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Why Destiny: Rise of Iron isn't coming to PS3 and Xbox 360

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News by Brenna Hillier Contributor
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Sorry, legacy console players: you won't be chumming it up with Lord Saladin. Activision is looking at ways to help you make the jump, though.

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Why Destiny: Rise of Iron isn't coming to PS3 and Xbox 360

No, the new Destiny expansion won't be turning up on older consoles. There's no messaging mistake: Rise of Iron is exclusive to PS4 and Xbox One.

There are two reasons for this. First, the legacy console base is pretty small - which likely makes the investment required a bit chancy.

"The overwhelming majority of our player base is now on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Around 90%," Bungie's Eric "Urk" Osborne told me in a chat earlier today.

Second, it's just not possible without making drastic changes to the existing Destiny experience.

"In order to add new content at this time, and especially on the scale and scope of Rise of Iron, we would have to take away from those older consoles, you would have to lose something," Osborne said.

"We still wanna make sure that people playing on legacy consoles still have all the content that they paid for to date."

There's no way that Rise of Iron could live up to its place as the big annual Destiny release and release on older consoles without locking current PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 players out of an experience they paid for, apparently.

"We want to make sure that people who play Rise of Iron get a bunch of new content, that it's worthy of the title of expansion, and delivers tons of new stories, cinematics, characters and places to visit, the new raid and the new gear and all that fun stuff," Osborne said.

"And we wanna do it in a way that doesn't destroy the work that was done and the game that exists on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360."

If you're on an older console but really want to check out Rise of Iron, there's good news:

"We are exploring potential options for players to upgrade Destiny from last-gen to next-gen and will have more to say about that with our hardware partners soon," an Activision spokesperson said in a statement.

It's likely that means the publisher is looking at ways to offer a discounted or free upgrade from last-gen to current-gen Destiny, as it did for several months after the shooter's initial launch.

Although this is a pain for legacy console players it's pretty exciting for the majority of Destiny fans; what might we expect of Rise of Iron now that the limitations of older platforms have been slipped? More vault space? Actually open worlds rather than cunningly hidden loading screens in long canyons?

Anyway, Destiny: Rise of Iron release in September. Pretty excited.

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