Destiny Rising’s Closed Beta Date Info Coming, New Trailer Drops

It hasn’t exactly been sweetness and roses over at Bungie lately, mainly in the Marathon department, but the future of Destiny will soon be discovered in July as its new “Frontiers” era launches.

But it’s been easy to forget another Destiny project is launching, NetEase’s Destiny Rising, a mobile game that creates a “non canon” story set many years before the events of the main game as players battle threats. Now, the reveal of the next major test is set to be announced tomorrow, May 21, according to a community manager posting on Discord (via The Game Post):

“Mark your calendars—here’s what’s coming on May 21: The official schedule for Destiny: Rising’s first Closed Beta Test. The App Store pre-order will go live!”

There is also a new trailer that’s been released for the game:

While players were obviously skeptical of a NetEase-made mobile game, feedback from the last closed test was surprisingly positive among the community in terms of how it plays, and there are some aspects that players wish were in Destiny itself. That includes things like cool new supers, a crossbow weapon class and now, apparently the ability to dual-wield guns. These things do not exist in the mainline series. Comments on the new trailer are mostly about how it looks better than Destiny 2 (I’d say that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly looks solid, and I did enjoy playing it).

I do wonder how community sentiment may or may not change once the full gacha aspects of the game start playing out, as there was only a brief preview of that in the test. It’s just normal gacha stuff, hero classes that can be extremely rare drops and you’ll want to upgrade them with even more drops. And all of this can be very, very costly and certainly akin to gambling.

It’s a little unfortunate this is yet another closed test, implying the full release of the game may be a while away yet. I know there are also requests for a desktop client version of the game, lower-spec visuals or not, so players don’t have to be hunched over their phones with controllers to play. No word on that.

When this was first announced, NetEase seemed like a net negative, having made games like Diablo Immortal. Now? NetEase is the company behind the wildly successful and hugely praised Marvel Rivals, so that narrative has changed. And it seems like they’re on track to make a good Destiny game after all.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.