New Xbox360 Game To Require Hard Drive To Play

[Vennt]

There's no irony, I'm not making an issue over the HDD's use in these titles, rather at it's lack of use in future titles, and likely the majority of titles as the spread between HDD owners and non-owners increases.

It's no good claiming figures for HDD adoption until the 360 hits a mainstream price, and once it does if you still have 2 SKU's then the usual mainstream buyer, the one who waits for a $199 or less price will snap up the cheapest option available to him, previous market performance for consoles support this as it's not the hardcore early adopter who makes up the bulk of a consoles user-base, but the cheap-ass casual.

I've not got a 360 yet only for 2 reasons:

1: I'm European, and they're only just starting to hit our shelves in easily available quantities
2: I broke my wrist so no gaming for 2 months, period.

When I do, I'll get a premium without question, however I'd want MORE titles to use the HDD, not less, and THATS why I think the HDD-less SKU is damaging overall.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I was one of the biggest proponents of base HDD as something every console should come with, but the fact is it will let them hit that $99 or $199 pricepoint faster, and people are already used to buying the system+storage device. So, it's hard to blame them for taking advantage that situation.

The 2 SKU's is good because it creates that initial huge install base for the peripheral, they also threw in HD cables and a wirelss remote to esnure that practically anyone who could would buy the HDD version. That's how you do it right IMO.

In addition tehy've built functions into the system to pretty much allow HDD streaming at the flick of a switch, so again they are ensuring that most develoeprs will support the HDD at least to some extent.

MS can control the install base to some extent with pricing, even if they price the HDD at $60 or even $50 they are making plenty of profit, and it pushes people to get on live.

It's just not a big deal, developers have the CHOICE to do what they want, i'm glad they allow this, that's how it should be.

 

[expletive]

Personally I don't think that theres any place for a HDD-less SKU, the only thing it does is promote lesser use of the HDD overall, and it would be in the benefit of all 360 owners for HDD to be considered the "standard", this can't happen whilst there is a HDD-less SKU.

Maybe YOU dont see a need for it but if youre the kid who only has 299 to spend on a console and not 399, then maybe it would make more sense to you.

 

[GB123]

There's no irony, I'm not making an issue over the HDD's use in these titles, rather at it's lack of use in future titles, and likely the majority of titles as the spread between HDD owners and non-owners increases.

It's no good claiming figures for HDD adoption until the 360 hits a mainstream price, and once it does if you still have 2 SKU's then the usual mainstream buyer, the one who waits for a $199 or less price will snap up the cheapest option available to him, previous market performance for consoles support this as it's not the hardcore early adopter who makes up the bulk of a consoles user-base, but the cheap-ass casual.

I've not got a 360 yet only for 2 reasons:

1: I'm European, and they're only just starting to hit our shelves in easily available quantities
2: I broke my wrist so no gaming for 2 months, period.

When I do, I'll get a premium without question, however I'd want MORE titles to use the HDD, not less, and THATS why I think the HDD-less SKU is damaging overall.

But most of the original xbox games didn't use the HDD for anything other than caching data.

The 360 HDD has a bigger use than just games, one of the most interesting to me is how casual gamers will react to downloadable demo's through xbox live.

 

[superguy]

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/101/hdd0wb.jpg

This is already an avatar at another forum.

Proves this whole thing is just about some people's dislike for a certain console..

 

[randycat99]

Have there been any numbers posted for individual hdd sales vs. core system sales?

 

[Miksu]

It's quite interesting that so few people know about Football Manager. I suppose that tells that not so many console gamers follow what happens in the PC-world. Football Manager is one of the longest running game series on PC, dating back to 1992 when first Championship Manager was released. Football Manager is developed by SI Games and the series has the most devoted fanbase I've ever seen. FM2006's Xbox 360 -version was supposed to be the first console-port of the game where the options and complexity weren't tuned down.

Like the game's title says, it's all about managing a football club. You choose a team, buy the players, make the tactics and try to win games.

Football Manager 2006 is massive. It's massive as a game and it's massive when talking about save games. My savegame was little over 250MB after finishing 7 seasons. Here's some numbers from the game:

- 50 countries
- 250k real players
- hundreds of leagues

In some ways Football Manager is niche, in some ways it isn't. It's popular as hell in UK. Here's a quote from last October (found in here):

"Sega’s ‘Football Manager 2006’ (PC) sells twice as many as last year’s version, scoring No2 in the All Formats Chart. ‘Football Manager 2006’ outsells ‘The Sims 2’ in its first week to become the 2nd fastest selling PC game behind Sport Interactive’s very own ‘Championship Manager 4’ way back in week 13, 2003."

 

[randycat99]

Ever tried to zip archive that save file? No seriously (this is not a facetious remark), I'm curious what it would compress down to when zipped.

 

[Miksu]

Ever tried to zip archive that save file? No seriously (this is not a facetious remark), I'm curious what it would compress down to when zipped.

I don't have any large FM2006 savegames around currently but 311MB savegame file from FM2005 translates into 84MB when zipped.

 

[randycat99]

Thanks for the info!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

- 50 countries
- 250k real players
- hundreds of leagues

Okay, that goes some way to explaining it. Thanks for giving the useful realworld numbers!

