"Destiny 2: Beyond Light" is about to make some very big changes to the game when it goes live in November. Whether less is more remains to be seen, but for better or worse, players will have to download the entire game again if that happens.

"With these changes, Beyond Light will be a complete re-download on all platforms - an inconvenience for those with slow or metered internet connections. To alleviate this, we plan to make Beyond Light available for preload on the evening of November 9, Pacific Time.

The good news is that Destiny 2's install size will be reduced by an estimated 30-40%, saving 59-71GB depending on the platform. Also, game-breaking bugs will be fixed more quickly (since bugs are expected to continue to occur), and Bungie will be able to "respond to fresher information about what's happening in the main game" because they will be able to continue release work closer to the release date.

"For example, historically each of our seasons had to be deep into production before the previous season began, preventing us from reacting to learning from that previous season," Bungie wrote.

"These technical improvements should give us a week or two more flexibility on a season scale and, in some cases, allow us to pivot more quickly.

The extent of this overhaul makes Bungie's engineering manager Chris Kosanovich's recent comments seem particularly interesting in retrospect: at the June AMA, he described the state of the engine and the fact that it was "a fix turnaround time is In response to a question about complaints that it was slow and causing "strange bugs," he dismissed complaints that the engine was "stale," but acknowledged that "there is a slow process and we are making improvements to address the technical debt.

"We updated the engine from D1 to D2 and continue to update the engine during the development of D2," Kosanovic wrote." We will not create an entirely new engine and migrate Destiny to it, but any future game Bungie makes will not necessarily use Destiny technology unless it makes sense for that game."

"Another interesting thing that came out of Destiny 2: Beyond Light is the reworking of the character face system." We are upgrading to a significantly more capable system (such as run-time decal projection), which we hope to leverage for more player customization options in the future. As part of this process, we worked with the studio's internal diversity committee and employee resource group to review the existing player model and made some small adjustments to the existing player heads," Bungie explained.

"We are also working on a list of guardian face shapes that should be introduced into the game in the future to increase the diversity of guardians in Destiny." "Our long-term goal is to allow everyone to imagine themselves as a Guardian."

Conclusion: "Your Guardian's face may look a little different."

Barring any unforeseen problems, Destiny 2: Beyond Light will go live on November 10. For a list of all that will be removed, click here.