Over the course of Destiny 2’s 3-year lifespan, developer Bungie has made a number of key additions to the game through updates, patches, and hot fixes. As a result, the game’s file size has ballooned and loading times have increased considerably.
While most Destiny 2 players on PC can still zip from planet to planet without spending more than a couple seconds staring at their ship in space, console players are not so lucky. It’s common to spend several minutes waiting for certain areas to load, as Destiny 2 both matchmakes with available players and tries to bring up the selected zone. That being said, PC players also have to face slow loading times at certain points in the game.
With a lot of the discussion in the community surrounding Destiny 2 speed runs, one Destiny 2 fan decided to poke fun at the latest debate and the slow loading times. Reddit user Pedrolopa shared a video they created of speed running from the Destiny 2 start screen to the Tower in under 6 minutes.
Pedrolopa’s video actually features the PC version of the gaming going from the Destiny 2 start screen to loading into the Tower in 5 minutes and 58 seconds. The video highlights one of the biggest problems with Destiny 2 right now, beyond PvP balance, the lack of content, or the disappointment with Season of Dawn.
It may seem somewhat fast to console players but the game spends about 3 minutes just getting to the character select screen. Over time the white loading screen has become longer and longer, as Destiny 2 loads player’s characters from its servers. This load time seemingly grew after Bungie added Cross Save to Destiny 2 and now the game has to check from a bigger pool of players.
Slow loading to reach the “real” start screen is sometimes to be expected, but it takes almost 2 minutes to load into the Tower. Granted, Tower loading also includes robust matchmaking as Destiny 2 tries to connect with a group of other players, but spending this long before actually being able to act with the game is frustrating.
Because of Bungie’s announced changes to Worldline Zero skating and skating in general, a lot of the Destiny 2 community has speed runs on the brain. This video capitalizes on that discussion but more importantly it continues to reinforce that Destiny 2’s loading times have become inordinate. This is also on PC, so new consoles likely aren’t going to change things for players on any platform.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.