Explore Destiny’s Planets With Google View

Editors Note: This website requires plenty of video and computing power. It also seems to run significantly better in Mozilla than Chrome.

Do you like goofing around on Google Earth, hoping to find out who was parked in front of your house when the camera truck came by? If so, you will enjoy Google’s new advertisement partnership with the developers of Destiny. This new map brings you Earth, Venus, Mars, and the Moon all set in the Destiny timeline.

When you first load the page, instead of a “loading…” screen you are encouraged to turn the volume all the way up. Don’t. You probably have your volume set to a perfectly comfortable level and that will do just fine. You can always turn it up later.

You can’t just roam around freely like you can in Google Earth,  but you get plenty of the same feel following a preset path to multiple points of interest along the way. You can stand in one place and rotate your view 360 degrees, much like Google Earth. From the Moon, Earth is pleasantly displayed on the horizon, with a note about how awesome it may look, but how sad and messed up it really is from the conflict.

A guide will introduce you to each new zone and tell you a little about the place. After that, there will usually be a video or picture prompt that you can click on to see the zone “in action.” The only downside here is that several of the videos are rehashed versions of the advertisement trailers that have already been released. The upside is that you might get to see new screenshots of the game or the narrator could let you in on a little known piece of info. There are also a few Google links directly to Wikipedia for more encyclopedic points of interest such as the Milky Way or the Lunar cycle of the Moon.

If you’re having trouble loading the site, but you know your computer should be able to handle it, I suggest letting it sit for a little while. The site has plenty of pre-loaded content and could use a minute to buffer. I was unable to determine if you get any rewards for exploring a whole planet. Either my computer or the website refused to load a few of the picture prompts. Here’s hoping it was just my computer and you can enjoy the whole site. It’s a beauty. 

The interface has points of interest on the minimap and a first person view of the planets surface.

This is an excellent way to get potential players familiar with the maps and terrain before the game releases on Sep 9, 2014. Resources like this can be fun and “educational” for the game. There are plenty of games that could benefit from the players knowing the map before the game comes out. Grand Theft Auto, anyone?

The Destiny hype machine is rolling along pretty well. The game hasn’t really gotten my attention, but fun stuff like this website has. The Pokemon promotion that Google ran a while back is another solid demonstration of what can keep Google distracted long enough to keep them from taking over the world.

Note: If you explore every single location on the map, you are rewarded with an In-game emblem for your troubles.