Looks like some of you are getting in on the fun with beta codes today. I've had a few days to play it, and thought I'd share my experiences. There are no spoilers below.

I have nothing but positive things to say, with the exception of a few small negatives. Overall, I have no doubt the game is going to be fantastic.

Much has been said about the open world, but that is probably a misuse of the term. It's open in the same way that a game like Metroid or Zelda is open. There is a large expansive section of the city to explore, but story missions take you to specific and unique places, and give you things to open up more of the city to you. You're going to go around taking missions, dashes, deliveries, or whatever else seamlessly and without loading. You can unlock fast travel. If you thought the original was too linear, then your grievance is solved.

Mechanically, the game feels much smoother. This is in part because of the 60fps presentation, and partly because the timings of the moves and the moves themselves flow better. In the first, it felt like you were pressing a million buttons to do a bunch of different things, that more or less felt like separate steps. Now, you still have to input the commands, but it feels much more streamlined as a whole if that makes any sense. The game is less reliant upon rapid inputs, with moves requiring slightly fewer inputs, but also MASSIVELY more lenient on timing issues. The timing windows are downright huge.

The original had a lot of movement 'tricks', which are for the most part gone, or else rolled into official moves. For example, in the original sidestepping then whipping your view 90 degrees resulted in you instantly accelerating to top speed. Rather than have to do that, the game simply binds a step move to R2 which accomplishes the same thing but without all the steps. The wall run kick is gone, and so also the numerous exploits involving it. Coiling repeatedly no longer gains you speed in the same way as the original, so now you just use it to clear things.

Combat is also much better. You cannot use guns. The focus seems to be on getting and maintaining your speed. While in a flow, your attacks do more damage and are sometimes capable of one hit take downs. Running and navigating obstacles in an uninterrupted fashion builds a focus meter, which when full, makes all bullets miss you. Running is the way to go. If you have to fight, you can add directionality to your attacks to stagger enemies into one another, into obstacles, or off the roof to their deaths. A missive improvement in this department.

All of this, combined with the open world freedom and the fact that dashes have only an end point, means that your success is more largely determined by your creativity in deciding where to go, and less with your ability to execute timed moves. There are still execution requirements, but the focus is less. This is good in my opinion.

The story missions in the Beta have a tremendous amount of freedom. There's a mission where you must break into someone's apartment and steal something. When Chris101b came over to play, he did the mission in a completely different way than I did. He entered a different way, and exited a different way. I was hugely impressed. If you enter through the fan then you did not get in the way I did!

Dashes are essentially time trials with just and end point, which is cool because you are completely free to take any route you want rather than be limited to hitting the checkpoints. Time trials work the same way as they did in the original.

Delivery missions are I think the first misstep the game presents. Essentially, you will find people hanging out and they will ask you to make a delivery. So, let's say a woman wants you to deliver a statue to her ex-boyfriend. She hands it over, tells you not to break it, and you get a time limit to run it to him. There are several issues:

1. They are functionally identical to dashes, thus redundant.
2. They make the world feel 'small'. Delivery time limits are never more than 2 minutes. You wonder why they can;t deliver it themselves if they are so close.
3. The time limit is arbitrary. Why when time runs out would I suddenly fail (in terms of the game narrative?)
4. Everybody giving you these missions is already on the rooftops. So why again can;t they do it themselves?

A character makes the observation that "back in his day all we had were addresses", regarding how fortunate you are to have waypoints. This is how delivery missions should have worked. They should have not been timed, and required a bit of detective work to find the recipient to encourage exploration. They should also only have been given out from private residences, or some other place where non-runners would plausibly be. If they were more of a long term side mission, where the recipient is on the other end of the city, requiring you to do a bit of homework or exploring to figure out how to deliver it while you are free to do other things, then these missions would be great. As it is, they are just really hard dashes.

The second downside is the music. It is incredibly unmemorable, and the original had great music. Even the menu music was fantastic. Nothing here stands out at all.

There is probably much more story this time around, since we get actual cutscenes. I am assuming this is a prequel given the circumstance the game starts in. No way to know until the full game drops.

Lastly you can make your own time trials. This is super fun, and if you are out exploring and see any by D_P_Roberts, give them a try and try to beat my ghost.

P.S. Long time Bungie fans: there's a mission with a very strong Oni vibe. You'll know it when you see it :-p