Gears of War is a game released only a year after launch and it nearly takes up the entire DVD9, same with Oblivion. A football game takes up 7 out of 8GB, 87.5% of the disc.
There's still 4 years left in the console's life. Don't you Xbox 360 owners expect anything better? It's going to be difficult without getting into multidisc games.
The PlayStation 2 when at a year after release, most games were still on CDs, but now there are almost no PS2 games that come on DVD.
Microsoft's claims that DVD9 is enough are just lies. It will cause problems in the future. Large or even medium-sized games will be forced onto multiple disks or will sloppily have features taken away to fit.
Not necessarily. As the generation goes on, developers code better and therefore waste less space. Case in point: MechAssault 2 actually takes up less space than MechAssault. There's also a lot of buzz around new techniques like procedural synthesis. Just take a look at Roboblitz coming out on Steam and XBLA. It uses the Unreal 3 engine and looks amazing considering its only 50 MB in size.
Admittedly, some two disc games could potentially be a problem. Online co-op would be much harder to pull off it two people had to switch discs. But what I think this means is that 360 developers will simply have to be more careful in coding, and that Microsoft will have to be more diligent in helping them keep file sizes small (see XNA).
One other thing to keep in mind is that it's getting expensive to produce a game. It's easy to create more than 17GB of padding (or FMVs), but to produce 9GB of meaningful compressed content, you're going to need a lot of people working with a large budget. If the PS3 fails to gain the huge marketshare the PS2 did, it's going to be very hard for developers to recoup their losses without porting to the 360 (and somehow dealing with the DVD-9 limits).
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Z @ Nov 27th 2006 7:48PM
Gears of War is a game released only a year after launch and it nearly takes up the entire DVD9, same with Oblivion. A football game takes up 7 out of 8GB, 87.5% of the disc.
There's still 4 years left in the console's life. Don't you Xbox 360 owners expect anything better? It's going to be difficult without getting into multidisc games.
The PlayStation 2 when at a year after release, most games were still on CDs, but now there are almost no PS2 games that come on DVD.
Microsoft's claims that DVD9 is enough are just lies. It will cause problems in the future. Large or even medium-sized games will be forced onto multiple disks or will sloppily have features taken away to fit.
Andrew Fong @ Nov 27th 2006 8:51PM
Not necessarily. As the generation goes on, developers code better and therefore waste less space. Case in point: MechAssault 2 actually takes up less space than MechAssault. There's also a lot of buzz around new techniques like procedural synthesis. Just take a look at Roboblitz coming out on Steam and XBLA. It uses the Unreal 3 engine and looks amazing considering its only 50 MB in size.
See http://www.gamesfirst.com/?id=1132 for reference.
Admittedly, some two disc games could potentially be a problem. Online co-op would be much harder to pull off it two people had to switch discs. But what I think this means is that 360 developers will simply have to be more careful in coding, and that Microsoft will have to be more diligent in helping them keep file sizes small (see XNA).
One other thing to keep in mind is that it's getting expensive to produce a game. It's easy to create more than 17GB of padding (or FMVs), but to produce 9GB of meaningful compressed content, you're going to need a lot of people working with a large budget. If the PS3 fails to gain the huge marketshare the PS2 did, it's going to be very hard for developers to recoup their losses without porting to the 360 (and somehow dealing with the DVD-9 limits).