Yesterday was the PC release for Destiny 2, and while our mouse and keyboard cousins are getting their first steps into a world without light, Bungie has been answering a number of questions about the state of Destiny 2 going forward. At a preview event last week PC Gamer managed to get some information about how the content, updates, and balancing between the console and PC versions of Destiny 2 will differ–or rather, how they won’t.
After a week introductory period, the Leviathan Raid will go live for PC players next week. Following this, Destiny 2 PC, PS4, and Xbox One will be the same game, barring the improved frame rates and resolution available for PC players (and of course the timed PlayStation exclusive content). “Once we get through that window of intentional staggering of content, when DLC 1 comes out, when DLC 2 comes out, all of those will be day and date with PC,” Bungie’s PC Lead David Shaw told PC Gamer.
While it may seem obvious on the expansion releases, Vicarious Visions (the studio that helped with getting the game up and running on PC) engineering lead Thomas Gawrys confirmed that patches will also be released simultaneously with their console counterparts. “It’s honestly easier for us to ship them all together than it is to try and separate anything out. For us our intent is 100 percent to keep all our platforms equal.”
That’s not to say that the two versions couldn’t diverge if necessary though. “Our goal is to keep everything the same across all our platforms. We did do some work to allow us to tune things for PC, just because we wanted to be ready if we needed to do something drastic,” Gawrys said.
“We absolutely are going to monitor the game once it comes out,” continued Bungie’s David Shaw. “And we won’t be just listening to the ‘what is Destiny saying?’, we’ll be specifically listening to what PC players are saying. Are they having different challenges? As we get crash reports we’ll be differentiating by platform and saying ‘okay what does PC need?’ So if we find things that are problematic we certainly will be eager to address them.”
The coming weeks and months will be interesting now that Destiny 2 is finally available to a PC audience, and we’ll see how well Bungie is able to stick to their singular “one design build” goal that keeps parity between the PC and console versions of the game. It can be assumed that Bungie’s recent reveal of content and plans for season two of Destiny 2 will apply this same rule, and now that the PC version is in the wild, Bungie can begin the process of analyzing and deploying fixes based on community feedback.
[Source: PC Gamer 1, 2]
