Bungie has officially confirmed that all characters created during the Destiny beta are being wiped to give everyone a clean, equal start when the game officially launches on September 9, 2014. Community Manager David “DeeJ” Dague thanked all of the participants for their contribution by eulogizing their characters, lost but not forgotten.
Designer Tyson Green succinctly explained why the character wipe was necessary to ensure a balanced game that wholly takes advantage of what was gleaned from the beta:
“Since the Beta, we’ve continued to tune and adjust the game. The way you earn experience has been adjusted up and down a bunch of times. Items have been added and removed. New features toggled. Although there’s no single monumental change, the sum of the tweaks leaves characters from the Beta Build in strange shape that would be confusing at best, broken at worst.”
Beta players will be losing all of their hard-earned gear and experience, but will at least be able to commemorate their contribution to the game with exclusive player badges that will be available to them on launch.
Destiny will be playable on the floor of Gamescom this week, so you can expect some more revelations about the game and story to leak out before it comes out for PlayStation and Xbox consoles in a little less than a month.
