Many Guardians rejoiced at the news that Destiny Update 1.1.2 might contain some additional Vault space for them to store their extra gear and weapons in. This has now been confirmed, the extra space will be coming in the next update to Destiny, but some might find their excitement dissipates when they see the actual extra space. Previously your Vault could hold 20 pieces of armor, weapons, and general items each, making for 60 total slots of storage. After Destiny updates to version 1.1.2 you will have 24 armor slots, 36 weapon slots, and 24 general item slots, making for 84 total, an increase of 24, or around a 40% increase.
The new dimensions will let you store twenty-four (24) ARMOR pieces, thirty-six (36) WEAPONS, and twenty-four (24) GENERAL items.
As far as who needs this space, apparently a lot of players. Destiny User Research Lead John Hopson explained that of all players over level 30, 21% have four or fewer free spaces left in their Vault. Even below level 20, “there’s a small but measurable fraction of players…who have full Vaults,” says Hopson. The importance of adding space to player’s Vaults has been apparent to Bungie for a while, but with House of Wolves on the horizon, promising new items and gear to collect, the team felt it was important to get this update out around the same time as that DLC.
This urgency caused the team to rush a little bit, and share work between the House of Wolves expansion and the new update. As Live Team Lead M.E. Chung put it, “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.”
One other reason for the lower than expected additional Vault space is the fact that Destiny is a cross-generational game. “In the case of the Vault expansion, it became clear that we would be pushing very limited memory constraints on older generation hardware,” explained Destiny’s UI Engineering Lead Brad Fish. “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.”
Destiny Update 1.1.2 will arrive in April.
