J. Allard Interview Pt. 2

[satriales]

I think that the Xbox could suffer by not supporting HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. It won't be long before games fill the DVD (infact I think 'Elder Scrolls: Oblivion' already has :? ) and I can see games such as GTA making use of the extra space available on Blu-Ray.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I don't see it, like J said 90% of xbox games were < 4GB even though they had 9.5GB available.

Using 2-3 discs would give a cpacity of 19-28.5 GB and that's PLENTY.

 

[pc999]

I don't see it, like J said 90% of xbox games were < 4GB even though they had 9.5GB available.

Using 2-3 discs would give a cpacity of 19-28.5 GB and that's PLENTY.

As long you dont need to change in the midle of the game.

 

[Spidermate]

I don't think bluray is going to be a factor at all, most people are going to play the games on standard tvs, and bluray movies are not going to look any better then dvd on them, I doubt hdtv sales are going to go up because of the consoles some will buy them but most are going to keep there old tvs, and others aren't going to buy them untill standard tvs are off the market

all the inputs are usles if you don't have a hardrive to trasfer the data to, maybe taking screenshots, looking at pictures, or downloads, but if the harddrive came standard, or it could be networked to work with your pc they wouldn't be needed

Seriously, are you people just looking for something to complain about or what? I mean, first we heard the nonsense about the specs. Then we heard the nonsense about the price. Now we're hearing nonsense about a drive supporting HDTV. I mean, what's next: the color? :? I don't mean to sound like I'm being bias here, but before the time of Blu Ray's announcement, people claimed how it wasn't a big deal to such and such because one would need an HDTV to experience the quality. But soon as some one like Microsoft claims an HD era, all of a sudden, HD matters. Where's the credit, people? Unless Microsoft can get HD quality to run at 720p on a standard television set, I don't see the big deal in that neither. No matter who's product you purchase, you're going to have to invest in something else to experience the full quality, rather that be a new television set or another DVD drive.

 

[therealskywolf]

I think that the Xbox could suffer by not supporting HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. It won't be long before games fill the DVD (infact I think 'Elder Scrolls: Oblivion' already has :? ) and I can see games such as GTA making use of the extra space available on Blu-Ray.

Well, i dont see whats the problem of having a Game with 2 dvds. I just dont see it.......

Back in the Psone days, there were lots and lots of games that shipped in multiple CDs, did that affected anything? No, actually people would be like "Man that rpg comes in 4 discs, WOW its huge!!!! Cool" lol

Are we so fat that its troublesome to get our fat asses of the sofa and change the Disc? Have you guys played Res4? Did the game suffered by coming on 2 discs? No.....

CG people....CG, next gen Graphics are IMO going to set an end to CG, there's no longer the point of having it!

Blu Ray and HD-Dvd will have an impact in Movies, thats all.

 

[ralexand]

As long you dont need to change in the midle of the game.

A good developer would minimize this.

His comments about the barrier to entry is what I agreed with him the most about. I don't need a game that lasts 40 hours. I buy a ton games now and only finished two of them this generation, Halo and Halo2 and the only reason I finished those were because I could play coop with friend to help out. We're talking about all these flops and what not, but the fact remains that having 1000 trees vs. 100 isn't going to make a game significantly more enjoyable to me. I love the tech as much as the next guy, but once we get past that, the most interesting thing for me is the developer who can create a simple experience out of all this complexity. Give me a compelling game of average length vs. a long game that extends itself by having me do alot of boring tasks. KISS, keep it simple.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Great interview. I think MS has made all of the right choices to make X360 a success, as long as Rare, Bungie, BC, Epic, etc... deliver the necessary games.

 

[Panajev2001a]

yea he brings up some good points about bluray on the supply side . Sony may not have enough drives to launch world wide and may not have enough drives to make a decent first launch .

You call those good point, I call them F.U.D. and we will see how they launch in all 3 major territories (worldwide launch) with enough supply to satisfy consumers' demand in each territory.

 

[Spidermate]

That's exactly why I called it fluff. Maybe they'll succeed on a lot of these claims and maybe they won't. But I have heard talk from both sides before. Now I want to see some results. It is much easier to vision a portrait than to actually plaint one. To me, this is nothing more than another hype fest to keep the anticipation flowing. We need hard facts, othwewise keep the talk to a minimum.

