The PlayStation 4 alpha for Destiny has drawn to a close, and Bungie is thrilled with the results. A developer blog post from community manager David Dague shared the team’s satisfaction, with the results laid out in an impressive set of statistics covering exactly how much carnage the alpha Guardians wrought.
Chief among those numbers is a whopping 6,461,871 player games. Within those games, Guardians managed to execute 149,522,313 primary weapon kills, 21,782,610 secondary weapon kills, 4,002,737 heavy weapon kills and 21,687,298 super ability kills. That all adds up to a mountain of useful data for the developers to utilize in tweaking the gameplay into the best possible experience.
While early access and open development are increasingly common strategies for indie developers, it is rare to see a public alpha like this for such a massively-hyped, mainstream game.
“Putting our Alpha out there lit a new kind of fire here at Bungie,” explained Dague. “It feels like we’ve been reborn. Putting alpha code out in the wild is always a risk; that build is ancient by our standards, riddled with content and bugs we’d never allow through to ship. In many cases, the really rough and jagged edges had been hammered smooth long ago, making it all the more difficult to see them discovered, but in just as many others, there’s still work to do, and the only way to get it done is to let you touch down in our world to tear the place wide open.”
The Destiny alpha launched on PS4 the weekend after E3, and was unexpectedly extended for “dangerous experiments.” A public beta will follow next month on July 17 for PS3 and PS4.
