"Everything you love about Earth is gone…" So begins the live action trailer which Bungie just released to promote the September 6 release of Destiny 2 on console. It's nowhere near as sombre as it sounds though, because the narrator is Cayde-6, the Nathan Fillion-voiced robot gunslinger who provides much of the comic relief in the shared-world sci-fi shooter sequel. As the riff to the Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage' cranks up, Cayde explains how everything we (ie the Guardians, the game's superheroic space soldiers) love has been destroyed by a race of even beefier power-armoured jerks. Even our puppies. The bastards!
From thereon there's a little more plot exposition followed by some frankly fantastic action sequences in which the guardians cut loose with their new super abilities. The trailer runs just shy of two minutes, and as someone who played an obscene amount of the original, and is delighted that the PC version of the sequel is looking stellar, I can say that it is a pretty sweet piece of fan service. It absolutely nails the power fantasy of being a Guardian and kicking a variety of alien ass alongside your pals. It's also leaves a good taste in the mouth, as opposed to the tie-ins for Pop-Tarts and energy drinks.
The trailer was created by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, best known for directing Kong: Skull Island, and who is currently also working on a movie based on the Metal Gear games. He told our sister site GamesRadar that he'd had to walk a tightrope between explaining what the game is to new players, and appealing to the "stay up all night raid type people so they can also be proud of it and say, "Fuck yeah that's my Destiny, that feels like the world that I fell in love with, that feels like the aesthetic that I fell in love with."
PC players will likely fall into the former category, and this week has also seen the open beta go live, with the full release set to follow on 23 October. So far I've been impressed, in fact close to blown away, by the technical quality of the PC version. Calling it a port is unfair, given it's had its own dedicated team working on it at Bungie and Vicarious Visions. The results, according to our own testing, is a game that performs astonishingly well even on lower end hardware. I'll have some thoughts on the story campaign early next week, and will also reveal why I think the raid might not be about a big planet-eating fish.
