During a recent Weekly Update, Bungie announced new details for Destiny‘s upcoming 1.1.2 update – chief among which were specifics on increasing Vault size. Since launch, many players wondered why Bungie chose to implement Vaults of such a small size in comparison to how much gear players acquire daily. The answer, according to Bungie, lies in the hardware limitations of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Bungie announced that Destiny‘s Vaults are getting a long-awaited makeover sometime during April, before the House of Wolves expansion releases. Vault size currently sits at 20 Armor slots, 20 Weapon slots, and 20 General slots; soon to change to 24 Armor, 36 Weapon, and 24 General.
While the update is a welcome one, and definitely one every player will take advantage of, many players have asked the question: why didn’t Destiny have bigger Vault sizes in the first place? Moreover, why has it taken this long for Bungie to implement it?
According to Bungie’s UI Engineering Lead, Brad Fish, increasing the Vault size wasn’t as easy as everyone made it out to be.
“Like a time traveler whose actions in the past inadvertently alter the course of history in unexpected ways, each modification to Destiny has the potential to introduce a variety of side effects. Planning and meticulous verification are key to ensuring the continued stability of the game.”
Bungie explained as much when they released the Heavy Ammo bug fix – that one fix to Destiny‘s code can inadvertently and drastically break something else. As such, fixing anything in the game requires a lot of planning.
What’s interesting is the reason behind the lack of Vault space in the first place – memory limitations within the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
“In the case of the Vault expansion, it became clear that we would be pushing very limited memory constraints on older generation hardware. We had a choice: leave the Vault as-is, or find some kind of compromise to enable it safely. We weighed the options, with player feedback in mind, and decided to move forward with the expansion by disabling the item comparison feature within the Vault on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.”
In order to increase Vault size for all consoles, Bungie had to disable item comparison within the Vault on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. According to Fish, the feature will remain on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
This is another example of previous-generation hardware holding back current-generation, and Destiny isn’t the only game suffering for it; supporting previous-generation consoles caters for those who haven’t upgraded, but it also hinders the final product.
There are many examples of what Destiny could have been if it were only available on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – perhaps we’ll see a current-gen exclusive with a sequel.