Let's Talk About RAM, or "Why Extra Vault Space Isn't Coming Anytime Soon".

Also a programmer, and you're quite wrong. First up, Bungie flat out said what OP is saying:

BF: Like a time traveler whose actions in the past inadvertently alter the course of history in unexpected ways, each modification to Destiny has the potential to introduce a variety of side effects. Planning and meticulous verification are key to ensuring the continued stability of the game.

In the case of the Vault expansion, it became clear that we would be pushing very limited memory constraints on older generation hardware. We had a choice: leave the Vault as-is, or find some kind of compromise to enable it safely. We weighed the options, with player feedback in mind, and decided to move forward with the expansion by disabling the item comparison feature within the Vault on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Item comparison will continue to function within the Vault on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and in all other contexts on all platforms.

Taken from the weekly update that talks about it.

Second, what you are totally failing to understand is that game engines - especially on consoles - tend to use fixed sized allocations for all the major subsystems to guarantee that they have enough memory to do things like load a new zone, or have textures loaded for all of the characters near you, or allow the UI to be up while the game is running. Because of that you can't simply reallocate memory or shuffle things around anytime you need more memory.

Not to mention the fact that paging to disk isn't reliable on consoles (for instance, the Xbox 360 doesn't always have one), compressed assets most of the time need to be decompressed to used (which takes up more memory - the one exception is audio where you can decompress a specific segment of it and buffer it), and streaming assets doesn't work when you need to have all your assets available at the same time. Or the fact that all of those techniques wind up increasing both access latency and processor overhead to do - which negatively impacts overall performance.

If we were talking about a traditional PC game you might be right, but I can guarantee you're dead wrong in this case. Game development - and specifically console game development - is all about working within very tight constraints.

/r/DestinyTheGame Thread Parent