Lost Odyssey to be featured on 4 DVDs!

[sharky]

makingmusic476 said:

sharky said:

makingmusic476 said:
To quote the article:

"The game uses a mixture of CG and real-time cut scenes to illustrate the storyline."

So it's 4 DVDs and not even all the cutscenes are CGI. How many discs will 360 games require in another 2 years?

Well, 4 DVD's is approaching 40 GB's..and considering I dont think a Blu ray game has yet to be even released on more than a single layer disc...meaning <23GB of data...

 

Blu ray is more expensive for a dual layer. I think Heavenly Sword said they almost used dual layer but didn't. All things equal PS3 publishers will try to avoid it because of extra cost right now.

 

In other words, 4 DVD's is approaching so big it would take two Blu ray's..look at it that way. Or in other words, it's more data than any PS3 game yet as well.

 

Anyways, I dont see top of the line PC games using that much. Look at World in Conflict, the just released PC RTS game that has superb graphics. I randomly noticed it installs to 9GB. However it is meant for a PC with 2-4GB of RAM, and more raw power than PS3/360 have.

 

So basically I dont think DVD is a realistic limitation. I will be interested also in what size is the Crysis install, since it has better graphics than any console game anyway.

 

Also Heavenly Sword is a good example. A 23 GB game that was only 6 hours. More storage doesn't mean much.

The real console limitation is 512 MB RAM. That and the fact all the data has to stream from a tiny pipe the optical drives. Because of this, the data has to be heavily compressed anyway, no matter how big of a reservoir it has. It still has to go through that tiny bottleneck from disc to 512MB RAM.

First off, single-layered BD-Roms hold 25GB of data, not 23. Also, only ~7GB of space is available to 360 developers on a DVD9 due to restrictions from MS (i'm not sure what they are). They do not have access to the full 8.5GB. Assuming that the 4th disc is roughly half full, you'd have 3.5 x 7GB = 24.5GB. 24.5GB is less than 25GB. Even if the total data did surpass the 25GB mark, they could just go dual-layer like you said. Kojima already plans to do this with MGS4.

As far as the expense of Blu-Ray discs, large runs of single-layered BD-Roms came to about 37 cents per disc, compared to ~10 cents per DVD, so a 4 disc DVD game would actually cost publishers more than a Blu-Ray disc game. I'm sure a dual-layered BD-rom wouldn't cost much more than a single layer, as they are already being mass produced for movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, so the cost difference is negligible.

About high end pc games, on the EA store it was recently listed that Crysis would need 16GB of HDD space. However, these specs were quickly taken down and Crytek scame out saying that the specs are not final yet. It could end up being a little bit more or a little bit less, but it's a safe bet that the final number will be roughly 16GB.

Also, Medieval II: Total War shipped on two DVD9s way back in Nov. '06.

To repeat my initial statement, how many discs will 360 games require in another 2 years?

"First off, single-layered BD-Roms hold 25GB of data, not 23"

 

Haha, no they dont, but the funny part is you fell right into my trap directly after, you see, blu ray fanboys always list DVD capacity as some lower number (after formatting and overhead) not the theoretical number. But they always list Blu ray capacity as it's perfect theoretical capacity, as if there is not not one digital bit on that disc that cant be used for content (unlike every other format in the history of man).

I brought this up on a much smarter forum than this, and yes, it was determined through Blu ray movie dumps that Blu ray discs do not have 25GB of usable storage after sector formatting and all that. It's actually <23GB. I dont know the exact number available to a Sony dev on a "25G" blu ray disc, but you can bet it's NOT 25 GB, probably more like 22, or less. Do you honestly think microsoft does special things to discs to remove precious capacity, but somehow Sony has no need of this?Just use common sense.

 

I'm just tired of the double standard. Either use theoretical capacities for both (8.5 GB in the case of a DL DVD, or 25 GB in the case of Blu ray) Or use a lower "true usable" number for both (like 7GB according to your claim, and 20-22GB on Blu ray) . What you constantly see on the internet is apples and oranges, the theoretical maximum on blu ray, and the lower usable capacity on DVD. This isn't accurate and needs to stop.

 The opposite would actually be me saying that a DVD is 9GB, and a Blu ray is ~20GB. This is no different than what you are doing, just reversed. Both cases are apples and oranges.