Poseidon said: Yeah, the ones who were dedicated to the 360 from the getgo and bought that HD-DVD drive should learn to bite the bullet, I mean, business tactics should prevail from customer satisfaction is what I'm getting from your post.

Why would any customer who bought the HD DVD drive "bite the bullet" in case Blu-ray won the war and an additional Blu-ray drive was offered by MS? The drive is an optional enhancement, so any customer who bought it bought it willingly, being aware of the ongoing format war and knowing that it might not pay off in the end, hence it being optional. In contrast, Sony would make their customers bite the bullet should they lose, since they forced everyone to spend money on that over-expensive Blu-ray thing which is not neccessary for playing games.

You want reasons why blu ray is nessicary for games i will give you some. First to add to my last post about stopts games. Blu Ray gives the ability to add hundreds even thousands of lines of new commentary, more sounds on the feild, more chants from fans, audio from coaches, and overall atmesfer of sound like birds, venders, trains and what not. Next you have space for many more animations, which EA has already stated both of these are reasons for needing blu ray for their future sports titles. Take a baseball game for example. On PS2Xbox a second basemen may have had 20 differant animations, now with blu ray that can be upped by 7 times so 140 animations making transitions look more fluid and putting more interest into every play. With more power also comes more responsibility and players can't look generic any longer which means each player should have a unique look which also takes a lot of space especially on a baseball or soccer game were you have so many players.

wii_are_better_than_ said: Actually, the PS3 isn't much more powerful at all. In fact you could argue that the 360 is more powerful. Wait for a price drop for the PS3 if you absolutely must have it.     edit- and welcome to the forums.

the PS3 is around 20x more powerful than a Intel Core 2 Duo EXTREME.

 Stanford is asking all PS3 owners to run Folding@Home because the PS3 will process the strands of DNA faster than their computers can. They Run C2DeX Workstations to try and find a cure for Cancer.

wii_are_better_than_ said: Actually, the PS3 isn't much more powerful at all. In fact you could argue that the 360 is more powerful. Wait for a price drop for the PS3 if you absolutely must have it.

 QFT.

 

As all the exclusives jump ship the wait and see if there is a reason approach is best here. Of third party exclusives only Metal Gear 4 remains and Final Fantasy is in jumping talks.

 I'm actually fearful the PS3 may be an Atari Jaquar of consoles. As Sega Saturn was doing better at this point in time. Not a good sign as Nintendo and M$ prepare their killer aps for the summer and fall.

Now on two how Blu Ray can help a none sim game. First and formost all PS3 games will be 1080p by 2009 Itigachi and the Lair devs have both started it is very possible to do. This alone will take double the disk space of most 360 games in the art department. Higher definition is not even the start though of were Blu Ray adds to game. First you have all I mentioned in the post above and it just goes on from there. With DVD a developer is limited to the amount of differant textures they can use so you will see a lot of the levels taking place in very similiar places, just like you did with big games last gen such as MGS, GTA, Getaway, killzone, and Halo. All of these games had to go with a theme to thier look because they could not have a lot of differant textures, this is why MGS three is only in the jungle. Now with the Blu Ray and the ability to stream textures devs will be able to eat away at the disk like their is no tommorow filling it with a gigantic amonts of textures.

Alright so I have went over Sound, Animation, Textures, and definition, but I know this is not good enoughf to make my piont ot everyone yet so heres more. Know I will look at the sive and amount of levels in games. Resistance shows that even without the best graphics it is easy to hit 16 gigs with a lot of levels, and motorstorm shows with the best looking game out it takes few levels to fill the same amount of space. Once we get into more PS3 killer apps which have both we will see games easily hitting 30 gigs. These games will have a huge veriety of inviornments, atmosphers, and will include distruction, and eveolving surroundings. A game like MGS4 will have huge levels in which every house in the level will be enterable and diferent. Their will be pictures on walls in rooms that are only in that room. Houses will have pics of their owners and will never be duplicated. Every enemy soldier will have their own look, and build. You can find this all in issue 152 dec 05 Gameinformer.

All that stuff sounds great, but you're never going to get me to spend more than $300 for it.

KBG29 said: All of these games had to go with a theme to thier look because they could not have a lot of differant textures, this is why MGS three is only in the jungle. Now with the Blu Ray and the ability to stream textures devs will be able to eat away at the disk like their is no tommorow filling it with a gigantic amonts of textures.

Gigantic amounts of textures also means gigantic amounts of development time. Every texture requires man hours to optimise, tile etc. Talking purely in terms of textures is wrong anyway. You need to think in terms of shaders - multiple layers of different filters - opacity, specular diffuse and so on. Shaders take a lot of time to get right. Having 7x more shaders means 7x more man hours.

I'm sure that the extra space available on blu ray will prove some worth before this generation is out - probably only to a handful of games though.

mrstickball said: The breaking point is if Sony can somehow develop middleware, developer kits, or something to allow the big ones like S-E, EA, Konami, Namco-Bandai, Activision, ect to make the PS3 a lead console for development on the multi-platform games.

That's an important point which I definitely overlooked in my original post. The question is, will the difference be enough to justify the additional expense of the PS3 to all but the most hardcore gamer?

I'm sceptical on that one. Killer exclusives, not multi-platform titles are the way back for the PS3 IMO.

  

Golvellius said: Poseidon said: Yeah, the ones who were dedicated to the 360 from the getgo and bought that HD-DVD drive should learn to bite the bullet, I mean, business tactics should prevail from customer satisfaction is what I'm getting from your post. Why would any customer who bought the HD DVD drive "bite the bullet" in case Blu-ray won the war and an additional Blu-ray drive was offered by MS? The drive is an optional enhancement, so any customer who bought it bought it willingly, being aware of the ongoing format war and knowing that it might not pay off in the end, hence it being optional. In contrast, Sony would make their customers bite the bullet should they lose, since they forced everyone to spend money on that over-expensive Blu-ray thing which is not neccessary for playing games.

Come on, a good number of people bought the HD-DVD drive because it was also hyped by Microsoft, and countering people who said that HD-DVD might fail. And you mean to tell me people wouldn't have a problem giving back their HD-DVD drives and HD-DVDs for far more less? I want an honest answer from you, if Sony had done this, would you be jumping all over them?

And I agree, if Blu-ray flopped, then that would be it for the PS3. But unlike Microsoft, Sony at least have backed it, are backing it, and will be backing it, whereas Microsoft's real intention was probably just to give Sony a hard time and start another format war.

People want to put Microsoft in a better light than Sony, when they are almost on the same wavelength when it comes to spouting bullshit; you mean to tell me there is a difference between Microsoft's crap and Sony's shit?