Hard drive's impact on video gaming

[scooby_dooby]

It seems obvious. HDD is memory, RAM is memory, of course it "can be done another way' but is it realistic? Is it feasible?

It might be doable, but that's irrelevent, walking across the country in my barefeet is DOABLE, but it's not gona happen.

It's not feasable, requires too much work, and just won't happen.

 

[randycat99]

If character growth requires 1 GB of data, they better be detailed down to the last DNA strand. Otherwise, that justification is utter bunk.

Just to illustrate...try using MS Word to write everything you possibly know to describe a fictional rpg character. Let us know how much typing you had to do to simply fill 50 MB. People don't realize the shear amount of plaintext data that is in a mere 1 MB, let alone 1 GB.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It seems obvious. HDD is memory, RAM is memory, of course it "can be done another way' but is it realistic? Is it feasible?

It might be doable, but that's irrelevent, walking across the country in my barefeet is DOABLE, but it's not gona happen.

It's not feasable, requires too much work, and just won't happen.

Yes, if it's not feasible then it won't happen. I agree with that. What I want to know is is it feasible or not? What information are they needing for this character growth? If anyone just wants to answer with 'they need an HDD and it can't be done any other way' don't bother. If anyone actually has suggestions of what sort of data is needed and how that takes up lots of storage, more than say 20 mbs, let me know.

I'm not saying SE is wrong is saying they need an HDD, but I want to understand why they need it. From my thinking I can't do that. I can't exlpain that massive data requirement. Seeing as this is primarily a technical discussion forum, hows about we get technical and start dissecting and considering the nature of games and what they need to be implemented? We have an assertion. Let's try to prove or disprove it!

 

[Mefisutoferesu]

The only thing I can imagine, Shifty, is something like design your own character to the extreme. For instance you have to flags and decals and everything body scars and art and tatoos and so forth. In other words, you make the model AND the skin... that I could see taking 10-20MB easily (especially at HD resolutions), but how feasible is it to do your own character from scratch for a game? Even with excellent tools the art alone would be hell for some people. Of course, it's the art that would skyrocket the data size as well.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I'm just saying that I'm sure SE would love to be able to not make their game reliant on the HDD, and somehow find a way to make it fit on an 8MB memory card. It would increase their sales and make them more money.

They haven't. They can't. It's either not possible, or completely unfeasable.

We don't make the games, they do. SE are some of the best in the game, console dev's through-and-through and they are telling you point-blank that their game does require a HDD and could not have been done any other way.

btw, enchant arm is rumoured to be requiring the HDD as well.

 

[randycat99]

It may very well be not possibile, but the reasoning of "character growth" as the explanation simply rings hollow. It will ring the "BS alarm bells" for anyone who has a clue about storage space, and it should ring alarms for you, as well.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes, the explanation of character growth confuses me. I couldn't fill up 3 mbs of data on me, let alone a computer sprite! Maybe they're using complex models that change over time, and multiple high-res textures, for several characters?

As for SE being great devs, I don't rate them highly. I've limited experience, seeing FFX and Kingdom Hearts on PS2. Ignoring their games and artworks, on a technical level these games are nothing amazing. Hideous jaggies, shimmer, and low erratic framerates abound. The world's haven't been complex either, with expansive AI and character development of NPCs. I've never looked at a SE game and thought 'wow, that's really impressive' at any point. So I personally remain unconvinced that SE are the best people to comment on what can and can't be done in games as indivcative of the acutal limitations of the hardware. Likewise Bethseda. Morrowind was quite groundbreaking in some ways but it's a game that has a poor framerate no matter what machine you run it on. They certainly aren't the world's best engine developers based on that evidence, so I'm not convinced when the say they need a resource that the genre ACTUALLY needs it, or just the Bethseda development team.

I don't really keep a note of developers and equate them to good or bad. I know people rave about Naughty Dog and Criterion (I think that's who they are) but I've never seen their games. The only devs I've been impressed with are Snowblind Studios with BG : DA and CON. As such my take on develop comments is 'okay, that's how you see things, but that doesn't mean your opinion is absolutely right.' There are good devs and bad devs, and even good devs may miss a trick that another team finds. It might be that this need for an HDD for character growth is based on SE's current way of modelling characters, and a different approach can have similar results with much less resources. Perhaps. We don't really know. But I won't take one devs comments, or two devs comments, as proving a case, especially if they don't explain things in a way I can understand.

Is a HDD necessary for expansive games? Some devs say so, but I'll wait for more devs to comment and get some games out before I accept that as fact. I've always been impressed by how much can be squeezed out of current gen and I won't put it past some smart people to find ways to achieve amazing things even without the resources one would assume would be needed.