We’re a few weeks away from the launch of Destiny 2‘s The Witch Queen expansion. With all the new content and gear coming in 4.0, there’s a lot to come. All the new PvE content is just the beginning. Players will have a whole new cache of gear to get, with a bunch of new God Rolls to chase. But with these expansions, often comes a big download. Those of us gamers on slow connections really appreciate the concept of a pre-load. That’s basically the window that players can download the patch ahead of the actual launch.
Bungie has already said that more than one million pre-orders have already been counted for the new expansion. It would seem that many players are planning to jump back into the wars of the Guardians quite soon. That means there’s going to be a lot of people rushing to download the update. There’s a plan in place to reduce day one loads from this rush. In a blog post, Bungie has revealed necessary details about when and where you can download the expansion. It’s a paid update obviously, so the full content will need to be bought via your platform of choice. Bungie explained how this will work for the Destiny 2 The Witch Queen Pre-Load.
The game servers will be pulled offline on February 21, 7 PM PST, with patch deployment expected to take two hours. From February 21 9 PM PST, players can begin to download the patch. 12 hours later, the servers for D2 will be brought back online. After that point, you will have to download the patch, starting behind everyone else in progress.
Destiny 2 The Witch Queen Pre-Load Start Times
- February 21, 7 PM PST (0300 UTC) – Destiny 2 is brought down for patching.
- February 21, 9 PM (0500 UTC) – Pre-load for Hotfix 4.0.0.1 will be available on all platforms.
- February 22, 9 AM (1700 UTC) – Destiny 2 will be brought back online, with the new patch deployed
- February 22, 11 AM (1900 UTC) – Destiny 2 maintenance is scheduled to finish.
The deployment of the patch will occur at the same time on all platforms, but there are some idiosyncrasies to be wary of. If you’re playing Destiny 2 on a PlayStation 4, though, you’ll need to download the PlayStation 4 compatibility patch first. The version of The Witch Queen on some platforms seems to need some extra love. It’s unclear why this is the case, but we’ll just have to deal with it.