Speculation: lack of a next gen media format may be a big problem

That's kind of a pointless comment for him to make then, no one expects the next gen NOT to increase in speed over the previous gen. Not completely though, as I guess it does illustrate what to expect for the more unimaginative people, but even then, load times may stay the same as assets are getting larger.
Besides, stockholders and ******s wanna know why they're supporting one system over the other. (I suppose Blu-ray is a newer marketting buzzword than DVD though, just like cores over Mhz now)

 

I agree in the same sense that min-DVD were good enough for last generation and 32mb cartridges were good enough for the one before it. But all the same the larger media formats on other consoles were made good use of in those past generations, and the same is bound to follow for this one.

 

Based on previous generations there were at least two platforms that supported the larger/largest storage medium.

psx/saturn - cd
xbox/ps2 - dvd

 

I agree with the statement: "Given a larger size, developers will make good use of it." I would disagree if the statement is "Lack of next gen media format may be a big problem."

 

ah, yeah, I wasn't trying to defend the claim in the thread title as that is just outright absurd.

 

of course he wasn't comparing it to 12x DVD when saying 'way beyond'.

they are too close for that kind of comment

I agree it was referring to old gen

 

I dont see why OblIVion is quoted as an example of a big game never before thought to fit into a DVD...

• it is a smal game (I finished it in record time)
• with simple dungeons (even the zelda games has more challenging (puzzles in the) dungeons)
• simple AI (hack n smash)
• not a big variety in the environment
• not a big variety in the monsters
• lack of video-cut-scenes
• I am sure I can say something about the voice-overs and music, but I don't remember it well enough

... of course it fits a DVD! Still a fun game, think *I* gave it a 90/100 overall (where the graphics did a lot for the score).

 

Oblivion is large in the context of "game world" size and relative detail in said game world. AI & difficulty aren't very related to "size" so to speak but I would agree they could have mixed it up a bit with more variety. Something akin to what crysis is attempting to do for in-game characters. For what it is though, Oblivion is a very large game compared to the others on the market. This is remarkable because it fits comfortably on single layer dvd. Even with doubling the amount of content in the traditional way without using any additional methods for file size reduction such as procedural synthesis, the game would still fit on one dvd.

 

Because the Guild Quests in oblivion as long as most of single player campaigns in most games today, the game takes place over 16 square miles, and has literally hundreds of hours of gameplay. There's as much, or more, variety in the enemies than most other games as well, most games have maybe a dozen types of badguys, oblivion has at least 20 or 30.

Like 2gb of oblivion was audio, so if you strip away that, the actuall game itself was barely over 2GB!

 

Yet Oblvion wouldn't be nearly as cool with no audio.

 

most games don't have nearly the audio requirements of oblivion. Oblivion uses 2gb, while most games use well under 500mb.

 

Apparently FFXII is an example of a game exceeding the capacity of a single DVD:

Just curious, with the advent of the optional HD-DVD drive, when a game like FFXIII is developed for X360, is the consensus that developers will create games on HD-DVD or more likely on multiple DVDs? IIRC, it was stated a while back that the HD-DVD would not be used for games. Is that correct?

-aldo

 

They probably wouldn't develop a game 'like' FF13 that relies on high resolution CG cut scenese, but rather do realtime cut-scenes and attempt to fit it within 7.4gb, or split it across 2 discs, from there *hopefully* they allow users to install the 2nd disc on the HDD.

 

Can anyone advise whether the time for read heads to do a layer change on a dvd is a big problem, as it seems like the majority of DVD games try and stay inside one layer capacity and if it is a problem then presumably some data would need to be duplicated on both layers further reducing the overall capacity available to games

 

Uninstalling and reinstalling that second disk every time I switch between games that do that doesn't sound like fun at all.

 

As I mentioned elsewhere, the second layer has been known to have issues on PS2 games that use it. The actual technical nature of those issues is lost on me, but as the second layer is basically harder to read than the first, I would expect seek rates to be down. I may be utterly wrong on this point though!

 

No, but how many games out there are like that? How many use that much high definition CG?

For that matter I suspect that FF13 could be done on a single DVD-9 disk if they simply reduced the CG cutscene resolution to a standard 480p DVD format.

 

Kind of a buzzkill to the "HD era" that MS and Sony have been pushing huh? I want all my media in HD, games, movies, TV, etc. I don't want SD, VHS, 8 Track, EGA...

MS fans made fun of the GC for it's ~2GB disc, now they are in the same boat for HD content and it's not so funny.

 

Hard to say until the game we are talking about comes out.

But how in the world would you know how much space they will wind up making make use of, be it for CG or otherwise?

 

Hence the words "could" and "I suspect"

No one's saying anything is for sure here, just that there's a good probability, especially knowing what we know about the last 10 FF games that have been made.

"Uninstalling and reinstalling that second disk every time I switch between games that do that doesn't sound like fun at all."

LMAO, such a freakin whiner. So you've got two multi-disc games that you want to play simultaneously, and they don't both fit on the HDD at the same time? Then get off your ass, swap in the 2nd disc and quit cryin about it! Why are you all about the absolute, worst case, never gonna happen scenarios?