BenSkywalker said:
You can compromise in every way to make it fit the technology. Much as you are suggesting.
No. If a game requires a dance pad in order to play it, you can't "compromise" the game in any way to make it playable on a joystick and be remotely the same gameplay. If a management sim requires a lot of storage space to keep track of histories, trades, updates, etc., there is no way you can "compromise" the game so that it can be played just by streaming off of the fixed released disc and retain the fundamental purpose of the game itself. The examples I gave indicate that bypassing the "requiste" add-on hardware would fundamentally alter the purpose and experience of playing that game.
Explain how you could do the example I gave in my last post without seriously altering how the game plays to fit on last gen media.
Neglecting any developer tricks to alleviate some of the disc swapping, you are still only talking about a convenience factor. Even if you had to swap the disc every five minutes for the life of the game, gameplay would be the same. Same controls, same graphics, same AI, same everything. The only thing you are talking about is a
distraction during a part of the game where user interaction is idle (transporting from one area of the map to another). The only thing I might agree on wrt modifying gameplay is whether such swapping discouraged me from making such trips - i.e., it might influence my style of playing. But the same can be said for having an HDTV vs. SDTV, size of your screen, environment you play in (wife, kids?), etc. All of those factors would have as much impact on how I approach and interact with a game than whether I preferred to avoid disc swaps or not.
Take a quest where you would travel to multiple provinces from city to city without having to swap disks every few minutes. Scale back content to last gen levels? Compromise what quests you offer to deal with last gen storage? How would you suggest to hinder development to make it work?
How about using multiple discs? Aside from that, I'm not a developer so I can't say with much confidence how useful data redundancy, memory usage, HDD (if present), could be used to minimize disc swapping.
Along those same lines- sports management games could have been done without a HDD if devs were willing to make large compromises to their core gameplay which is what you are asking.
Apparently, we have a different definition of what a "compromise" is. You seem to think that if you change a game to an entirely different game, that is a compromise. I mean, I suppose if my epic battlefield game with flying, rolling, walking, swimming and digging enemies taking place over a huge varied terrain in all weather conditions with twenty weapons couldn't play on a certain hardware it could always be "compromised" to just a dozen enemies of two types in a room with fixed lighting and a single weapon, but that hardly seems a "compromise." In contrast, I feel that a compromise is something like trading framerates for eyecandy, or single disc convenience for larger install base. Neither affect the fundamental gameplay.
