I give it five minutes before quest and hells 666 turn up and make this thread a splode.

If I planned on buying this game I'd probably say something smug about mah blu-rayz, but meh.

Compression algorithms get better and better. I wouldn't worry about it. Obviously you can't argue that more space is better but I don't think it is really going to limit the 360 this generation. Like Remz said, if it becomes that big a deal put a code in each retail package to downlod the multiplayer maps, big deal. Everyone should have a hard-drive by now that plays online anyway. Having one disc be the multiplayer disc and another be the campaign is also perfectly valid. There are methodz ppl!

DEE EL SEE

remz has probably the best solution to all this. do you think MS would make them charge?

still, i was buying it for ps3 so i don't really care.

They could always just make an install disk and a play disk. And if it's just maps, you could even make it optional fairly easily I think.

People have to realize that this generation, games will need more storage. The suggestions of making the content downloadable or installable on a seperate disk instantly limit your user base to people who chose to purchase a hard drive and or people who will buy the dlc as well as pay for a subscription to live. Even then its a costly solution to the average gamer.

Every generation, we have seen a change in the storage medium as well as an actual increase in storage. NES cartridges were tiny. Then the SNES ones weighed in at close to 8Mb. Then we moved on to 32~64mb carts for the N64 and CDs for the PSX. Then to DVD. NOT ONCE has a company used the same media for 2 generations in a row. Those that say DVD is fine and BD/HDDVD is not needed are perfectly happy playing prettier versions on last-gen games.

@AKK Because Mass Effect and UT3 are exactly the same.

@Remz, so if the people who buy the system without a hard drive pay the same amount for a game that they can't access fully? Or are you suggesting that they charge for the maps that you should have gotten for free?

All I'm saying is that there are reasons why we are constantly coming up with larger hard drives and disk media, it's not just so they can say "our disk is bigger than yours."

@Taicho - So can you tell me what defines a "next-gen" game?

Can people stop using terms that have no real meaning... If the game is on a 360, it's NEXT GEN, because it's not on a Xbox. I have yet to see one game on the 360 or PS3 that made me think games were evolving... If anything, God of War on "last-gen" was better than anything I've played that's "next-gen."

They all look like the same FPS and sandbox (GTA4 looks so... the same) games to me... When they show me something that deserves the "next-gen" title I'm all for it (Bioshock maybe).

@Nyteshade,

I just wanted to say that IMO, user created content is going to be focused on more this generation. Even though they have been doing it on the pc forever, consoles are totally new to it. UT3 will have mod support on the PS3 and I think that's peachy.

brainderailment: "I just wanted to say that IMO, user created content is going to be focused on more this generation."

I think that's gonna happen in the next gen. No, not this next gen, the next next gen. ;)

@brianunf

You smoke too much stupid, man. Like 2 hits too many of the stuff. HD gaming refers to the graphics, not the media. We've had "HD" games for years on the PC. Anything that scales above 480p resolution is officially HD compliant. So that stretches back to... 1995 or so.

DVD is the storage medium, not the content quality. I hate to break it to you, but even Blu Ray uses compression on both video and audio. Dolby Digital is compressed. And the video you're watching is compressed as well. Full blown 1080p uncompressed video (not film, which runs many TB's per hour at 4K resolution, IMAX quality) is slightly less than a Terabyte per hour, far below BluRay's capacity, so don't end up looking like a stooge claiming HD isn't DVD.

You're way off your math jumping to conclusions about texture size and audio compression. An hour of uncompressed WAV format audio is 700MB. that's less than an 1/8th of a full DVD-9 disc. Most people can't hear the difference between uncompressed PCM 5.1 and DD5.1, and even fewer people have the equipment that supports it. In fact, Dolby is such a common household name, people are more likely to seek out the Dolby audio over another option because they think the quality is going to be better than PCM. And Dolby mixes tend to be about 1/10th the size of the original audio.

As for textures, animators for YEARS have cheated visuals in high resolution. You can use smaller textures and replicate them, do sub-surface lighting to add a more realistic look to the texture, and a whole host of other cheats to get the look they want. You're also forgetting that they can cut the visuals down from 1080p resolutions to 720p resolutions and they'd manage to probably be able to scale their storage needs down by more than half without having to even touch anything else. It'd still be HD.

