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Auhim on 21 July 2008
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Retrasado said:
StanGable said:
montrealsoon said:
Another issue with the DVD drive of the 360 is the noise.
This is a big factor that shouldn't be overlooked.

The new feature to allow one to copy the DVD to the HDD is a great one, the noise in the first place isn't.

 

Seriously, does anyone play their videogames with the volume so low that you can hear the DVD drive? When I play videogames the last thing I hear is the 360 drive and I definitely enjoy playing games loud either by myself or with friends. Anyone saying that the noise coming out of the 360 is an issue is either a rabid Sony fanboy that wants an excuse to believe that their console is better (lol) or you just have superb incredible ears that you can listen to it through all the dang noise while playing (or mommy won't let you play your games loud enough).

I don't know about it being an issue, but when a friend of mine who owns a 360 (and not a PS3) who I hadn't seen in like 2-3 years came over, the first thing he said when I turned on the PS3 was "Wow, that's really quiet..."

OT: Looking at the market today, I think it was good decision because it allowed them to get the leg-up on the PS3. If the PS3 and 360 had launched concurently in late 2005, I doubt the 360 would have even topped 12 million WW by now. So it WAS a good decision, at least for the short-term. However, I personally think that decision will come back to haunt them as the generation winds on. I think that by mid to late 2009, the DVD will be causing devs nightmares with trying to figure out how to use it's limited space. I mean, think about all the people who criticized Sony back in 2000 when they decided to include a DVD drive in the PS2. I distinctly remember dozens of articles saying that it was totally unnecessary and that a CD would easily provide all the space anyone would ever need for a video game. We all know how that argument ended up. I could be totally wrong, but I just get this feeling that it will be the same this time around. If the 360's games already take 3-4 discs to hold, imagine what it will be like by early 2010. (6 discs? 7? 10?)

 

The PS2 needed DVD far more than the current generation needs something larger. As of right now, there are exactly two Xbox 360 games which use more than one disc. Sure, they use 3 (Blue Dragon) and 4 (Lost Odyssey) discs, but it's still only two games. In the last generation, there were very few multiple-DVD games. (I can only think of two: Xenosaga Eps. 2 and 3 each used 2 single-layer DVDs) In the generation before, multiple discs for a game was not rare at all.

Edit: To clarify, the PS1 had several games with multiple CDs, therefore showing CDs weren't enough for the following generation. The PS2/Xbox switched to DVD and it wasn't a limitation at all to developers.

In this generation, it's honestly looking like the Xbox 360 is going to have about as many multi-DVD games as the PS1 had multi-CD games by the time it's over. That's perfectly reasonable and will indicate a necessity for the following generation to have higher capacity discs. I would also bet that the PS3 will have zero multiple-disc games in its lifespan and the following generation will introduce the first multiple Blu-ray games. After that, we don't even know if we'll still be using distributed media for games primarily.