The Destiny Beta has drawn to a close. Throughout the adventure, I was regularly broadcasting my gameplay on my Twitch Channel and posting highlights to my YouTube Channel. The full playlist of Highlights is above, and below are a couple of my favourite individual videos.

First up, there's my first run in the beta through the Strike, Devil's Lair:

Next, a more bite-sized video of a rapid takedown of the Devil Walker from a Public Event a bit later in the Beta's run:

In the Beta, there were two variants of the competitive multiplayer "Crucible" available, both using the same game type (Control - "Capture & Defend, Guardians!"). Of the two, I preferred Iron Banner, the limited time only event where Level Advantages were enabled so your gear counted. It also granted access to two additional maps, both of which were far better than the First Light map which came as one of the two available in standard Crucible. Here's a quick match on Rusted Lands:

Little bit longer now, but still shorter than that Strike, here's the Mission on the Moon (The Dark Beyond) in standard difficulty. Along the way, we take out a Servitor as part of our first ever Moon-based Public Event. This was a fun adventure, with time limited access, and it teased us mercilessly with the gorgeous environment Bungie has created on the Moon:

And now, the feature presentation...After running through The Dark beyond on standard difficulty, we cranked it up to the Level 9 difficulty and went back in. But this time, partway through, I looked off down a road and wondered aloud what was at the other end. For the next our, we explored the moon, including getting semi-lost in the depths of the Hellmouth, deep below the surface of the moon, discovering giant enemies and terrifying doors and chains and hooks. It was incredible how much of the moon, way off the track of the mission path, was open to us and we crawled over as much of it as we could. Here is that adventure in its entirety:

This Destiny Beta video stuff was also a bit of a Beta test for me. This Twitch channel is new, replacing my old one which was actually a semi-converted Justin.tv channel and thus missing some important features. Now I've proved it works as I wanted, come the full release of Destiny, I'll be doing The Destiny Daily, a daily (or as near as possible) Destiny broadcast on Twitch, with archives on YouTube. Between times, I'll have some less structured video fun from the world of Destiny, and I'll post a weekly review of the best bits right here on my Giant Bomb Blog.

Before that, I'll be doing some broadcasts of the PS4 games I'm using to fill the insufferable 42.5 days left until Destiny drops (Including The Last of Us Remastered and Oddworld: Abe's Oddysey - New 'n' Tasty!). and looking ahead, I'll probably add a regular DRIVECLUB broadcast once Sony's new racer finally hits store shelves.

The idea of large explorable environments, like the moon area you describe is pretty encouraging.

I didn't end up having enough time to play the beta in the end... although I'm looking forward to taking a few days off work to play the game when it drops later this year.

@james_hayward: Yeah, absolutely. Those huge area maps are really attractive to me. I found a lot of traction in dropping into the Explore activity and aimlessly making my way around finding new stuff to do at my own pace.