 

[Acert93]

yea he brings up some good points about bluray on the supply side . Sony may not have enough drives to launch world wide and may not have enough drives to make a decent first launch .

You call those good point, I call them F.U.D. and we will see how they launch in all 3 major territories (worldwide launch) with enough supply to satisfy consumers' demand in each territory.

I think they said they are aiming to ship 3M consoles which probably WONT meet demand in all areas. From reports it seems pre-orders are doing surprisingly well. I am actually shocked 50 people at any game store would pre-order based on how few games we have seen :?

But looking at it from Allard's pov, what if they were only able to get 2M units out with HD optical devices instead of 3M with DVD devices? That would only intensify the supply issues. They are already balancing a new CPU, new GPU, HDD, a lot of GDDR3, a new SiS chip, etc... Every extra "new" item you throw in could inpact availability.

Whether MS's choice of DVD over Blue Laser technologies was the right one or not will be seen after how available these drives drives are this fall, if drive availability impacts the PS3 much, and most importantly how large the demand is for HD media in 3 or 4 years (and what format has won). I still cannot buy this stuff at my local stores, and while HD displays are growing I think the recent estimates are still only 15M for the end of this year. To compare, broadband--which is constantly chastized for its limited user base--is estimated to have about 40M in the US and 215M worldwide by the end of 2005 (I think 2004 numbers were 34M and 165M).

It still looks like for the next couple years the core gaming audiance, the casual gamer, will be on normal standard TVs, watching DVDs, offline. And from a numbers standpoint broadband/online gaming will probably hit mainstream quicker considering its explosive growth over the last couple years. Europe, for example, still has no coherent HD TV plan :?

Not knocking HD TV (I plan on hocking whatever next consile up to my 8ms LCD Panel!) but it will be more of the realm of early adopters for the next couple years. Great technology and all--and I am on board--but if online is going to be minimized the same applies to HD.

 

[pc999]

A good developer would minimize this.

His comments about the barrier to entry is what I agreed with him the most about. I don't need a game that lasts 40 hours. I buy a ton games now and only finished two of them this generation, Halo and Halo2 and the only reason I finished those were because I could play coop with friend to help out. We're talking about all these flops and what not, but the fact remains that having 1000 trees vs. 100 isn't going to make a game significantly more enjoyable to me. I love the tech as much as the next guy, but once we get past that, the most interesting thing for me is the developer who can create a simple experience out of all this complexity. Give me a compelling game of average length vs. a long game that extends itself by having me do alot of boring tasks. KISS, keep it simple.

Well games can last in a lot of way, multiples forms to get the objective is one, more/biger levels is others...

The interest (at least mine) in newer tech is especialy to get new tipes of gameplays (better looking is nice too), gameplys that need more flops (or whatever) like lots of guys,complex AI, physics, advanced interfaces...
Who much this translate into more Gb they should know.

But for example if they put SP in one disk and MP in other thats fine.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

It's smart for MS to go with DVD and it is also smart for Sony to go with Blu-Ray. The two things are not mutually exclusive IMO.

 

[cthellis42]

I'm kinda surprised they didn't try to develop MS-ROM to sneak in there at the last minute.

 

[mckmas8808]

Johnny Amesome thats the quote of the day right there.

It's smart for MS to go with DVD and it is also smart for Sony to go with Blu-Ray. The two things are not mutually exclusive IMO.

I think people also forget that the PS3 can also utilize most forms of DVD. But I do have a honest question. Would Sony get money from all Blu-ray disc sales? For example when Apple, HP, and Dell include Blu-ray drives in their computers if someone buys blank Blu-ray disc to backup information would Sony make cents on the dollar off that sale?
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Toyota Corolla E70 Specifications

 

[JasonLD]

Sony has every reason to put Blu-ray into PS3, as they are trying to push Blu-Ray as the standard HD media. It is more political than technical reason. Right now, it looks as Microsoft made a right choice with sticking with DVD (probably cost and uncertainty of future standard issues), but Xbox 360 is "supposed" to open the HD era and not supporting any of the HD media format is little bit of downer.

