Millions of players might have been hoping—assuming, even—that all the work they'd put in leveling up and customizing characters during the Destiny beta would continue on in the final version of the game. Nope. The characters built in this summer's pre-launch test are being wiped and all players will be starting fresh.
News of this decision comes from a post on the official Bungie blog, with reasoning provided by designer Tyson Green:
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.
More than 4.5 million people played the Destiny beta during the weeks it was running. That's a whole lot of people who'll need to start from scratch, and get to that ominous Moon mission the hard way. It's probably fairer to wipe all those characters but it still hurts.
[via Kotaku UK]