The Destiny Rising Closed Alpha has come to a close, and it’s impressed many Destiny player, with many now calling for a release date from the developers. Today I’m going to go through the statement from the developers at the close of the Alpha, plus some of the reasons why Destiny players have been impressed with the Destiny Rising Closed Alpha test.

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The Destiny Rising Closed Alpha has come to a close and with it a message from the development team. Let’s dive into that straight away.

“After a little more than a month, the Destiny: Rising Closed Alpha(DRCA) has come to an end. With the help of thousands of players, we were able to finally get the game out to be thoroughly play tested, helping us uncover what improvements could be made for the future when the time comes for its proper launch. We know not everyone who wanted to try the game got the chance to do so this time, but we hope to be able to bring it to everyone around the world as soon as possible. We’re truly humbled by your enthusiasm to play our game.”

“It’s important to note that what we revealed in the DRCA is just the beginning. Destiny: Rising has so much more in store, and we can’t wait to share it all with you. We have thrilling new destinations waiting for players to explore, exciting and unique new characters to introduce (both those exclusive to Destiny: Rising and many more familiar faces to come), a diverse array of formidable enemies to confront, and captivating stories that expand the main campaign far beyond what was offered in the DRCA.”

“While many players got to experience the original Satiyaaliksni Smart Bomb Exotic weapon and the brand-new Crossbow weapon type introduced with Destiny: Rising, we have plenty more new Exotic and Mythic weapons waiting to be discovered. Additionally, we are working hard to introduce exciting and innovative ways to interact with weapon types, bringing a fresh experience to the familiar sandbox gameplay.”

“We still have a lot of work ahead of us, though. We’ll be reviewing our findings and player feedback from the DRCA thoroughly and evaluating how best to apply our learnings to make the game even better next time you see it. After a few more concluding messages, we’ll be going radio silent for a while until we’re ready to show you what we’ve been working on. Thank you to everyone following the news on Destiny: Rising, we look forward to sharing more with you soon!”

So the Alpha has closed, and the immediate question on everyone’s lips is “When is the game going to come out?”. It looks like the team are going “radio silent” for a while, but with many people impressed with how polished the game was, especially for a mobile game, I would expect some news pretty soon.

Many existing Destiny 2 players were impressed by the Destiny Rising Closed Alpha. Here’s a couple of reasons:

New activities

There are some decent activities in Destiny Rising, it’s full of familiar content, but also some great new ideas too. For example, Xur has a new activity where you work your way through waves of enemies and pick up a modifier card. This changes something about your hero or the enemies, adding in variety each time you play through. It had rouge-like mechanics, kind-of-similar to something we had in the main game during Season of the Witch. We’ve also got sparrow racing league here in Destiny Rising, which is something the Destiny 2 community has been asking for since I can remember.

Heroes

While the monetisation surrounding Heroes isn’t going to be great, it’s hard to deny the concept of heroes in Destiny Rising isn’t fun. Rather than building out a single Guardian with all the abilities and then creating a build through various subclasses and weapons, Heroes in Destiny Rising have certain abilities, supers and can only use certain weapons. This helps the game feel new, and sounds very similar to a spin off game that was in development at Bungie until the plug was pulled earlier this year. We’ll have to wait and see what the monetisation is like in Destiny Rising, but the early impressions from the closed Alpha have been very positive regarding heroes.

NPCs in missions

We’ve had a few occasions in Destiny 2 where our fireteam have participated in missions, but it’s too few and far between. Here in Destiny Rising we have been fighting alongside NPCs, with them fighting alongside us. I remember Ikora Nova Bombing the Cabal during the Red War campaign, and it feels like a long time since we have fought beside our NPCs. Saint-14 recently got our his bubble in the post campaign mission after The Final Shape in Destiny 2, that’s great but we want to see these legendary characters get in there and smash the enemies alongside us, and it looks like Destiny Rising is going to deliver this.

Bots replace players

Destiny Rising appears to be able to backfill matches with bots when real players aren’t available. This probably wouldn’t be ideal in PVP, but this is very helpful in PVE game modes. For example, you are running a strike or a nightfall-like mission, if you lose out on some human players then it’s going to be very tough to complete the mission. Destiny Rising has the ability to backfill with AI bots and they seem to know what they are doing.

It appears Destiny Rising is much better than people were anticipating. Many wondered if it was going to be a modified version of Destiny 2, and while it doesn’t have the graphical power of the main game, it makes up for it with decent gameplay and loads of game modes. The early signs are very promising, and I for one can’t wait to get into the Beta, or find out about a full release date.

Let me know what you think in the comments.