 

[Bjorn]

I don't see it, like J said 90% of xbox games were < 4GB even though they had 9.5GB available.

Using 2-3 discs would give a cpacity of 19-28.5 GB and that's PLENTY.

It's kinda sad that Allard brings up the XBox as comparision since it's all low res, both games and cgi/movies. We're now talking about a bump to 720p for both and also a completely new game generation (UE3 engine and so forth) so i wonder how long it'll take before a game comes out that need two dl dvd's. A lot of people might of course see that as acceptable but i think it's rather annoying to have to switch disc's. And then it's of course the question about redundancy and load/seek times.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I dunno, PS1 had tons of multi-dics games and nobody seemed to care, my and my friends sure didn't give a crap.

Didn't allard say they would have better seek times with the DVD, since blu-ray is so new?

It would be funny if 360 with the normal dvd drive had quicker load times than the blu-ray PS3.

 

[Bjorn]

Didn't allard say they would have better seek times with the DVD, since blu-ray is so new?

Didn't Allard conveniently forget about the redundancy part then ?

Though i have no idea how effective that is and how much it's really used these days.

 

[Acert93]

It would be funny if 360 with the normal dvd drive had quicker load times than the blu-ray PS3.

Not knowing the BR drive speed on the PS3, it is hard to say. But if the PS3 does not have a HDD standard, I would tend to believe that games on the Xbox 360 would have some pretty quick load times with HDD content caching.

Didn't Allard conveniently forget about the redundancy part then ?

There would still be the issues of disk errors. But I would wonder: If a game is only 2GB big, would they even bother with BR? BR disks are currently much more expensive to make than a cheap DVD disk. So just because it has a BR drive does not guarantee all games will ship on BR media (unless Sony mandates such).

It's kinda sad that Allard brings up the XBox as comparision since it's all low res, both games and cgi/movies. We're now talking about a bump to 720p for both and also a completely new game generation (UE3 engine and so forth) so i wonder how long it'll take before a game comes out that need two dl dvd's.

My guess is in the first year we will se at least 2 games that need more than 1 DVD. I do wonder, though, if these games may use the HDD to prevent constant swapping? It probably would not be too much of a pain to load the second disk onto the HDD. Just an idea of course...

I guess the flip side is look at the PC. They have had a ton of room for a very long time, yet you do not see many multi DVD games. The reason being, of course, money. It takes a lot of money to create large worlds. Valve spent $40M on Half Life 2 and it was about 4GB. Doom 3 fit onto 3 CDs. FarCry was 5 I think. And of course all those games are High Definition.

Of course there will be games this gen that go over 8.5GB. But unlike past generations there has not been any single big area that has pushed the size envolope. We already have FMV, 5.1 Sound, high res textures, etc. I am sure more and more games will use better sound and higher resolution textures (and more normal maps), but is there anything right now that is pushing the boundaries of our current media limits?

It is all tradeoffs. Sony is doing the right thing for them by pushing BR out the door. But as a consumer I am not excited about a first gen Blue Laser optical drive in my console. These things have enough problems not falling apart, adding in first generation optical devices just means more problems. But I am not really excited about HD movies either, so everyone is different.

Obviously for hardcore gamers who want an all in one device and who are willing to possible sacrifice some features and quality in a HD optical drive and/or do not want to hot swap some games they will want to wait until Spring 2006 to get a game console with this feature.

 

[jvd]

yea he brings up some good points about bluray on the supply side . Sony may not have enough drives to launch world wide and may not have enough drives to make a decent first launch .

You call those good point, I call them F.U.D. and we will see how they launch in all 3 major territories (worldwide launch) with enough supply to satisfy consumers' demand in each territory.

really ? because they didn't do that with the ps2 , ms didn't do it with the xbox , nintendo didn't do it with the gamecube . Nintendo didn't do it with the ds .

Actually the only launch in the last 10 years that i can remember them having more than enough to meet demand was the psp which sold 200k less than they shipped in the usa and the saturn i guess , i remember it being hard to find but not impossible .

But u claim that even with bluray they will be able to ship and meet demand . I will really like to see this happen .