 

[Ginko]

The problem is, and we've discussed about this many times already, is that in the Xbox the HDD was used in a much more useful way than just to save big stats and stuff like that.
If now the 360 userbase is really 90-10, then why bother releasing a unit without the HDD?
Now because of that, only a few games will be able to use the HDD for caching and things that generally make games better - definately made some Xbox games better, especially in terms of loading times...
It was a stupid decision from many sides.

Curious, what Xbox games are you referring to when you say the loading times were better?

The most impressive, and almost non-existant/very short loading times I've come across have all been on the Gamecube, then the PS2 coming in a very close second, and the Xbox trailing in a distant third (Conker, Jade Empire, and Riddick were AWFUL with frequent and long loading).

The fact that the PS2 didn't have loading times for games like Jak & Daxter, or very short ones for other games like Ratchet & Clank, I'd say the HDD's value drops dramatically in terms of usefullness other than storing large amounts of saves.

my 2 cents. Still curious what Xbox games you were talking about though.

 

[AlNom]

my 2 cents. Still curious what Xbox games you were talking about though.

Halo 2 is one...

 

[rounin]

my 2 cents. Still curious what Xbox games you were talking about though.

I'm not London-Boy but I can say that with my limited collection on my Xbox DOAU, Ninja Gaiden, Halo2, loaded really fast due to caching, and almost all multiplatform games load faster on Xbox (ie Bunrout series)

 

[Ginko]

Halo 2 had one big load and that was it. Jak & Daxter on the PS2 did the same thing, and I believe the Grand Theft Auto series did as well (and I know that GTA loads faster on Xbox). If the HDD gave developers the ability to minimize load times then why did I have to sit through so many long ones, especially from seemingly talented developers (Conker from Rare, Jade Empire from Bioware, and Riddick from Starbreeze).

Question is if the HDD is necessary and cost-effective to include. As you may or may not know, the HDD was one of the components in the original Xbox that kept manufacturing costs so high. How many developers utilized it? Did the majority of customers care? Will they really miss it, or would games suffer from a lack of it? I certainly don't think so.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Halo 2 uses 2 cache directories to cache over 1.4GB of information.

Load a lvel for the first time and it's like 40+ seconds, ever subsequent load is like 10-20 seconds, that's what the HDD allowed.

 

[Ginko]

Halo 2 uses 2 cache directories to cache over 1.4GB of information.

Load a lvel for the first time and it's like 40+ seconds, ever subsequent load is like 10-20 seconds, that's what the HDD allowed.

even so, there were games on PS2 and GC with non-existant loading times outside the initial load. Good, no, great looking games at that.

Even though the HDD allowed it, was it really utilized? Was it worth the loss to MS?

 

[Rolf N]

Ever tried to zip archive that save file? No seriously (this is not a facetious remark), I'm curious what it would compress down to when zipped.

You cannot rely on lossless compression when designing for a specific storage constraint. How well the savegame compresses depends entirely on its contents, and it is the nature of save games to have varying contents

Unless you can guarantee that every possible save game can be compressed to <=the size of a memory card, there's no point making the game compatible with that memory card. If you can compress your starting save to 10MB that's good, but it would just suck if a few seasons later, when the data has grown, you suddenly couldn't save to a memory card anymore.

That being said, the game may well just carry around too much fluff in its save games. E.g. if there's some variable in there that can only take a few different values (say, players' player numbers), storing it as a 32 bit integer is a genuine waste of space. In other instances you may have continuous numbers with large ranges that appear to just require all their bits, but you could still get away with far less. E.g. a player's hair color or whatnot might be stored as a three-byte RGB triplet, whereas if you used some universal color palette for it, you could get away with a single byte for 256 discrete hair colors (and that's stretching it).

As a rule of thumb, the first described form of waste of space generally leads to good and somewhat reliable lossless compression ratios. If you use just the lower 8 bits of your typical 32 bit integers, the others are invariantly going to be zero, and that's something a lossless compression algorithm can catch. The trouble are variables that usually are zeroes, but can under specific circumstances vary (e.g. a bitmask indicating broken limbs). Assuming good compression for something like that is a liability.

Quantities expressed in floating point formats tend to not compress well at all. IMO they are best avoided in save games in favor of some sort of quantization to a small integer.

If you look at typical console games, many have signs of being designed specifically for small and constant savegame size. E.g. all character attributes in all Final Fantasy games are integers and max out at 255 (an unsigned byte). All console RPGs, with the exception of Morrowind (which has an HDD at its disposal after all), have a hard limit on the number of different inventory items you can carry, and a hard limit on how many of each you can have. Also the whole issue with save points, random encounters/respawns in rooms that were previously cleared, disappearing corpses etc is something that allows keeping save games small and constantly sized.

____________
Re the topic at large ("no default HDD on XBox360, game designers at least encouraged to make their games work with just memory cards"):
I believe it is a step back. The HDD on the first XBox was IMO a main differentiator to the other consoles. Every game could rely on having virtual memory and huge amounts of space for save games. This allowed doing certain things on the XBox that just weren't possible on the other consoles (again: Morrowind). That differentiation is now lost. Everyone can sell a slap-on HDD to a system to enable the genres that require that (and at least Sony did it already), but it was a definite strength of the first XBox to have it in the base configuration.