E3 2013: Eyes-on With The Destiny Gameplay Demo

Following the live demonstration of Destiny during the PlayStation 4 E3 press event, I was pretty excited to get to my behind-closed-doors session with the game Wednesday afternoon. I was a little bummed, then, to discover that this super secret session was a replaying of the same section of gameplay with basically the same script. Still, there are worse things in the world than getting to see a rad game demonstration for a second time.

If you caught the Sony presser, then there's little I can add to what you've already experienced. For the uninitiated, though, allow me to break it down. Or, more appropriately, let Writer/Design Director Joseph Staten break it down.

“In the world of Destiny, you're a legend in the making,” Staten said. “You're a Guardian of the last safe city on Earth.”

As a guardian, most of your duties involve traveling the game's massive world and killing alien threats to humanity, something the team at Bungie has grown quite familiar with over the years while working on the Halo series.

“I'm going to meet some friends and we're going to shoot some aliens in the face,” Staten continued. “Because shooting aliens is relaxing.”

As the demo began, Staten took a brief break from the scripted demo to show off the landscape surrounding his current location, a beautiful canyon peppered with water and trees.

“All of that, everything you're seeing, is real,” he explained, throwing a grenade down into its depth and watching it explode to further prove his point. “You can touch all of it. But today we're visiting Old Russia, and we've got to make it through this wall to get there.”

From there, the demo basically took the audience through the same series of events as the Sony presser. Staten met up with a friend and they entered the hulking, rusty wall. Along the way, they lit dark corridors and fought invading enemies using all manner of guns, grenades and “SPACE MAGIC!”

Upon exiting the wall, the duo were joined by other members of the team in a Public Event, dynamic scenarios players can choose to jump into or ignore completely. The handful of Guardians worked together to take out some more baddies, including a hulking robotic beast and, with that, the show came to a close.

Thankfully, it sounds (and looks) like Destiny is well into its development. If Bungie can reach the lofty goals they've set for the title, we could have something quite special on our hands once this one arrives sometime in 2014.