Destiny's Vaults expand, but at a cost to PS3 and Xbox 360 gamers

Destiny's latest update, coming in April, will expand a character's vault but it comes at a cost for players on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Bungie wrote in its latest weekly update.

For players on all four platforms, vault space will increase from 20 to 24 for two categories, armor and "general items," and from 20 to 36 for weapons. However, because of memory limitations on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the item comparison feature must be removed to allow for the vault expansion.

"We had a choice, leave the Vault as-is, or find some kind of compromise to enable it safely," said Brad Fish, the game's engineering lead for user interface. "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 is unaffected on PS4 and Xbox One. Also, it will still function outside the Vault on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Why expand the Vault? Bungie acknowledged that "very few people have completely full Vaults," but 21 percent of players at or above level 30 have four or fewer free spaces. "Even at lower levels, there's a small but measurable fraction of players under level 20 who have full Vaults," said John Hopson, the game's user research lead. "You could charitably think of them as ‘collectors' or uncharitably label them as ‘packrats,' but some people just flat out like holding onto their stuff."

In a different matter, Bungie noted that the PlayStation 4 firmware update that launched on Thursday has a Suspend and Resume feature that will not work with Destiny. That functionality will be delivered when Update 1.1.2 arrives sometime in April, before the launch of the House of Wolves DLC expansion.