Hey dvddesign, I quit smoking but I might start again after reading that reply. Settle down, why are you so angry? I play games and watch movies on an HD projector and I can tell the difference. HD uses very little compression compared to DVD. Last time I read the back of a Blu-ray movie it said uncompressed audio.

!Taicho made a good point. What if the PS2 or Xbox was released with a CD-ROM drive instead of DVD. Would they reach their full potential?"

Well, PS2 did have those blue CD discs in the beginning, before more and more DVD games came. There were some ok games on those discs, I mean, I still think the first SSX is one of the best games for PS2.

Maybe it'll be the same with DVD and the 360? I mean, it's possible to do great games on DVD, ofcourse. That's already proven. But when an equivelent to the PS2's GT4 or MGS3 comes for the "next-gen", maybe DVD just won't be enough. Look at the original post for an example...

And as a comment to the people saying that you should just compress everything even more. Hell, why did we even get the next-gen consoles. I mean, a PS2 or a Xbox should be just fine. They just needed to compress the shit a bit more right? -_o

@RTYPE1124
Always so nice to strangers. Like it or not it would solve a lot of problems for MS. Cheers Mr. friendly.

UT2K came with 6 CD's...this at a time when most PC games could still fit onto one. If you think Epic needs the extra space because they're incompetent, and not because of the astonishing amount of content they give you, then you're nothing but a nub.

Keep in mind that this title contains both a SP campaign and the usual MP, a first for a UT game.

From BeyondUnreal review of UT2K4, "UT2004 is overflowing with gaming goodness, so much so that it would take you almost a whole day of solid gaming to spend just ten minutes in each of the title’s excessively-detailed maps."

What MS needs to do is make the HD-DVD drive able to read/play game discs, With that in place, Sony would really have nothing on the 360, Since the 360 is already graphically supperior system, allowing HD-Disc space for games would make it "T3h R0x0rz" for "Mah B0x0rz"

@Squeewupiwupi
problem is that it would kind of put an end to the concept that the 360 lets a person choose wheather or not to have HD-DVD/Blu-ray. With a game enabled HD-DVD drive, more and more developers would put their games on HDDVD, and that would alienate anyone who doesn't get the add-on. Also, there's the fact that the add on would add an extra $200 to the price of the 360 which would make it close to the same price as the PS3. Not to mention how royally pissed off consumers will be, since there are quite a few who already bought the non-game enabled version. hell we can even point on that between the HDDVD and blu-ray, it so far seems like Blu-ray is the one that will come out on top; and if the HDDVD format does die out it would mean some serious shit for the 360 (personally i think part of the reason MS didn't include the HDDVD drive is not only to lower the price, but for damage control should the HDDVD format die... MS can always release a blu-ray add on)... frankly, the 360 would probably suffer some serious backlash from such a move...

frygar's got a point, if the tech is available, they will make use of it. And if i remember rightly, Lair or Heavenly sword (not sure which one), made full use of current BR capacity of 25GB.

I have both systems - I really can't tell the difference in load times between the PS3 and 360. Actually, in the case of Oblivion, it loads faster on PS3.

And i don't believe it would have to be a totally separate unit, Most likely just a firmware update for both would be sufficient

@h3lios just fyi BD dual layer holds 50Gb, you are referring to the single layer disks of course. You probably knew that, I just wanted those others out there to know that once devs are hitting their 25Gb cap on games, all they have to do is start using DL disks and they have double the space they had before. This generation of PS3 games is sooooo weak compared to 5 years from now.

Blu-ray offers enough space to use this technique, which objective is to provide more detailed scenarios without big impacts in system reources at the expense of disc space. Sure the 360 can pull great games without using this, but for sandbox games like Mass Effect, GTA, etc, using the technique in the 360 is impossible.

Blu-ray is no more than a tool for developers, if they will use it wisely, to improve their games is up to them. If some of them manage to use it in a fundamental way, impossible of being done somewhere else, then other platforms could be in trouble.

Good to see developers aren't overlooking blu-ray advantage because of the small installed base.