No, Destiny 2 will not receive a new engine with Beyond Light. However, the technical upgrade is important for the future. What is the deal with the criticized engine and what can we expect in the DLC?
All new with Beyond Light? In the TWaB from September 24, it got “nerdy”: Bungie presented technical changes that will come to Destiny 2 with the Beyond Light expansion.
- Festooned with many technical terms, it was about the engine that powers the game and numerous improvements to it.
- In retrospect, one could read here and there or find videos with titles (via YouTube) that spoke of a “new engine” for Destiny 2.
However, Bungie itself denied that.
This is what Bungie says about the “new engine”: Bungie has never spoken of a new engine. The Destiny developer always refers to improvements, adjustments, or upgrades to the existing system.
Chris Kosanovich, Engineering Manager at Bungie, has even explicitly denied that they are switching to another engine with Destiny 2:
[…] we updated the engine from D1 to D2 and continue to update the engine during the development of D2. We will never develop a completely new engine and switch Destiny to it
Chris Kosanovich via reddit
MeinMMO looks at why Guardians want a new engine and what changes are really coming under the hood.
The old engine as the unseemly bottleneck
Why is the engine considered problematic? Since 2016, we have known that a lot went wrong during the development of Destiny 1. Aside from late reworks or rewriting the story, the engine has been a major problem for Destiny for years.
Anonymous Bungie employees revealed to Jason Schreier (via Kotaku) that loading a map took all night and even the smallest changes took several hours to compile. In the current TWaB, Bungie now officially states that “delivering a full version [of Destiny 2] often takes more than 24 hours.”
The currently used engine is based on a version that was already used for Halo: Reach (2010) and was last significantly adjusted at the launch of Destiny 2 (2017) (via Bungie).
For many players, it has since been said: The engine is to blame for the content droughts and slow patches.
Engine upgrade is one of the most important innovations of Beyond Light
Destiny 2 does not receive a new engine when the next chapter launches on November 10. But that is also not unusual.
Many developers and game franchises rely on the same engine for years, which is only modified from installment to installment. Other studios license development environments such as the Unreal Engine 5.
The engine usually serves the developer as a kind of toolbox, where the countless individual parts of a video game – graphics, animation, sound, physics, etc. – are assembled and we can interact with the virtual world. Source: Game Culture
What the technical improvements bring: Beyond Light upgrades the engine instead of replacing it. However, players will benefit massively from this.
Bungie mentioned, among other things, that the improved development environment will provide the following advantages:
- The complete loading time of the game will take less than 12 hours (let’s remember the 24 hours before)
- It is expected that the optimized processes will give 1-2 more weeks per season to respond flexibly to situations
As players, we ideally get patches and fixes sooner. A nice side effect of the optimization and the elimination of “dead content” is that Destiny 2 shrinks by 30-40% on your hard drives.
Further positive effects are: The adjustments under the hood bring us a few more treats:
- Destiny 2 receives dynamic weather for the first time: Blizzards & Snowstorms in Beyond Light
- Old locations receive a new lighting system
- A new server host structure allows more accurate tracking of player data – In the future, complex missions should be possible with the new physics host, where assets, like enemies, can be distributed more precisely
Are there negative effects? Due to the adjustments, there may also be teething problems in the Destiny universe.
- Bungie confirmed that the disappearance of the popular Prophecy Dungeon is linked to the technical adjustments. They currently expect to bring the activity back in December 2020
- You might not recognize your Guardian: Due to the adjustments, your character’s face may look different – More editor adjustments are likely to find their way into the game in the future
The biggest achievement of the engine improvement is likely that Destiny 2 will become more future-proof. This is also necessary. Because Guardians should say goodbye to a third installment for the foreseeable future. We already know the rough plans for Destiny 2 until 2022.
What do you think of the technical investment? Do you believe that we will benefit significantly from it in the future, or have all your hopes been pinned on Destiny 3?
