If you’ve been following the progress of Bungie’s enormous new game, Destiny, you’ll know that some clever players were able to access and expose sections of the game relegated to being downloadable content.
One such player managed to enter a location called The Terminus, which isn’t supposed to be accessible until Destiny’s first DLC pack The Dark Below releases. The areas are unfinished, but having inaccessible, downloadable content already on-disc has been the cause of massive controversy in the gaming industry for some time now. Quick to defend the game, Bungie president Harold Ryan sat down and spoke with Eurogamer, explaining that the content was put on-disc to limit download sizes.
“Both inside the US and all over the world, how much you download on your local home internet connection can be a problem, and even how much storage space it takes up on your console,” Ryan said. “So we share a lot of assets across all the activities in the game. When people get into areas that aren’t unlocked right now, they’re seeing pieces we built and shipped ahead of time, but they’re by no means the finished experiences or even the finished content.”
Ryan stressed that what was in the DLC was built after the game shipped. For instance, a new character called Eris was built and polished after Destiny shipped.
The Dark Below releases on December 9th for $20 and adds new weapons and story missions, as well as raising the level cap to 32.
Originally published November 3, 2014. Updated January 18, 2020.
