
Destiny 2's Guardians Are Getting a Face Lift in Beyond Light
Bungie's making some player customization tweaks with the next expansion.
Destiny 2's next expansion, Beyond Light, will be the first of three major updates Bungie plans to make to the game over the next couple years. By the time the last of those comes out, Destiny 2 will be about six years old. Instead of letting some long-standing inefficiencies stick around any longer, Bungie will overhaul a few key systems with Beyond Light-and the most notable change to come from this might be your Guardian's face.
In a weekly Destiny 2 update posted yesterday, Bungie runs down a few of the differences players will notice when they get Beyond Light. Guardian customization is one of things that players will notice changes in, thanks in part to some tech tweaks the system sorely needed:
Our original system for player faces had some combinatoric content authoring problems–for example, every decal had to be authored completely custom for each player face permutation. This prevented us from extending this area of the game with more content and features. We've upgraded to a significantly more capable system (with e.g. runtime decal projection), which we hope to leverage for more player customization options in the future.
While rebuilding the player face system, Bungie also had its Diversity Committee and Employee Resource Groups review the face choices that currently exist, leading to a few small changes in the existing variety. "Your Guardian's face may look a bit different," Bungie warns. There are also plans to bring new faces to the customization system in the future, something that likely wouldn't have been possible before this rework.
Along with the fresh faces, Destiny 2 will see its install size shrink (due in part to the vaulting of certain areas and activities, a contentious part of the Beyond Light release) to between 59 and 71 GB, depending on which platform you play on. Two areas that are sticking around after the update, the EDZ and Nessus, are also going to look a bit different since they've been given some love by Bungie's lighting artists (who knows, maybe there'll be some ominous triangular shadows cast over those places).
Beyond Light is set to launch for all platforms on November 10, the same day that the new Xboxes launch. Earlier this week, both the Forsaken and Shadowkeep expansions were added to Destiny 2 on Game Pass for Xbox One, so if you're feeling bold, you could start from scratch now and race to see everything that's going away once Beyond Light hits.
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