Conclusion

What we've seen so far from Bungie's Destiny 2 gameplay looks extremely promising. While it's still a little early to tell, with limited access to campaign missions, the game seems to address most of the criticism voiced by gamers after the Destiny 1 release. Gone are the infamous Grimoire cards from the original Destiny, which, while extremely interesting for lore-starved players, were implemented messily and outside the game interface proper. Bungie has elected to include lore through item descriptions, scannable objects in the environment, and an increased focus on storytelling. Gameplay, however, remains a mix of FPS shooter and MMO, which reminds me a bit of Borderlands. You pick from one of three classes that have special weapons, skills, and abilities that can be improved throughout the game, as your character levels up. Bungie's 30 second fun loop they've been mastering and iterating on since the original Halo is well patent here: shooting is satisfying, visceral, and fun.

In Destiny 2, Bungie seems to be using the same game engine they used for Destiny 1, obviously with modernizations and added features. The graphics look crisp and richly detailed; I would classify them as "very good" for 2017. The PC version comes with a sufficient number of graphics options to ensure everybody can get decent performance out of the game. A novel feature is the addition of HDR, which promises to play well with the engine's Global Illumination capabilities, but getting HDR monitors into the hands of gamers will take a very long time; my guess would be half a decade for serious market penetration as monitors are the least-often-upgraded hardware component. One thing that is very impressive (but shouldn't be) is the game's native support for 21:9 rendering resolution. Cinematics, menus, and gameplay all render correctly and natively at that ratio, which is something that is still, unfortunately and in 2017, a bit hit or miss with new releases.

What also worries me is that Destiny 2 is DirectX 11. Don't get me wrong, the game looks and plays fine, but didn't GPU vendors promise us tons of DX12 games in 2017? I haven't seen many, and it seems that the mantra these days is to rather stick with DX11 instead of spending time and money on a new engine that may or may not work better than the DX11 engine you already have, ready to go and make you some money.

Gaming performance of Destiny 2 is good; 60 FPS are well within the range of mainstream graphics cards like the GTX 1060 and RX 480/RX 580 graphics cards on 1080p, even with all the bells and whistles enabled. Just be sure to enable SMAA instead of MSAA since the latter comes with a higher performance penalty without an equivalent improvement in rendering quality.

This doesn't mean that the game isn't demanding in itself, though. If you want to game at over 60 FPS (and with a game of this nature on PC, that's what you should strive to achieve) on 2K resolution, you'll have to make the jump towards a GTX 1080 since the GTX 1070 and Vega 64 both fall short of that magical average. However, you can easily recoup the small number of frames you're lacking by dropping a few settings from "Highest" to "High" - the added fluidity makes more of an impact on your gameplay experience than the visual impact of turning those settings down. You can even make use of Destiny 2's rendering resolution feature to gain those extra frames if you want.

If you're looking towards gaming at 4K, you'll really have to have a beast of a system; even NVIDIA's mighty GTX 1080 Ti falls short of 60 FPS at that resolution, delivering a still fluid 48 FPS - even more so if you use a G-Sync-enabled panel. Destiny 2 supports SLI, though - so keep that in mind should you have an NVIDIA graphics card in your system. And for perspective, you can also keep in mind that console players will be stuck at 30 FPS for the foreseeable future; if they can make do with that, so too can you, if you're one of those for whom eye candy trumps frames per second - up to a point.

NVIDIA has been hard at work promoting Destiny 2 in partnership with Bungie, and the strength of NVIDIA's architectures shines through in this title. NVIDIA's late-generation Maxwell-based GTX 970 can still deliver top of the line performance at 1080p, and NVIDIA's alternatives routinely best their would-be AMD competitors. Seeing a GTX 1070 besting AMD's flagship RX Vega 64 at 1080p is impressive; NVIDIA's champion even stays within a single frame of difference as resolution increases towards 2K and 4K. AMD, on the other hand, seems to have some more optimization to do on this game, even though they too came out with a Game-Ready driver for Destiny 2 (which we used for this article).

Even though this is still a Beta for a game that will only be out towards the end of October, gameplay and features seem solid for a PC release of the entertainment juggernaut that is Destiny 2. There are some bugs, but these are few and far between, and so far, not experience-breaking. PC settings and feature support is top-notch, and usually, things can only improve from a Beta. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can access the Open Beta through your Blizzard account, download the game, and experience the first story mission in addition to competitive multiplayer and a single, cooperative, matchmaking-enabled Strike.