Arriving in April, update 1.1.2 for Destiny will add support for the upcoming House of Wolves expansion, while also adding some new features.
One of these features is the increase of Vault Space. After the new update goes live, the dimension of your Vault will go from 20 Armor, 20 Weapons, and 20 General items to 24 Armor, 36 Weapons, and 24 General items.
According to User Research Lead John Hopson, only 21% of players are pushing up against the limits of their Vaults:
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.
Live Team lead M.E. Chung then discussed how they knew the Vault space needed to increase to support the new Exotics coming in House of Wolves:
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.
To ensure stability within Destiny, Bungie had to be aware of constraints with the previous generation hardware, as UI Engineering Lead Brad Fish explained:
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.
As it stands, Destiny is one of those PlayStation 4 games that doesn’t support the new Suspend/Resume feature introduced with firmware update 2.50. When update 1.1.2 goes live in April though, the feature will be enabled.
If you try to use Suspend/Resume now, you’ll receive this message: “Cannot enter rest mode with the following application suspended. The PS4 will close this application and then enter rest mode.”
An icon of the application will appear and then a prompt will say, “The PS4 will automatically close the application in 30 seconds,” with an OK and a Cancel button if you do not wish to close the game.
[Source: Bungie (1), (2)]
