Big Changes Coming with Destiny Update 1.1.2, Includes Suspend/Resume

With PlayStation 4 system update 2.50, gamers were granted the ability to suspend/resume a game which translates into drastically shorter times when turning off/on your console and getting back into your previous game. While many games support the feature right out of the gate, Destiny, one of the most popular games on PS4, lacked the ability to utilize the newly added feature. With Destiny update 1.1.2, all that will change as Bungie will bake in the functionality. Beyond that, other major tweaks will be coming to Destiny like larger vault sizes in preparation for the upcoming House of Wolves expansion.

More details after the jump.

Bungie User Research Lead John Hopson

Very few people have completely full Vaults, but a lot of endgame players are bumping up against the limits. For example, 21% of players who are level 30+ have 4 or fewer free spaces in their weapon Vaults right now. The armor and general sections are slightly less full for most people, but not by much. Even at lower levels, there’s a small but measurable fraction of players under level 20 who have full Vaults.

Specially, with the latest update which will arrive sometime in April, players value space will increase from:

20 Armor to 24
20 Weapons to 36
20 General items to 24

So why the increase in vault space? As it stands, you’ll have just enough room to house all the game’s exotic items but with House of Wolves, all that will change. Live Team lead, M.E. Chung:

Different players have different needs, but our goal was to find a solution that could deliver more Vault space to the greatest number of people in the short term. Our challenge was to provide an increase in storage that fit within the memory constraints that limit how many items can be displayed on one screen. This had to be accomplished by a team who is simultaneously working on future content. We opted for making sure that players would have enough slots for all Exotics from Launch through House of Wolves – thus the largest increase in slot space is for weapons.

We know there are a bunch of players in the world who don’t have enough space for Armor and General items. We’ll have a solution for you in the future.

The increase in vault space will come to both PS3 and PS4 users though the former causes a bit of a headache. As Bungie learned, due to memory constraints on PS3 (and Xbox 360), increasing the allocated slots in the vault wasn’t as simple as redesigning and changing some code. UI Engineering Lead, Brad Fish:

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.

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. Item comparison will continue to function within the Vault on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and in all other contexts on all platforms.

Destiny update 1.1.2 will go live sometime in April while House of Wolves will be released in May.