Stop Playing PS4 Version Of Destiny 2

Bungie, the studio behind Destiny 2 and the older Halo games, has a public service announcement for all of its PlayStation 5 guardians: Double check that you are actually playing the PS5 version of the game and not the PS4 version! Don’t feel bad if you are playing the wrong version though, Sony has done a terrible job with all of this stuff.

Destiny 2’s next-gen ports launched alongside the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles back in 2020. While they weren’t new games, they were improved versions of the old-gen originals, with higher resolution and 60fps support. They even loaded faster and felt snappier overall than the PS4 or Xbox One versions. So most players made the free leap to the next-gen editions of Destiny 2, assuming they owned a next-gen machine. On Xbox this was easy. You just…downloaded Destiny 2 on your Xbox Series X and that was that. Over on the PlayStation 5, things aren’t as easy and it seems a “notable” number of Destiny players on Sony’s fancy new console are still, in 2022, actually playing the old PS4 port and not the fancier PS5 version of Bungie’s online shooter.

In its weekly blog post, This Week At Bungie, the studio included a small PSA about the situation, explaining that a “notable number of PS5 players” were not playing the next-gen port, but were stuck playing the older, slower PS4 version of Destiny 2. To remedy this, Bungie pointed users toward a specific webpage created by Sony to help explain how to download and install the right version of your specific game on PS5.

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While I’m sure this PSA will help some folks out, it’s yet another reminder of how Sony is far behind Microsoft and its Xbox Smart Delivery System. I and many others joked about Smart Delivery at the time. “What a silly buzzword! Who cares!” we said. Now, it’s become one of the best things about the Xbox ecosystem.

On Xbox, I never think about this stuff. I just hit download and the correct version of the game installs on my machine and all the saves and everything just…work. On PS5, I have to dig around to install the correct version or in some cases, I have to install both games to transfer saves between them. It all feels like it’s held together with duct tape and doesn’t seem like a good way to handle any of this. It shouldn’t take six steps to play the right game on the right console!

And while this issue will become less and less of a problem as fewer and fewer games are released across both console generations, it makes me nervous about how all this will work on the inevitable PlayStation 6.

Meanwhile, for those still playing Destiny 2 on Xbox One or PS4, Bungie also shared the news that it’s shrinking the game’s memory footprint by compressing some textures. It offered up some comparison shots to show how little the textures are affected by the new system and it looks good. Anything to help make games smaller and more efficient sounds great to me!