Destiny 2 brought its release date forward so the servers don't melt at launch

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In case you missed it, Destiny 2 has brought its release date forward. When delays are a far more common announcement, that's as cool as it is unusual. So I asked director Luke Smith why. 

Admittedly, it's only launching a few days earlier (September 6 for the game, and July 21 for the beta) so not a huge change, but games just don't go in that direction. According to Smith it's got a lot to do with the fact everyone plays games at the weekend. Too many in fact. "We were looking at a bunch of logistics; the technical diligence," he explains. "Our games at Bungie historically have their highest concurrency on the Saturday of their first week. And so, by [originally] going out on a Friday, I think we were putting our technical teams at a risk." 

Basically, it's a bad idea to launch your game just before the busiest day you'll ever have and just hope the servers hold up. What if they don't? "If that happened on a Saturday that could be really bad," understates Smith (as anyone who queued to play Rise of Iron will agree). As he puts it, the small change in days was "an opportunity for us to say, ‘if we can pull the data in for a couple of days [we can] ease some of the tension on the server teams and give our fans a win'". That new Wednesday release date "gives us some time to adjust the scalability on the servers if we need to, if the game is bigger than we anticipated." And, considering Destiny currently has over 30 million registered players, the chances are the sequel will be quite big.

While we wait for that slightly earlier release have a look at everything we know about Destiny 2. We've also got more from Luke Smith about Destiny 1 where he admits "I don’t think we always knew exactly what we were making." 

Leon Hurley
Leon Hurley
Managing editor for guides

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for guides. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website.