Don’t get me wrong here, The Destiny beta is fantastic. It was even confirmed fresh by Lil’ John himself. The thing is though, Bungie has told us that the game will be huge and have tons of places to explore. Sadly with recent news and discoveries this is proving to be anything but true.

I played the alpha of Destiny and was blown away, Old Russia was beautiful and decent sized with a lot to do there. At this point in time, I thought there were three or four more places on earth to explore at launch. I was barely worried about the size of the game during alpha though. The only gripe I had was that the tower was a little small and only a hub to trade in glimmer or faction marks, but that’s what its for.

When the beta came around though, it was the same Old Russia (No pun intended), but plenty of people didn't play the alpha so it was new to them. For me though, Old Russia was beginning to feel stale and boring, my doubts on the exploration on this game had started to flow in. I started hearing that the beta was 10% of the full game. This scared me, Old Russia was not that big and easy to explore relatively quickly. The moon was a nice change of place, but it was smaller than Old Russia (The moon is the smallest place in the game.) It did have caves though, so it kind of evened out with Old Russia. I wasn’t expecting a Skyrim like map or something like that but I was expecting more to explore than what we did in the alpha.

Then Deej (The Bungie community manager) had confirmed on a livestream there is only one explorable place per planet at launch. This is what really made me and others disappointed. I can’t believe that they only have one place to explore per planet. The thing is, Expansions and DLC are already planned and probably have content being made for them, when really they should be able to fit that content into the base game. Old Russia got stale relatively quickly and for the short time we played the moon it looked decent sized but even then it was relatively small when compared to a zone in World of Warcraft.

The problem is that Bungie had been hyping up the game and saying you could explore massive lands and great landscapes but hadn’t really gone into detail and kept it vague. This led to the impression that the worlds would be massive and very explorable, but in fact there isn’t a lot of areas expected at launch. The biggest letdown though is how there is only Old Russia on Earth and no where else where Earth has so much potential for places to go.

I will give Bungie the benefit of the doubt though and wait until launch to see if there is in fact bigger and more interesting places to explore. My worries of a small world though seem to be becoming more of a reality though. Hopefully there will be plenty to explore at launch.

Note: This is just my opinion of Destiny so far. Bungie could have a huge game with tons of max level content up their sleeve (and most likely do.) I’m just pointing out the others and I have noticed about the scale of exploration in the game. I loved The Crucible and many other parts of the game. Exploration is seeming to fall a bit short for me.