The creators of Halo have set a date for the beta testing period of their next massive shooter project, Destiny, with excited gamers getting hands-on via their home console in July.
Activision Blizzard reported the beta's anticipated date during their quarterly financial earnings report and while gamers were originally supposed to get beta access this spring with a preorder, it has since been delayed to allow for further netcode work (I'd assume). Destiny's beta will be made available to PlayStation gamers on PS3 and PS4 first.
Activision has said that the company will probably spend $500 million developing and marketing Destiny, but I took issue with that figure in light of the first-person shooter genre's outright flooding of the marketplace at the moment.
Still, I'm hopeful that Destiny will prove exciting, engaging, and wholly liberating for the team at Bungie who made more Halo games than they seemingly wanted to under Microsoft.
Hopefully, we'll have hands-on impressions of the title at E3 2014, with coverage of the beta and more as we near launch. Destiny will launch on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4 on September 9th.