The publisher’s boss has openly admitted that they made a mistake with Destiny three years ago.

Activision’s CEO, Eric Hirshberg talked with VentureBeat (), where he said the following regarding Destiny:

„We didn’t even reveal Destiny 2 at the reveal event. We revealed it about a month earlier with our two cinematic assets with Cayde-6 and Zavala mapping out the storyline and the characters you’re going to get to play with. The thinking with Destiny 2 was — Destiny had so many towering strengths. It was so engaging, so fresh, so innovative, a new genre. But we’ll all freely admit that the story left something to be desired. We had some areas to improve there. We wanted to lead with a great narrative and great characters you’ll connect with on an emotional level. The strategy was to lead with, “Hey, I wanna hang out with those guys. I want to fight in that battle. I want to be a part of that world.”

Those two cinematic assets we put out about a month before the event were two of our most highly engaging assets we’ve ever created in Destiny’s history. Then, because we led with storytelling at that first beat, when we got to the event we had all of our gameplay powder dry. We just had a tremendous amount of content, an hour’s worth of content on stage, and hands-on content to show at the reveal.”

What a down to earth and modest comment by Hirshberg. Destiny 2’s beta launches on July 18 for PlayStation 4-preorderers (otherwise it’s July 21), and the game will launch at retail on PS4 and X1 on September 6.