http://xboxer.tv/2007/08/eif_2007_xbox_360_unreal_tourn.html

Speaking at this year’s Edinburgh Interactive Festival, VP of Epic Games Mark Rein indicated that Unreal Tournament III for the Xbox 360 might have to get cut down in order to cope with the limitations of the console's hardware. Answering a question from the crowd about whether disc size would be a problem with an Xbox 360 port, he stated that “We’ll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version...Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom. And what's really cool is if you think forward and think about what we've done in the past with UT. We had UT 2003 and then we had UT 2004, which was everything in UT 2003 plus a whole bunch of great mod stuff that we went out and purchased from mod makers.”

"If you think down the road, well maybe the next UT beyond this one, on Blu-Ray disc, we might fill the whole damn disc with all the cool stuff the mod makers make."

If the DVD format is already showing its age, it's bad news for Microsoft. Sony's decision to include Blu-Ray has had its detractors, but if multiplatform titles are going to be bigger and better on the PS3, then Sony’s going to be able to start justifying the cost of its more expensive hardware. This will doubly be the case if it's a big franchise like Unreal Tournament from Epic. It's especially worrying given that these are still fairly early days in this console cycle. If it's a problem over the next year, what's it going to be like four or five years down the line?

Could not have said the last part better myself :P

Good for Blu-Ray.

I guess we'll have to wait for the game to be released to see what happens. Apparently Microsoft is now very open to the type of mods and other content that Unreal Tournament 3 will have. Also I'm surprised they don't simply include a 2nd dvd with additional levels and allow people to install the additional ones they want to play online.  In my experience it's rare that people play more than 10 or 20 different maps in UT.

 its Blu-ray... god doesnt people look at correct spelling anymore... the r is lowercase.

Anyways, DVD is like 10 years old now. How old was VHS when it was phased out?  

Since these are multiplayer maps we are talking about, you wanna switch a disc every time you chose a specific map that wasn't on the first disc to play the next match?

What if you have it set to join the next game automatically and it takes you to a map you gotta switch a disc for, you wanna do that? Or let's say the people you are playing with said let's go to this other map and it's on the other disc or 3rd or 4th or whatever, you wanna switch again?

This isn't like a single player game that you just switch disc after getting to a certain point (Blue Dragon).

Also, they can make it downloadable to your hard drive, but not all 360s have hard drives then there's also the issue of whether or not it will be free maps. Weren't Gears maps free first then future ones you had to pay for?

Ummm... like 27 years old... 

How many DVDs is this going to be on for the PC user?
Guess MS might just start pushing the uses of the HDD more. There is no reason why the Xbox version couldn't have maps installed on the HDD. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 version is going to support having part of the game installed on the HDD.

If the pervious UT games are any indication of how UT3 is going to be then 1/2 of the maps I will never play. =P

on the pc version they can compress it a ton and during something called installing (i think people might have heard of it) they uncompress things and leave it on the hard drive for caching and uncompress it right before use. its a huge advantage for pc's since they just destroy consoles on the ability to compress and uncompress things. thats why it took so long for dvd to be standard in pc gaming, they didnt need it.

Well why couldn't the Xbox uses compressed data like the PC and have it uncompressed onto the HDD when you go to play it. Doesn't seem like something that couldn't be done. I really think developers should start taking the HDD into consideration. I always saw it as a mistake that MS didn't include a HDD with every system.

the original xbox did use extreme compression, but the new one cant. now the ps3 has blu ray and full use of the hdd, so it has almost no problems with space (how the heck is 50 gigs not enough for kojima? can some one please tell me). so the ps3 can cache uncompressed textures and it doesnt take away about anything from the engine. the 360 can sometimes use a some power (and time if its developed badly) to get the textures from the the disk and into the game.