Buy 'Destiny' on PS3 or Xbox 360 and upgrade to new-gen for free

   

The wait is almost over: Destiny, former Halo-developer Bungie's ambitious shooter, releases this coming Tuesday. If you're holding out on it because you don't have aPlayStation 4 or Xbox One, though, there's no reason. Bungie has announced that should you purchase the game for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, until next January 15th you're eligible for a free upgrade to a current-gen digital copy. That's as long as you within the console family you bought the game for originally. Meaning, if you buy the game for PS3 you'll get a download of it on PS4, gratis. Any extra content like season passes will carry over too -- just like your character's progress and gear.

This goes way beyond what we saw a handful of titles offer around this time last year in a few different ways. For starters, this costs 100 percent less than the upgrade program for, say, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag or Call of Duty: Ghosts did. The other thing is that you won't have to start from scratch (regardless of how many hours you've invested) when you jump to new hardware; Bungie is making the transition as painless as possible.

Speaking of transitions, Bungie hopes to make Remote Playing its latest effort on the PS Vita simple too. Sony's handheld may be a capable piece of kit but it's lacking total parity with the PlayStation 4's DualShock 4 when it comes to controls. To make up for the handheld's shortage of buttons, Bungie designed a control scheme specifically for playingDestiny on the portable. While the DualShock 4 has a touchpad, the Vita has an entire touch-friendly screen. Bungie has assigned ancillary tasks like tossing grenades, summoning the floating and robotic Peter Dinklage and executing wicked melee attacks to the left, center and right portions of the Vita's display. And, as Eurogamer noticed, since the portable's analog sticks don't click in like their PS4 counterparts, running in-game is handled by pressing down on the system's D-pad.

Why the extra effort? Well, according to the PlayStation Blog, the short-lived Destiny betawas the number one game Remote Played of any PS4 games for all of this past July. Excited? Well, NeoGAF has noticed you can start pre-loading right now.