Peter La Fleur: [after Patches hits Justin in the face with a wrench] Yeah, uh, Patches... are you sure that this is completely necessary?
Patches O'Houlihan: Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine?
Peter La Fleur: Probably not.
Patches O'Houlihan: No, but I do it anyway because it's sterile and I like the taste.
Peter La Fleur: ...Okay.

I'm sorry I thought about this scene in Dodgeball :D.

Blu-ray is a nice bonus it is not important now but I think it will be later for the PS3. Blu-ray and the harddrive will be big advantages for the PS3 later this gen.

I don't think you can say it is or not. It depends on what your going to create. Quality and content will determine that. Compression can always get better I guess, so a multi-platform game will prob not need it.

The exclusives on the PS3, however, will need them. If you want gaming to stay at this level and your satisfied, then no, Blu-ray isnt need. If you want gaming to progress into something more it will be. Better graphics, better AI, and larger games will need more space. It's just common sense. Games this large will take a lot longer to make, but once development is perfected on the PS3 in 2 years or so, I think we can expect to have a massive 150 hour RPG game with dialogue like Mass Effect, graphics like Uncharted or Gears of War, and side missions galore.

Its possible with more power and larger storage media. As the gaming industry grows, I think well see more large corporations having development teams and paying big bucks for them. I think people like Fox, Universal, Warner Bros, will get into game development, and I don't mean crappy video game movies. I think blu-ray allows for those larger projects, and hopefully Microsoft further pushes their next console to be able to carryout these newer more advanced projects as well.

The problem is such games just cost too much to develop right now. The time it would take to develop a RPG with that length would be ridiculous. This jacks up the dvelopment cost a ton, and that is before they have to raise their audio and visual budget to meet the HD standards. For established franchises this is not so bad. If you know a game can sell 10 million on a 30 million install base, you can develop your heart out until you reach the point where profits would be too low.

For an untested IP though, even from a large studio, the risk is too large. Look at Lair. The game had a huge budget, but sales have not matched the cost thus far. You can't take a big risk on a game that you don't know will sell well and expect to make money everytime. This forces the smaller studios and new IPs to look cheap and unpolished by comparison. While it won't kill the new/small game buisness, it will certainly hurt them.

In time the above concern will vanish without a doubt. The artistic costs of a game will fall and you can spend more time just developing the game itself. Eventually the extra space will be nothing but a nice extra for any game developer that can afford the dev kit. That day is still a long way off though. Until that happens I think Bluray will simply be a way to avoid compressing some audio sounds, and maybe a few extra shiny visuals that don't help gameplay in any direct way.

The short version, eventually yes it will be required but currently it is just extra space.

not neccessary, but neither is dvd. it will be a big help not too long in the future. its gona be good in a little bit before next generation when we get full games (as in full campaign and multiplayer, full graphics, and everything in a normal production) downloaded. if only this gen started a year later than sony would have been happier.

@ NJ5

I think good devs always try to optimize things, for example for Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune they optimised the game design to have a very limited amount of loading and seamless connection between story telling cutscenes and gameplay. In Ratchet the cutscenes are rendered on the fly, so when you shoot a nano-swarm just before entering the cutscene it will be there or when you upgrade your armour-suit Ratchet is wearing his new cloths in the following cutscene.

The end results matter for enhancing the game experience and developers will try to get this right as much as possible. On the PS3 there are just more and wider options available to developers.

MikeB said: @ NJ5 Space is not a big bottleneck on the PS3, so it's natural that developers don't worry about optimizing for space I think good devs always try to optimize things, for example in Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted they optimised the design to have a very limited amount of loading and seamless connection between story telling cutscenes and gameplay. In Ratchet the cutscenes are rendered on the fly, so when you shoot a nano-swarm just before entering the cutscene it will be there or when you upgrade your armour-suit Ratchet is wearing his new cloth in the cutscene. The end result matters and developers will try to get it right as much as possible. On the PS3 there just more and wider options available to developers.

You don't really understand what "optimizing for space" means, do you? It means trying to reduce space for the sake of space. There's absolutely no incentive to do that on console games which don't require installation to a hard drive, except where it affects the things you talked about, or when you're running out of space.

