Why Blu-Ray is bad for the PS3

[Andir]

Jesus, I wish people would stop relating game length to BD-ROM size. It's not only game length. How cool would it have been for Oblivion to have different looking dungeons instead of the same re-placed tile sets? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to choose from thousands of cars instead of four? How cool would it be to have a game where your character model evolves through the game and changes into something completely different in the end? All those extra models take up space. It doesn't matter if you reach the end of the game in 1 hour or 100 hours. That's up to the design team to create a long game, and balance feature count and content.

Heck, I know it's an MMO, but Vanguard: Saga of Heroes weighs in at 17GB+. It has the benefit of low load times, a large world full of unique dungeons, towns, and people. The largest part of that game is not the textures. It's the models for all the different dungeons, houses, cities, etc. The sad part about it was they tried to "cheat" and make all player models use the same skeletal structure and all the human players look alike. If they were to enhance this part of the game you could tack on more size for models, armor models and texture sets.

I also hate the compression argument. You simply want to trade decompression time for load time? Compression/adaptive generation is not free. It just doesn't come from magical fairy trees. There is an example FPS floating around that's like a 95K EXE or something. I love when people use that for an argument that disc space doesn't matter, because it takes a long time to generate all the textures, and on top of that, they are very repetitive and low quality.