What Sorts of Games Really REQUIRE a HDD?

[scooby_dooby]

Sure, but my point remains that it is not the lack of the hardrive itself that limits such functionality but rather the choice of the developers, be it with respect to budget considerations or otherwise.

But in a world of limited budgets and timeline, it IS the lack of HDD that is limiting the functionality in this specific case. And I would argue that things like this, that may have been feasible with a HDD but simply will take too much effort without one, get cut all the time and we just never hear about it.

HDD just makes things easier to accomplish so they have a greater chance of being implemented. There's very few things you literally 'can not' do without a HDD, because both HDD and ram are memory storage, but with any given timeline & budget they can potentially do 'more' if they have a HDD, just because of it's performance enhancements: Faster throughput, caching abilities, better seek times etc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Besides, hasn't MS always made it clear that games need to developed with the understanding that the HDD won't always be there?

I don't think that was totally clear early on. Certainly it seems the Saint's Row were surprised, as were a couple of Japanese devs at the announcement of no standard HDD.

And did the developers of Saints Row ever show any flying built into their game at any point? Seems more likely to me that they just made the claim as a convenient excuse and to critizise MS's choice to sell core systems.

I can't imagine they'd make up that they had to drop a feature just to gripe. That's pretty immature (but you never know!)

As for lack of HDD preventing that, no it doesn't if the devs designed around it. These are the same arguments that were had months ago with XB360 having HDD, PS3 not (in those long gone, naive days. How foolish we all were!). What can an HDD do that designing well for a console without HDD can do? Well in games, not that much. They key point is it can do it better.

I'd rather have an HDD than not, if it doesn't up the cost prohibitively. None of us are going to grumble about having too much tech; we're all certified geeks! And having worlds where every tree, plant, person has an age and growth and changes over time is fairly cool. You could even create procedural meshes and textures and save them to HDD, gigabytes of data potentially, to add more variety. Offloading the procedural generation this way means saving processing time from having to do it all on the fly in game. Only a small portion of the game needs t be generating when it can't be loaded.

 

[Inane_Dork]

If you travel through a city at 30 MPH, you will have a maximum transfer rate at which new buildings with textures needs to be loaded, maybe 40 buildings a minute (PITSF). If you then fly through the city at 100+ MPH, you're going to be needing 3x the transfer speed because textures are going to need to be loaded for all the buildings appearing much faster, perhaps 120 buildings per minute. If DVD can't supply the files fast enough for the textures for 120 buildings a minute, you either have to use much smaller textures or cap speed at whatever the DVD can support, which is, say, 30 mph. That means dropping the plane.

That's a plausible reason where designing for HDD, the moment the HDD stops becoming standard, a feature is dropped because the hardware can't support it.

I strongly doubt it. Say you start in one corner of the world and head towards the other corner in a plane. Even though you can stream from the HDD to memory while streaming from DVD to HDD in the background, if the velocity of the plane exceeds the velocity supported by the DVD drive, at some point you'll be DVD-limited. Or, I should say, that's quite possibly the case. One alternative is to have everything you need on the HDD, which would make initial loads take a REALLY long time.


Anyway, I agree that MMO games are the most obvious candidate for requiring a HDD. It's funny how games like Morrowind that you might think are examples of games that require HDDs are totally surpassed by Oblivion which does not require a HDD.

 

[scooby_dooby]

One alternative is to have everything you need on the HDD, which would make initial loads take a REALLY long time..

Like Halo?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

One alternative is to have everything you need on the HDD, which would make initial loads take a REALLY long time.

That's what I was anticipating - very large caches!

 

[Inane_Dork]

Like Halo?

Or worse, but yeah. Same idea.

That's what I was anticipating - very large caches!

Well, I'm afraid we're into system-specific stuff like how much of the HDD the game can use for cache, so I dunno.

 

[scooby_dooby]

somewhere between 2.5gb(xbox1) and 6gb(amount of space missing from HDD).

If they straight doubled it from xbox1, it would be 3x1.5gb caches.

Also intesesting to note, that while most games only used 1 cache, halo used 2, so on xbox 1 it would cache around 1.5gb of data, and yes initial load times were brutal....but then you could replay that level very quickly, as long as your caches weren't deleted by another game.

 

[nintenho]

I have heard this before and I don't really doubt it, but still I have difficulty believing that the lack of HDD is the whole story, because what would it matter if you had a HDD or not if you are going to take a plane ride.

I don't really know how that plane ride was supposed to be implemented, but if it was that you were able to take a plane and during the flight load the next city or whatever, I don't see the lach of HDD being of importance.

Nice topic by the way. I was asking myself similar questions and it has been discussed a bit in other threads...

I didn't read the rest of the thread yet so maybe somebody already answered it but...

The way you fly a plane in the game is that you walk up to an airplane, enter, and then just fly around the world. There are NO LOADING TIMES in the game. Obviously, you have to stream the game world faster if you're in a plane, so that's why the game needed a hard drive.

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

Heh, more like "chose to." It isn't like there is anything inherent to plane flying that requires a HDD.

Nope i remember the interview, it was a definate HAD TO.

 

[function]

"Had to" as in "it wasn't worth reworking the game to allow it without a HDD."

 

[rounin]

Well a console without a harddrive will never know what its missing

so long as its the only console on the market

 

[Jabjabs]

The way you fly a plane in the game is that you walk up to an airplane, enter, and then just fly around the world. There are NO LOADING TIMES in the game. Obviously, you have to stream the game world faster if you're in a plane, so that's why the game needed a hard drive.

That's the idea. GTA Sanandreas worked aorund this though by running a lower detailed city so that it didn't exceed the transfer speed, it only loads the details when you get out of the plane or stop in one spot.

The only problam I have with the Saint Row HDD issue is, what if the city exceeds the HDD's cache, would it then just be a temporary messure and not a solution to thte problem?

 

[nintenho]

That's the idea. GTA Sanandreas worked aorund this though by running a lower detailed city so that it didn't exceed the transfer speed, it only loads the details when you get out of the plane or stop in one spot.

The only problam I have with the Saint Row HDD issue is, what if the city exceeds the HDD's cache, would it then just be a temporary messure and not a solution to thte problem?

I'm sure the developers prepared for some pop-up. What I'm wondering is why they didn't make it so that if the game notices a hard drive, it makes the planes playable? It could have something to do with some of the missions they had made before they found out that not all 360's have hard drives requiring you to fly planes though...