Destiny 2's install size will soon shrink significantly - but you have to re-download the entire game

Destiny 2's install size will soon shrink significantly, but there's a catch: you have to re-download the entire game.

Developer Bungie said the upcoming Beyond Light expansion will shrink Destiny 2's install size by 30 to 40 per cent. Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, including all updates, is currently 120GB on PlayStation 4, 111GB on Xbox One and 95GB on PC. After Beyond Light comes out, Destiny 2 will weigh in at between 59GB and 71GB, depending on the platform.

In a post on Bungie.net, Destiny engineering director David Aldridge explained this reduced install size was made possible due to culling unused or replaced content, install size optimisations, and moving some content to the Destiny Content Vault (a decision that has sparked much debate within the Destiny community). "These improvements should also help us control install size better in the coming years," Aldridge said.

That's good news, of course, but it comes with a catch: all players have to re-download the entire game.

Beyond Light, then, is a full re-download on all platforms. "We know this will be painful for those with slower or metered internet connections," Aldridge said, "and we're sorry about that."

Helpfully, Bungie plans to enable Beyond Light preloads sometime in the evening of 9th November, which should give everyone at least 10 hours to download before the floodgates open.

Bungie isn't the only developer to recently announce a reduced install size. Earlier this month, Digital Extremes said it intends to free up at least 15GB of space when it comes to Warframe's install size.

Video game install sizes are of course a hot topic. We've seen some huge games weigh in this generation (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I'm looking at you), and there's concern those PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S SSDs are going to fill up fast.

Back to Destiny 2, and Bungie said its new faster builds should help the developers issue fixes faster than before, especially when it comes to game-breaking bugs, and it should reduce its overall ship pipeline depth, which in turns means the developers can work on Destiny releases closer to their ship dates. The benefit of this is Bungie can react to fresher information.

Aldridge provided an example: "... historically each of our seasons has had to get deep into production before the preceding season launched, preventing us from reacting to learnings from that preceding season. These tech improvements should give us one to two more weeks of flexibility on a seasonal scale, helping us pivot more quickly in some cases."

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