 

KBG29 said: The adavantage's that Blu-ray gives devs is the ability to have perfect uncompressed sound at 7.1, a ton CG or in game MPEG's at 1080p (which when used right covers up load times), tons of variations in textures throught the games, and the ability to let the processor work more on game tasks than decompressing when streaming. When devs start to relly take advantage of this no one will question the benifits that Blu-ray brings to gaming. The best examples of what this can do so far are Uncharted, Ratchet, Heavanly Sword, and (the underrated) Lair. These games all use 25GB Blu-ray discs; Uncharted Showed and Ratched showed the freedom in textures with every level having its own unique textures, Lair showed the ability to stream lager levels, and Heavanly Sword showed the use of uncommpressed audio. Next year we will see many games coming out on 50GB Blu-ray discs. Games like Killzone 2, Getaway, and MGS4 will bring all of the advantages of Blu-ray together into one game, and create worlds that DVD is just not capable of.

 All the games you named are linear, and thus can be put on multiple DVD's. The only real advantage of Blu Ray is for non linear games, games that have vast open lands that you must return to on multiple occasions. This can be done on DVD, but would be a real pain in the ass once you pass the line between disk 1 and 2. The constant switching would be a bitch. Linear games on the other hand are okay because you generally go from disk 1 to 2 to 3 and so on without having to change back until you restart/replay the game.

 I really think that FF13 will be the first game to take advantage of Blu Ray.

Musouka said: Yes, more space is necessary given the bigger texture sizes and all the add-ons, which eventually enhance the game experience. Who would want to play a Metal Gear game when cut scenes are kept at a minimum.  MS should have included a bigger capacity disc. They suffered from space shortages even in racing games ala PGR 4, and had to work their way around that problem by using lighting instead of different day/night textures.

 Actually a lot of people would.  Back to OT. The problem isn't space available, but cost of asset creation.  High res. textures, 7.1 sound and unique character models for every character cost lots of money at every point in design, from brainstorming to concept art to prototyping to final product. This is why we've seen game with budgets in the tens of millions coming from a team of over a hundred people be well under 10 hours. Uncharted may be using 91% of BR capacity, but that doesn't prevent it from being short as hell for the above reasons. And the thing is that many of the ways you can cut down on some of the above cost also help save disc space. If you have a high res brick texture, then it doesn't make that much sense to make a new one for a brick building later in the game, or a brick wall later in the same level - especially when you can alter the lighting to give them a different appearance. Furthermore, reusing textures helps cut down on the amount of RAM in use on a level, again beneficial. This has already been in use in games for ages, and modern games are only going to continue this for cost and performance reasons. Bluray is, in no way, going to curb this trend unless you see games with far, far larger budgets and dev times or very short SP.

TL,DR summary; Space isnt the main constraint this gen, its budget and time because of HD.

@ NJ5

Of course I do, realtime rendered cutscenes should take less space than pre-rendered cutscene videos. Compression is one option and improves loading times on the PS3 as the Cell is so powerful it can decompress data faster than the drive can load the additional data. Compression possibilities are also limited though as in the end it's all just 1s and 0s and you cannot reduce this further without losing data (reduced texture or video quality for example is possible, so you can reduce this furher than executeable code).

You have to understand I come from an Amiga background, devs had to deal with 880 KB diskettes, this was the platform's most evident and profound limitation with regard to creating games. Devs had to pull every trick they could find to reduce the amount of data on disc, such as re-using graphics and sound from previous levels, using memory efficient mod music, procedural teniques to create more diversity or by mirrorring graphics and using different color schemes, etc.

The demoscene also is really big on the Amiga with for example the devs behind Max Payne / FutureMark creating space and memory restricted technical demonstrations for fun. They had to use a varierty of techniques to impress while limiting themselves to for example on 40K-64K max for intros or one disc for the bigger demos.

Example Amiga 500 demo example (880 KB disc) (DivX capture)
http://omr.planet-d.net/amidemos/sota.zip

Amiga 4000 demo
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2aoIsWxGWHQ

I'm sorry but you either didn't understand my post or you're being downright dishonest.

I don't care what your background is, when we're talking about developers filling up Blu-Ray discs with uncompressed audio, it's obvious that optimizing for space is not going to happen a lot on the PS3, where it doesn't affect loading times or anything else in practical terms. You can even forget the audio example, and just accept that basic fact.