| BW_JP said: lots of flaws here. PC HD games are about 10-15gb but the design methodologies for those games are different. You load/run/read games on a PC a hell of a lot differently than you do on the 360.
For instance, Gears of War for the PC required a 12GB install, yet fit on a much smaller disc on the 360. PCs have a lot of brute force. You can succeed by having decompression during run time, and you can also succeed by having the hardware upscale and force certain graphical effects into the game.
Physical media is here to stay. Blu-ray? probably not. Blu-ray 2.0? Absolutely. It will not be a new proprietary format. it will be Sony/Toshiba/Whatever's format. They control the Television market and they are the ones with the power to push these. about 90% of the world cannot possibly download 15-20 GB games enough anyway. Americas broadband system would never have it. You'd cap out after like 5 games. Sure some people will be satisfied, but most will not.
Until american can improve its broadband service 10 fold, you will not see this. It simply is not viable. The DVD9 is really starting to show its limitations now, and it's going to get much, much worse over 2010 and 2011.
"They could easily take a game like FF13 on 360 and release it for DD at only 8GB or so since each disc is filled with duplicated data." Do some research before you speak. No they could not. The blu-ray disc is not filled with duplicated data. about 12 of the 18 GB for the game are CG cut scenes. Absolutely horrendous quality CG cut scenes. Are we supposed to sacrifice the quality of our games for DD? Unacceptable. The 360 version of this game was butchered enough.
I really don't think you fully understand the tech behind it, and that's fine. But let me just make sure you understand that a lot of processing inabilities of current generation consoles are overcome by extensive use of space.
The last Remnant on the 360 is a vastly inferior game to Final Fantasy 13. They cannot even be compared. the PC install for this game is 15GB.
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Checking Steam:
- Staker - All three combined take up less space than FFXIII on Xbox 360
- Red Faction - 7.8GB
- Company of Heroes 9GB
- Saints row 2 - 12GB
Not too bad really, especially considering these games have extra big textures for PC also they likely carry multiples of the same textures in different resolutions to work for systems which have weaker hardware. In addition to this the texture compression formats are different and so not directly comparable, even for the exact same textures.
The reason why Sony needs that much space? Well you take an audio format which 99% cannot distinguish any improvement for, then you take your game and prebake lighting, SSAO etc but since you cannot reuse the same texture for a different lighting condition, (note how few of the Sony produced titles have dynanic time of day.) you have to store them seperately and finally you store a bunch of videos etc so the kiddies on the forums have easy access to bullshots which aren't quite bullshots of your game and make it as linear as possible to help stream that big data set. Reminds me of the very first CD based game at arcades.
The reason why PCs don't need the space? I'll give the checklist.
- Lighting? Dynamic.
- Gameplay? Open world.
- Cutscenes? In engine and real time.
- SSAA? Real time.
- Audio? Reasonable.
Guess what? Next generation will be more like the current PC than the current PS3 game design. More dynamic environments, more procedural rendering, no prebaked cutscenes, no need to prebake every lighting condition and they will actually give the player a choice to customise their character. Its pretty jarring and stupid that in Uncharted 2 I had my favourite gun but because they didn't want to record the cutscene with 10 different weapons they made me drop it and go back to a generic gun.
Do we need 50GB? Hell no! Will we need 25GB next generation? Probably not! We could probably get away with HD-DVD and spare the cost of the extra blu diode laser. With digitial distribution becoming more important and not less important there will be a significant downward pressure on the filesizes of games. Even with a 50GB cap every month, the average consumer can still buy a couple of games @18GB total required bandwidth, its not like a movie where content has to be premade and then delivered over the network. Who really buys more than two games in a month?
Do you know what its like to live on the far side of Uranus?
