You can now try Destiny with a free demo on all platforms

Destiny developer Bungie released a free demo for the game yesterday, giving interested players the opportunity to try the shooter and transfer their progress to the full game if they buy it.

The free experience is now live for all platforms Destiny is available on — PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Bungie refers to the last-gen version as the Destiny Demo and the current-gen offering as the Destiny Trial. Both of them offer "a sampling of character creation and progression, story mission content, along with cooperative and social activities," according to an FAQ on Bungie's website.

The Demo requires 6 GB of hard drive space, and the Trial needs 20 GB. Neither the Demo nor the Trial supports external hard drives, so the Demo won't work on an Xbox 360 Arcade, a 4 GB Xbox 360, an Xbox 360 Core or a 12 GB PS3.

Progress is maintained on Destiny's servers, as always, so players who try the free version will be able to continue playing within the same console family. For example, they can try the demo on PS3 and use that character even if they buy the PS4 version, but not the Xbox 360 or Xbox One versions. The Trial can be upgraded to the full version of Destiny through a purchase in the in-game menu, but last-gen players will have to exit the Demo and buy a retail or digital copy of the game.

Bungie released a major update for Destiny this week, bringing the game up to version 1.0.3 with a 2.44 GB patch that added features such as extra bounty slots and voice chat for matchmade games. And yesterday, the studio kicked off its revamped Iron Banner event for competitive multiplayer combat.