Every day brings Destiny 2 players closer to the highly-anticipated launch of its next expansion, Beyond Light. With all of the new content that’s set to arrive in November, including plenty of new missions to take on and enemies to fight on Europa, there’s plenty to get excited for. However, what may excite players even more is that Bungie is taking action to reduce Destiny 2’s file size, even though it will be pretty inconvenient for them in the short term.
File size is becoming a major concern in a time when live-service games take up more and more space on players’ hard drives with each new update. Bungie’s shooter, in particular, has become one of the worst offenders, as last year’s Shadowkeep expansion pushed Destiny 2’s file size all the way to 165GB. And with Beyond Light looking like a massive update on its own, a lot of players are worried about the potential lack of storage space (especially given the potentially larger expansions that will follow it over the next two years).
Even Bungie is being inconvenienced by the sheer size of the game, having revealed in its latest weekly blog post that shipping completed content builds has been taking it over 24 hours. Because of this, the developer revealed, it has undergone a process of streamlining Destiny 2’s systems and cutting content that isn’t being updated or moved to the Destiny Content Vault, with the intention of getting the shipping time down to under 12 hours.
What this will mean for players is that Destiny 2’s file size will shrink by 30-40%, freeing up between 59 and 71GB on their hard-drives (depending on platform). These changes will also mean less waiting time for future updates and bug fixes, while allowing Bungie to respond to player feedback sooner. That’s the good news, but unfortunately, the bad news is that, because of all these changes, players are going to have to redownload all of Destiny 2 once Beyond Light launches.
This will be far from ideal for players who just want to jump into Destiny 2's new content, especially for those with slower internet. Apologizing for it in advance, Bungie revealed that it’s planning to mitigate the hassle for players by making pre-downloads for Beyond Light available the day before launch, which “should give everyone at least 10 hours to download before the gates open.”
No doubt, having to download the game all over again will be a pain, but considering that game file sizes are going to get even bigger in the next generation, it’s better to get it out of the way now before Destiny 2 gets any more bloated.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light will launch on November 10 for PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The PS5 version should be available November 12.
Source: Bungie