As you may recall, Destiny 2‘s Xbox Series X update was originally scheduled to launch with Microsoft’s new consoles day and date on Nov. 10, 2020. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Bungie pushed the update out another month, so players on the Xbox Series X and S have been playing the Beyond Light expansion with no upgrades whatsoever.
That changes today with update 3.0.1.
With Destiny 2‘s next update, which is set to start rolling out in the middle of the day today, a whole slew of new improvements are coming. For example:
- Destiny 2 will run at 4K, 60 FPS on Xbox Series X and 1080p, 60 FPS on Xbox Series S
- Xbox Series X will get 120 FPS Crucible support
- Both Xbox Series X and S will get a field of view slider, a fancy option previously only available to PC players
- Load times will be improved across the board (even more so than they already are, apparently)
As someone who’s played a fair bit of Destiny 2 on PC, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the higher frame rates are going to change the game for the better on console. The world just feels more alive, and the Crucible experience is greatly enhanced by upping the frame rate, which in turn improves responsiveness.
The field of view slider is a nice addition, too. This is something previous gen machines just couldn’t have handled — they didn’t have the horsepower and had to be finely tuned just for a 30 FPS target. The Xbox Series X and S have far more capable CPUs, and those help make this new feature possible.
The thing I’m very curious about here is Bungie’s claim of faster load times. This is something plenty of players — myself included — have already seen with the back compat version of the game. If Bungie made further tweaks and managed to bring the load times down even more, that will truly be a feat. In fact, I’ll be a bit envious of those who get an Xbox Series X or S this holiday. Jumping from a last-gen Xbox to one of the new machines will be like moving from a Rascal scooter to a Ferrari. Night and day.
As mentioned, the 3.0.1 update is scheduled to drop mid-day, surrounding by a period of Destiny 2 maintenance. If you can, set your console to auto update so that the game is ready to go for you later this evening. We’ll be sure to share some 60 FPS gameplay from the update as soon as it’s ready.