we picked up some news over the tin cans that Bizarre Creations (the studio behind Project Gotham Racing 4) had some issues fitting what they wanted to include in their game on Microsoft’s chosen game storage format for the Xbox 360, DVD9. Now that that news has washed over the gaming blogosphere, Bizarre Creations has posted some clarifications on their web page. Now they say that:
“DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games… and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys.”
To ‘shed some light’ on what’s going here, please take a look at what Alan M, another Bizarre staff member posted earlier:
“In the past we’ve always had day and night and to do this we’ve had to create a duplicate set of textures for most of the buildings, obviously there is the space on the disc and the time it will take make all those night time textures. For some cities night time is important, as good as Vegas looks in the day everyone really wants to see it at night, so in PGR4 only night will be available, and if you thought Vegas and Tokyo looked good at night wait until you see what Shanghai looks like!”
So, it seems like Bizarre Creations’ response is to say that their dynamic weather system could create more gameplay situations than the previous day and night option, letting them change the environments of one texture set in many ways. That definitely makes sense, but it does not change the fact that there can only be a set amount of texture sets because of the limited storage space. They said it themselves:
“You won’t see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn’t a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD.”
While there may be more variety with the lighting/weather effects versus simply having a day and night version of each locale, wouldn’t it be better to have more texture sets and the lighting effects? In other words, while a night time Tokyo may look great, will their lighting system be enough to make those night time Tokyo textures look like day time ones? That would be kind of hard to imagine. It’s kind of a bummer because a Tokyo sunrise can look great, too.
