Up until now, Bungie was going back and forth between whether or not we'd be able to keep our beta-created Destiny characters when the retail version releases. Sadly, they recently announced that they will be deleting them after all.
Those of us that participated in the Destiny Beta this past July will need to start fresh come launch this September. Don't be alarmed when you don't see your maxed level 8 characters are nowhere to be found. While we might've guessed that everyone was going to be put on a level playing field from one another regardless, Bungie designer Tyson Green did go into more detail via the developer's official blog post:
"Since the Beta, we've continued to tune and adjust the game. The way you earn experience has been adjusted up and down a bunch of times. Items have been added and removed. New features toggled. Although there's no single monumental change, the sum of the tweaks leaves characters from the Beta Build in strange shape that would be confusing at best, broken at worst."
While some players may have put many hours into the Beta, the level cap was still set to 8 and wasn't too difficult to attain after playing for a few hours. This might've been easier to reach due to the length of the Beta, but there has been hints of an official level cap of 20 in the retail version. Still, we hope that this bit of new doesn't discourage people from buying the retail version of Destiny, releasing this September 9th on PS4, PS3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.
Will you miss your Beta characters, or will this ultimately deter you from purchasing Destiny? Don't worry, we won't judge you.
Source: Bungie.net