Bungie is making some potentially significant changes to Destiny 2 on older consoles, which it believes are important to the game's future. Destiny 2 has now been available for over five years on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It remains actively in development for both platforms, with content released in parity with PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Maintaining the platform going forward for years yet is no simple matter, but Bungie is making an effort to improve Destiny 2 on PS4 and Xbox One so it can continue releasing updates.

While many Destiny 2 players may jump to the assumption that Bungie is addressing the game's file size, there's another problem tied to the PS4 and Xbox One. As Bungie continues to release content for Destiny 2, it's creating much more detailed and rich visual scenes. Environments are full of complex texture work and stretch further into the background. Characters in the foreground have more complex models and high-resolution textures. It takes a lot of memory to display these Destiny 2 scenes, memory that next-generation consoles have that older consoles may not.

Bungie announced in the latest This Week at Bungie article that an update is in the works to launch alongside Lightfall on February 28, 2023. The update will "modify some textures" in Destiny 2 for PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, and Xbox One X. These texture changes will reduce their "memory footprint," which Bungie explains is important to enable the team to "keep creating new content" on these aging platforms.

This week at Bungie, we have a little chat about Guardian abilities and the next step of evolution.

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— Bungie (@Bungie) November 3, 2022

Those thinking that modifying textures to reduce their memory footprint would lead to worse-looking textures, and potentially a worse Destiny 2 experience would be fair to do so. Bungie is confident that the change is necessary, however, and that it's minimized the visual impact as much as possible. While Bungie doesn't detail exactly how its made these changes, it likely means little to no changes in the foreground with increased texture reduction going further into the background.

A series of screenshot comparisons shared by Bungie reflecting the before and after of the update makes clear that the differences may be unnoticeable. Further, those are static images, which would typically make texture differences stand out. In motion, Destiny 2 players will find the changes even more difficult to notice. Of course, Bungie may have chosen examples where the changes didn't stand out. It will take further analysis to make a full judgment.

If Bungie believes that this update is necessary in order for it to continue updating Destiny 2 with new content, that means something. It's possible that Lightfall may not have been ready for launch on PS4 and Xbox One otherwise. It does raise the question of whether Bungie will have to make further changes and sacrifices going forward in 2024 and beyond, though. That may be a small sacrifice so long as Bungie continues to support Destiny 2 on older consoles.

Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

Posted: Nov 06, 2022 10:43 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/bungie-plans-improve-destiny-2-older-consoles/