Today was arguably a pretty huge day in the world of Destiny 2 on Xbox Series X. For the first time since the launch of Beyond Light, I was put into a queue at login. That means a lot of players were very eager to see all the improvements that came with Update 3.0.1. And yes, that meant a whole lot of “Contacting Destiny 2 servers.” Some things never change.
How has the update fared so far, though? If you’re curious about what I think of Destiny 2‘s official next-gen upgrade, read on. Also, before you go any further, if you are really interested in keeping up with Destiny News, check out Destiny News Hub. They really keep on top of everything going on with Destiny on a daily basis.
Simply game-changing
I also own Destiny 2 on PC, and there are some areas where my 10th-gen Core i7 and RTX 2070 drop frames, even at 1080p. The Tower is one such location. The Trostlands in the EDZ — especially when the church is in view — is another. I experienced none of these drops in Destiny 2 on the Series X. It held, and held impressively.
A match of Crucible was just as impressive. I didn’t notice any stutters while playing. In fact, I briefly forgot I was playing on the Series X for a moment and not a PC. In terms of a 60 frames-per-second experience, the two are pretty much on par now. That Destiny 2 appears to be hitting 4K on Microsoft’s new machine makes it even better.
Load times feel about the same. I don’t think Bungie could really make great strides here, as Destiny 2 was already loading pretty quickly on Series X. With that said, I’m happy I didn’t notice an increase after the update, which wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
In terms of options, there is now a field of view slider in the settings screen — very nice. There are also a few other toggles as well. You can now turn off motion blur, for instance, as well as film grain and chromatic aberration if you so choose. Bungie is getting closer and closer to having just one version of Destiny 2 that scales across platforms.
Sadly, if there is one thing this update could’ve done that it didn’t, it is fixing HDR. I still can’t get HDR to look right on my display. With HDR off, the game looks gorgeous. Turning HDR on, however, degrades the skybox to a certain degree. No amount of fiddling I’ve done either with the display or the game has worked, and I don’t have issues with any other game — just Destiny 2.
All in all, though, I’m pretty pleased with how Destiny 2 on Xbox Series X turned out. There is now an even smaller gap between the performance on Xbox Series X versus a similarly decked out PC rig, and that’ll come in handy when cross-play eventually arrives in 2021.