BELLEVUE, Wash.—We're finally close to knowing what Destiny 2 will feel like when it launches on September 6 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

Close, but not quite. The online shooter's developers at Bungie hosted a major preview event last week, just down the block from its offices in the Seattle-area city of Bellevue, and the assembled press was invited to turn on capture equipment for a limited amount of gameplay. The event came with some limits, and as a result, this preview is more about the video of what we captured than about our thoughts and feelings on what's being shown here.

The average Destiny 2 experience will revolve around a number of elements—a full plot-driven campaign, a "crucible" multiplayer mode, a series of "Strike" group battles, a bunch of character customization options—that are currently off-limits to talk about, either because I didn't get to play them at length or because those details are still embargoed. So in some ways, discussing Destiny 2 right now is like describing a cherry pie without mentioning the cherry filling.

Instead, Bungie gave us permission to capture and talk about what it's like to return to the game's starting "destination" planet, Earth—specifically the "European Dead Zone" (EDZ for short)—once we'd played over half of the campaign. Despite the limits, this video still shows off something hugely important for Destiny 2 hopefuls: the sensation of logging in and adventuring once the game has been "beaten" but you still want to keep blasting with friends.

When the game actually begins

That's when Destiny 2 really starts, anyway. Just like the first game, Destiny 2 has been built with the hope that its fans keep logging in once the campaign is done to find emergent gameplay in the form of cooperative group combat, extra-hard special missions, and shots at rare loot. Only this time, we may not have to wait for expansion packs to introduce content that's actually worth replaying ad nauseam. I can already tell that Destiny 2 wants players to return to planets with friends and get into what essentially feels like a frenetic battling chain: mission after mission, task after task, and epic firefight after epic firefight.

The above video was edited for brevity, clarity, and to delete the times when I died out of sheer incompetence, but it shows how this sequence of play feels when romping around the EDZ. Destiny 2's map system makes it easy to stake out a task and run toward it, and these can come in a few forms. "Adventures" populate the world with unique plot and dialogue that flesh out the events of the game's default campaign. You may see an adventure pop up and think, "I'll just knock that out for some loot and be done with it." Fat chance.

You're likely to be interrupted by quite a bit of optional content as you run between checkpoints in one of these adventures. Public events will be the most likely ones. They pop up in a number of spots on the EDZ map and restart every 15 or so minutes with massive fights that either require players to hunker down in one spot or to run from battleground to battleground within a limited amount of time—and can sometimes ask particularly good fireteams to then take on additional bonus tasks for higher-grade loot. Simply participating in a public event will yield some form of loot even if the basic objectives aren't met, but it wasn't clear whether that loot was graded based on how much or little you do to help the public-event cause at any given time.





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Additionally, higher-level "yellow" health-bar enemies will show up out of nowhere, and if you and your fireteam decide to take them out, without any beacon or icon telling you to, they'll likely explode with loot. Certain items can extend your personal radar to show off more hidden chests in the EDZ as well, which simply pop up around the map and essentially reward players who are constantly on the move finishing other tasks. And you can hop into a "patrol" mission, which is now more elaborate than in Destiny 1; these missions ask you to take out quite a few enemy types in waves, usually a set of three or four across a map, with a big dollop of loot as your reward.

Loot, by the way, sometimes comes in the form of EDZ Tokens in this instance; other Destiny 2 planets have similar tokens. These can be cashed out with a EDZ scout named Devrim Kay to acquire engrams—as in, the same engram system from Destiny 1, which produces loot according to your level in the game of varying rarity. Even going into detail about this system is hard to do thanks to the mix of embargo and limited information we currently have handy, but what I can say is that this location-specific token system is already easier and more satisfying to participate in while working to acquire more loot.

This goes hand in hand with the other thing you may notice in the video: no numbers above enemy heads. Enemies are not marked by levels, in that they scale in power right alongside your own character. Instead of equipping gear that turns you OP and lets you mow these foes down, you're instead focusing on gear that suits your exact kind of playstyle, along with exploiting other faction-specific weaknesses. Going into more detail on this also goes beyond the purview of what I can say here, but I found this D2 change to feel very satisfying in practice.

I'm happy to try to answer questions in our comment section based on the content in the video; if I don't answer, it's because I'm withholding certain information until my "review of the first 15 hours" article goes live in early September. But even this limited amount of information and footage should make relatively clear why I'm actually excited about the beat-to-beat, night-after-night potential of Destiny 2, even when shackled to the limitations of the console versions as opposed to the late-October PC build.