Destiny 2 is one of the longest-standing first-person shooter games on the market, and the franchise as a whole encompasses over seven years of releases and updates. Because the core of the game is that of a looter-shooter, Destiny 2 relies heavily on the fact that players can and will obtain all sorts of possible rolls for each weapon, especially now that buildcrafting has become a major factor. This has been further expanded with the introduction of things like the Light 3.0 updates to subclasses, or the new Artifice Armor that drops from Master difficulty Dungeons, as they are tools that provide more control over what characters can do.
These elements have been fantastic for keeping Destiny 2 alive throughout the years because they provide reasons for players to engage with activities in order to get the best loot possible. However, with all these items that players need to have stored in their vaults and inventories, it's becoming increasingly harder to have enough space for everything one might need - randomly-rolled guns, Exotics with random perks, Exotic armor with random stats, and more. One of the steps Bungie took to improve the current situation was to increase vault space, but that is not enough.
Why Destiny 2's Current Vault Space Situation is Problematic
Destiny 2 has had a vault space issue for years, and Bungie did nothing to improve it over four years leading up to Season of the Haunted, which is when 100 more vault slots were added. The vault is where one can hold loot from a single account, meaning it's shared across up-to three characters, and players only have a total of 600 slots for both weapons and armor pieces. As the game keeps on growing with new weapons and armor pieces being added with each Season, it's unreasonable to have just 600 slots in the vault for a few more years.
The problem is that there are far too many items one may deem as desirable in Destiny 2, and thus want to keep them for later instead of dismantling them immediately. This is completely understandable, because Destiny 2 is a game that changes constantly through sandbox updates, be it a healthy set of adjustments to classes and their abilities or a fundamental overhaul of weapons and how they operate. As such, a given item that may not be significant today could very well be useful in a month or two.
This wouldn't be an issue with deterministic ways of getting items with the exact rolls one wants, which is the whole point of the new crafting system in Destiny 2, but that is not always feasible and only applies to a tiny fraction of weapons. This leads to the next point, which is that things like armor pieces with unique stat rolls and random rolls on regular or Exotic weapons mean players will most likely have to delete stuff to make room for more. This is not what a looter-shooter should force its players to do. Additional vault space is great to have, but at the rate the game is growing, it's unthinkable that players will manage to make do with the slots they currently have.
How Bungie Could Deal With Destiny 2's Vault Issues
Crafting is a good way of dealing with this problem in theory, but it is not in practice given players are only allowed to craft a set of two minor and two major perks on any gun, which means different rolls need to be crafted again as well. This is a major flaw in the current iteration of the crafting system, and Bungie should look into alternatives that allow Destiny 2 players to either change crafted perks (including Enhanced Traits) for free, or at least craft several perks per-column on each weapon. This would reduce the number of crafted weapons players would need to store at any given time, thus generating a bit of extra vault space.
Still, the main issue remains in that vault space will always be limited by the capacity of information that Destiny 2 can effectively store for each of its players. One alternative to this could be to allow at least one or two rolls per unique weapon and armor piece to be saved in the Collection tab when players unlock them, meaning a given roll could be safely dismantled because it would be imprinted in the Collection tab to pick up whenever. This saved roll could be changed for a different one at any given time, sort of overwriting the previous save.
While not the perfect solution to the problem, it could still work wonders by allowing everyone to save an insane amount of vault space, which could then be dedicated to remaining Destiny 2 Exotics, armor pieces, and weapons until new items are released. The benefit of this operation would be to never need a bump in vault space in the short term, but it could still cause trouble if not implemented in a way that secured specific rolls.
Overall, Bungie's approach to vault space is going to be an exponentially complicated problem in the years to come, and it may be one reason why the company eventually decides to make a true sequel to Destiny 2. A similar issue can be seen with the Destiny Content Vault, which is a way for Bungie to remove existing parts of the game in order to make the experience faster and more responsive.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
