wipes has always been a huge DELETE, for the exact reason Bungie said. Yet large numbers of people still ask (seriously), and people still get upset it doesn’t (facepalm).
If you however buy the game that has a pre-order bonus to let you in a few days before the server goes public, then you keep that progress. Otherwise Beta is always DELETE.
It is a great marketing opportunity for your game if you are able to balance the amount of content between too much being given away before the final game and too little that you blast through it in less then an hour.
However i believe the major reason is simple – developers need to test their back-end and networking much more stringently now and to do this, they need people flooding their servers in order to ensure stability.
Those is pretty common, I haven’t had beta experience continue into the final for any game.
Ff14 a realm reborn 🙂 beta progression carried over to the real game
But in that case they were selling the beta as an actual game …
Beta was free and it was an actual beta with level cap.
I’m assuming you mean progression from ff14 1.0 was carried over to 2.0 (arr), the actual closed beta for ff14arr (and open i believe but i can’t remember) the character data was wiped
played all 3 characters through to level 8 so i’d 100% know which character I preferred to start fresh from in the full release. doesnt bother me 😀
which character are you going with?
The best one, probably. Which obviously means Titan. Duh.
(LET THE CLASS WARS…. BEGIN!)
hmm I only used Warlock and was pretty happy with that class, but I didnt like the armour,
It won’t be Titan as while they are ok in PVE, it is Warlock that dominates that PVP (same sort of ability without having to worry about getting shot while using it).
Na there is no class wars. TItan hands down number 1, follow by Warlock and last place is Hunter.
Titan is almost unkillable in Iron Banner and Warlock just clears the capture point with the super.
Warlock.
all 3 seem to have equal popularities anyway which is good!
I would very much want to play as hunter in the game but after playing so many crucible matches I’m gonna go with warlock or titan. Best offensive and defensive character. One warlock super you get one point.
It’s a bit of a shame but they said somewhere that they’d accelerated the loot drops & XP gains to test stuff so that pretty much meant there was bugger all chance of people keeping the characters since they’d be overpowered from the start.
Also as another comment I saw elsewhere said, it’s an MMO, who didn’t see a beta character wipe coming?
In no way is it an mmo, think max game size is 16 players. No persistant world or anything “massively multiplayer”.
If this is an mmo, so are borderlands, diablo, team fortress 2 etc…
FMOCRPG ? Forced Multiplayer Online Casual RPG ?
Okay granted the description isn’t exactly ideal but from what I can tell it’s designed to be online, open and persistent to more of an extent than any of those other games.
What MMOs have a persistent world? If anything, that seems to be the antithesis of the MMOs I’ve played (unless you’re using that term to mean whatever you do things remain persistently the same)
Its really doesn’t have much more online play than borderlands.
Um, persistent when applied to mmos have always meant the world remains and continues to live whether you’re in it or not, which in destiny’s case is false. Besides bungie have never said it was an mmo so we’re arguing over nothing.
Character and progression wipes are just standard practise with most online game betas
…. Why would you expect anything less, gamers these days I tell ya !
It should hardly come as a suprise to people. Like was mentioned above, everyone would be starting again anyway…..and be largely overpowered.
Guild Wars 2 erased progress every single beta period they had.
Well, most of them.
But… but.. I had a level 20 purple hand cannon I wanted to use :c
Ha ha yeah I dont really mind – Fortunately I didn’t waste my time leveling up 3 characters just the one – but the beta was great fun anyhow.
I “wasted” my time leveling 3 classes because I wanted to see which build worked best for my play style.
I did that too, but it was probably a bad idea because I experienced burn-out. Burn-out. In two days. Great sign!
I did too, till it opened up on xbox platforms and I could actually play with mates. Made all the difference.
I have a feeling I’d have lost a bit of interest if I’d been playing solo, playing with friends and talking shit while doing it is always more fun
Sooooo many jokes I could make…
oh no, my seven or so hours of gameplay (capped at level 8) is gone, never to be returned? what a calamity!
That’s cute.
I assumed they would anyway, but it would’ve been nice if they’d said it in big bold letters as soon as you boot the game to avoid the billions of posts clogging up internet message boards about it.
I installed the beta on two xbox ones, my wife played the Warlock while I went the titan, we both tried hunter for while but both went back to our first characters after a bit.
It’s beta, not get a head start before other’s. It’s used to server test as well as test the game engine and how things work.
It’s not your personal shit, it’s beta, how are people butt hurt about this.
Dang nabit, hopefully I can get my hands on some of the rarer Scout Rifles that I got used to using. They were my prized possessions.
TBH, this is good for me, it means my mates that missed the beta and I are on the same level and get to ‘experience’ it all, without someone being a higher level and cruising through the game to begin with 🙂