‘Destiny’ Box Art Revealed; Beta Releasing As Pre-order Bonus?

Destiny has been a game on many lips ever since it was first announced in February. As well as being Bungie‘s follow up to the Halo series, Destinyplays with the term “MMO” and mixes it with a “AAA” first-person shooter experience. Winning a flurry of E3 and Gamescom awards, the game has garnered some of the biggest hype going into the next-generation.

Bungie has been working away on their new long-term IP after a summer of showcasing Destiny at various conventions and expos. Working towards their 2014 release date, updates have been a little scarce of late but today the box art for the game has been released showing its marketing direction, with a promise of a new announcement and a trailer tomorrow.

What’s interesting about the Destiny box cover art is that instead of focusing on the ‘Traveler’, the big mysterious white sphere that hovers above Earth’s last city in Destiny, it’s been pushed to the for the background in favor of faceless, generic sci-fi action protagonists. Read into that what you will, but the Traveler is the more unique and interesting element that’s been the centerpiece of most of the game’s art and placeholder covers to date.

Also, a rather interesting observation is that even though the bottom-right image is the back of one of the Guardians, the design bares an odd resemblance to another sci-fi, cloak-wearing super soldier with a Bungie past…

In other Destiny related news, fans who invest in the game early may be given the chance to jump into the universe of Destiny before release. MMOs are often tricky things to manage on the server side and have a history of falling apart when first put up to the test of going public (see: Diablo 3 launch). To alleviate concerns, publishers and developers are increasingly taking advantage of beta periods for players in order to catch server problems and bugs early. Destiny is going to be no different, and according to a Reddit user claiming to have found the news on theDestiny website , all it could take to be a Destiny tester is pre-ordering the game.

If true, as long as players are willing to pre-order the game, they could enjoy a sizable amount of gameplay early on to help Bungie work through bugs in the system a la. This is the second time in less than a week that a major development for a game has been found on a company website and posted onReddit before it has been announced.

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Destiny is due out in Q2 or Q3 of 2014 on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.