Maybe I'm reading the Eurogamer interview wrong, they may be talking about funding for The Getaway: Black Monday which was being developed at the time of the interview.  It's confusing the way the interview was written.

Wouldnt the older GTA's for ps1 be considered sandbox games?

the closest sandbox game i played on the ps1 was courier crisis. damn that was fun, you can flip cops off and they would chase you just like in GTA except... your riding a bike. plus you can also punch people and they would fight you back. i remember a guy hitting me then running away, then.. a bus ran over him ^^ good times... good times...

Sony America generally don't have a problem with games going on the PC. The Agency is a game that is being made by Sony and they are releasing it on the PC themselves.

Sony don't mind PC gaming. 

 I thought the older GTAs had multiple cities per game. You beat a few missions in one city, then move onto to the next.  I haven't played GT2 in a good 8 years, though, so I could be mistaken.  Either way, none of them took up multiple discs. :P

i guess it would sell better, but R suddenly saying its not a ps3 exclusive is a complete stab at sonys back not to mention sony's trust.

Edit: @jhlennon1, oh ok, thanks for the info. i was basing my assumption on UT3 scenario. cause if UT3 was just a ps3 exclusive i bet it would move way way more consoles.

Technically Heavenly Sword was impossible on the 360 too because of it's 10GB (reportedly) of uncompressed sound. However, the 360 has a multitude of games with more content and length than it with graphics nearly or just as good. My point is this: If you have extra space, you can use it by removing compression and make it impossible on the 360, but that doesn't mean it's going to make the game better or even longer with more content. It just means you are using the space because it's... there.

Edit: Lair was impossible on the 360 too btw. 

last i heard(this was a rumor) R* was already having trouble trying to fit GTAIV in one DVD9, and it was made for the XBOX360. Since this game was originally planned to be a PS3 game it means they prolly went GB happy with the game(not to mention the game might be bigger than GTAIV), i dont think even really good compression can fit it in one DVD9 anymore.

Edit: Even Lair wasnt possible on the PS3 either >.<

Sure, I understand what you are saying.

I just don't really agree.

Sony are pushing developers to make bigger games. Ones that take more space. Its one of the advantages of the PS3 hardware, and they want to use it for media/publicity reasons.

There is no evidence that the game would be significantly different on either a single DVD (9Gig), or multiple discs.

...

For instance - take sound. Instead of using compressed sound, they might be using uncompressed, 32-bit, stereo, 44Khz (or higher) samples.

Its one of the biggest space wasters in games. A game I worked on had 500MB of sound - and it was compressed, mono, etc.

We *could* have made it much larger if we had the space - it could have gone from 500MB to 8Gig quite easily.

Apart from being a pain-in-the-butt to process (larger files, longer build process, longer disc burns, more server space taken, more source repos space taken, etc..) would it have made any real difference to the game?

No - not really. 

On some machines (this was for a PC/XBOX/PS2 title), it might have improved the audio experience. But we would have been better off putting the extra development time into improving the use of the audio within the game. Instead of making a 5% difference to the quality of the audio, it could have made a real difference - 5% to the quality of the game.

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Clever programming allows huge environments and experiences to be generated from small data sets. Its been happening from the very start of programming - there are some really amazing demo-scene applications, and the machines those demos were designed on were much less than 1% as powerful as a PS3/360.

It may be a personal preference (development) thing - and there may be a real reason why huge data sets are required for some games.

But - if the developers for those games are not using compression to the maximum, and using every trick in the book to reduce data sets to a minimum - they are kidding themselves.

It would simply mean that the extra space has not been legitimately used at all - and is purely an excuse for lazying programming, and ammunition for a PR department looking for material.

(note that compression *also* reduces load times - and more so in next-gen consoles than last-gen - so there is no excuse to not use it)

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We have all seen LAIR & Heavenly Sword. Two games that define Sony's desire and use for BluRay. Neither have proven that BluRay is useful for games.

Actually iclim I believe that is possible. The upgrade to HD does take up more space. My point isn't that DVD-9 is automatically just as good, it's simply that using Blu-ray to take up more space isn't automatically better. The thing is that although Blu-ray gives you lots of extra size, the ways developers are using it are not increasing game content. That would require much more (and much more costly) development effort and no one, not even Sony, has shown willingness to put forth that effort.

Also, you will never have size limit issues on a non HD dvd-9 console like the Wii. I mean Twilight Princess is a 40 hour game that fit on a 1.5GB GC minidisk. If you look at the amount of game storage space those graphics take on PS3 games compared to the size upgrade there is really no difference in content space available between the Wii and PS3. The 360 is another story, but they are still managing to make games like Bioshock and Mass Effect. Games with lots of FMV are going on multiple discs. That may be a pain to some, but it's never really bothered me on the PSone...