It's an ugly discussion that's been beaten around the bush more than Hayden Pantierre's mum, but it's still an important one. Are graphics becoming to good for one DVD-DL? iD seem to think so, and have confirmed in an interview with Second Story Gamer that their new title Rage will be released with 2 discs. The PS3 version will still only be on one Blu-Ray disc. Not only this, but they will be using a different compression method for the 360 version, which will make it look worse on the system.
Now we've seen this story before. Mostly it comes from RPGs and the ridiculous amount of content they contain. But FPS games? Surely we aren't moving into that age already? I don't want to buy Gears of War 3 with three or so discs to keep swapping when I want to play. And what about multiplayer? Will it just be on one disc or both of them?
As for the compression story, I can't imagine it will look that much worse. It certainly won't look bad. But the story does beg to ask what will happen with Doom 4. Doom 3 was eventually ported to consoles on the Xbox, and with this day and age with piracy, I find it hard to believe Doom 4 won't be ported either. But whether it will see the light of day on the 360 is another matter with this recent news.
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Second Story Gamer 
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Carmack's said that if it wasn't for the fees it would be 3 DVDs & have plenty of wiggle room.
Eurogamer
Eurogamer: Given your personal in-depth understanding of the architectures of the competing console platforms - the 360 and the PS3 - do you think one will have a significant technical advantage over the other in the years to come?
John Carmack: You know right now they're both really good, and that's why any time that people make comments one way or the other about the consoles it's easy to leave aside of the fact that it's the best that it's ever been in any generation in terms of support capabilities and all that, but what you can say really quite clearly and not get into too much argument about it is that the 360 is much easier to develop for, it's easier to get the performance out of it that it can deliver, and the rasterizer, the GPU side is generally faster than what the PS3 has.
If you were doing a whole lot of simulation, you can in theory get more performance out of the Cell processor than out of the two other dual-thread processors on the 360, but that's a big 'in theory'. You could design a game where the PS3 would be the superior platform, but you'd have to go out of your way to do it. If you're doing a game like people just want to do games now, the 360's the better platform.
But, the fact that Blu-ray won the format wars on there is a huge feather in Sony's cap, and then we wind up with cases like what we're seeing right now where having all the extra space on the Blu-ray may be a useful thing for us above the fact that the hardware's not quite as good in terms of what it can do with the processing but being able to just have more data available there.
Carmack said you really wont see a difference except for areas you wouldnt normally go into, you know... near the outside of maps.
Then again, he would have to say something like that cause if he came out and said "man this game is going to look like a dead cat reheated in a microwave" I dont think many would buy the damn thing.
Then again x2 I dont think I will buying the thing anyway and I own both consoles.
They basically pioneered the FPS & online multiplayer FPS genre. & from what i've seen of iD Tech 5 it's going to be real competition for the unreal engine when RAGE & DOOM 4 come out; & id tech 6 will be a big leap forward for ray tracing incorporated engines.
EPIC, iD & Crytek have consistently made the best 3D engines.
Also Diablo2 to an extent if I recall had some disc swapping (for those of us not on the latest and greatest PC at the time). The horror of ten seconds of effort! Will it never end!