L.A. Noire - Not so exclusive? PS3/PC? Too big for DVD9?

[starcraft]

makingmusic476 said:
@shams: It's not the size that's keeping the game from going to the 360. It's the fact that it's not going to the 360 that let's them increase the size, utilizing the extra space.

That's the one problem with arguments for/against the use of Blu-Ray in gaming. People often say that Blu-Ray is useless, because the 360 has far better games using DVDs than the ps3 has using BD-roms. But the question that is never asked, and can never be answered, is would those games have been better if the developers had Blu-Ray to work with? And if so, how much better? It can't be answered, and we can't use multiplats for answers, as developers design them to be equal on both platforms, taking into account the DVD of the 360.

People say that games like Gears weren't hurt because of the limitations of DVD9, but we can't actually say that. The developers designed it with DVD9 in mind, so of course it was going to work just fine with the format. Same goes for games like Uncharted and Blu-Ray. Uncharted apparently streams everything - sound files, textures, EVERYTHING, from the Blu-Ray disc, which is why there are no load times whatsoever throughout the game. Streaming data off the disc requires the data to take up more space on the disc (less compression) than it would normally, and as such even the demo from e3 could not fit on a single DVD9. Could this be done on the 360? Something similar, yes, but not this specific game, because of the way it is designed. Even a multi-disc solution just wouldn't work.

The only way anybody can definitively prove that Blu-Ray is better or, dare I say it, "needed" for gaming would be if a developer developed a game entirely around the 360, and then recreated the game entirely around the ps3, starting the engine from scratch, taking into account the added storage space of Blu-Ray and whatever advantages it may provide, and carrying over only the plot and artwork from the 360 version. They would even expand the concepts of the game, taking into account whatever possibilities Blu-Ray opens up for them. It would essentially be a brand new game, that just happens to look like the other version. Then we could truly see what effect Blu-Ray has on the game. This will never happen, however, as it would be far to costly for a development studio.

Seeing as we can't prove whether Blu-Ray is really useful this generation, we can only go by the words of the developers, and most are rather welcoming of the new format, many stating that their games could not be done with out it. With Lost Oddyssey on 4 discs, Blue Dragon on 3, and Rage on 2, it seems like it would've been at least somewhat beneficial for MS to go with HD DVD for this generation, if for no other reason than to avoid multi-disc situations such as the aforementioned games. And then there are cases like Uncharted where even the main engine of the game can't fit on a single disc, let alone things like audio, story, and new areas. How many 360 games could have been improved with this? Mass Effect, no loading whatsoever? Who knows. How many game elements were nixed entirely because of the limitations of DVD9?

 Blu ray is more expensive for developers than DVD9, therefore it is impossible to say that multiplatform games wouldn't have been better on PS3 if they weren't limited by the large distribution (and therefore smaller development) budget of the PS3. Thank you for playing, money pwns space.