Blu Ray a Must Have for Truley Next Generation Games

It is time to put all of this speculation to rest on weather Blu Ray is needed in next Gen games. I have listened to to many people claim that Blu Ray is an absolute slap in the face to Playstation fan, because nothing could be further from the truth. The PS3 has a Blu Ray drive for games first and formost, it is a luxury to also be able to use it for movies. Many of you may think this is BS but you have to look past the then and now to wearthis gen is really taking us. In this blog I will go over examples of why Blu Ray is so important to games and how it will make the PS3 the best system for the most emersive games of this generation.

Multiple Discs

This is often the first argument brought up by gamers when talking on this subject, and right now that is completly understandable. As of now no 3rd party titles have used multiple discs and many have even utilized the DVDs less than they did with PS2/Xbox. The reason for this is up to the end of 2006 it was the PS2 generation and the 360 was their to. Many devs did not put full power behind making next gen games because 2/3 of the industry was still in the past gen with a lot more money to be made. This is not the case anymore in 2007. Sony and Nintendo are both in the next gen market and the game is ready to begin. Now that the hole industry has moved forward it is time to start putting full force behind 360, PS3, and Wii development. This means companys will begin to start expeimenting with their new toys finding ways to pump out more power. Once this happens we will see games growing to 20+GB and 360 games will all be on multiple discs. Now Multiple discs is not all bad RPGs, GTAs, and RTS' are all fine on multiple discs. It is when Madden starts going onto 2 and 3 discs that it will get annoying. No one wants exibition and season on one disk, career and franchise on another, and Online on a third it would be rediculous. The bad thing is, if 360 games are not down graded this will have to happen and heres why.

Audio

I will start here because this is one of the places were Blu Ray will truley do amazing things. To start Blu Ray can do fully uncompressed 7.1ch sourrond sound, this alone will take up a much greater amount of disc space compared to last gen games. At the moment, However, this feature is not somthing that will be widly used due to the amount of people that have surrond sound, but that is not all blu ray offers for audio. With Blu Ray and the power of Cell audio teams will be able to really shine on the PS3. Sports games are a great example of how the space on Blu Ray will very usefull. No longer does a sports game announcer have to repeat the same thing over and over again throuh the hole game. With Blu Ray the teams can add thousands of more lines of comentary in baseball, soccer, football and Basket ball games. They can add facts about players, use more phrases for things going on on the feild, give historical info on the game and tech you about how certant plays formations and pitches work. Commentry can be brought to an all new level, and it dosn't stop their.

Games on Blu Ray can have more sounds on the feild such as coaches barking orders, players grunting, sounds the bat makes when conecting with the ball, thuds from hits can sound all differant depending on how the were recived, and many more suttle sounds that really add to the atmospher. Plus the sound seach stadium has that are unique can really be enfisized. When go the seattle you will here the sound of trains and sigals, in san franscico you will hear the sound of ships in the bay, in chicago the ripping wind will be heard as it wipps past you on the feild. All of this may be small, but it takes a lot of space and once you have it going back to a game with out it will feel really noticable. Much more will be done with sound in all games this gen, but I think this is good for now. Next on my agenda is animations, and physics, which will play a key role in next gen games.

Animations and Physics

This is a catagory that will be huge on PS3 and 360 games. With the charictors looking so good and the enviornment looking so real it will kill a game to be skimpy in this department. If it looked rediculous last gen to shoot a rocket at a door or tree and have it look like nothing ever happened it will only be magnified this gen. Starting with sports games again in this catagory, in which Physics and animation make a big effect due to their trying to emulate real life. Take for example a 2nd basemen in a late last gen Baseball game. They may have had like 20 canned catches and throughs for every play they had to make. It would have been nice to add more, but their simpliy was not the space to do so. Now with Bluray that same second basemen can have over a hundred animations which adds a ton of veriety to the game and makes each play more exiting, because it will not be the same everytime. Adding Phisics to the game makes it so hits can look more realistic and make better hops of walls and when players colide it will react in a very nice looking bone crunching colision. This dosn't stop at the feild either, as fans will also have their own animations. All of this will make sports titles use up a lot of disc space.

Animation and physics will play an even bigger role in FPS, Stealth, racing, and adventure games. Cutscence and gameplay will and a lot of very complex movment and facial animations which will all take up a lot of extra space on the disc. Games like Killzone, MGS, Uncharted, and Ratchet will all have a lot of disc space used for making animation more fluid. All of these games will be very heavy in physics also, which will not only include objects but also enviornmental destruction. This will then make it so everything will have to be deeper than last gen games using more textures and more verity.

Textures And Verity

This is were developers will begin to really eat up the GB. In previous games devs used a lot of textures over and over again to save disc space, and that is why a lot of PS2/Xbox game take place in a similar atmospher all the way through. Now with Blu Ray they no longer have to worry about limited disc space as much. They can have gigantic amounts of differant textures giving the hole game a unique feel. Games like MGS4 will shocase this extreamly well. In previous additions MGS took place in the same eviornment the hole game because of texture limitation, now with MGS4 kojima will be taking us all over the world to much differant places. In issue 152 of Gameinformer he explains how he wants the graphics of the game to look good, but he wants the depth to be incredible. This is were veriety will take place, all the enemys in the game will have their own look no two should ever look exactly the same. Kojima wants the hole world to be acssesible, so if you walk by a door it can be opened and entered. Once inside each room will be unique to the family, buissness, or purpose it has. to go even deeper all of this will be shown with streaming textures, and the hole enviornment will be distuctable. This kind of stuff takes up ingodly amounts of space on the disc and is only possible on Blu Ray or Multiple discs. My last subject includes 1080p and the amount of levels and modes in games.

1080p and Game Modes/Levels

One things that is compleatly unique to blu ray is the ability to stream data at 1080p no amount of DVDs will ever do this. Many may believe the PS3 will not do 1080p, but that is uterly rdiculous. Many devs have said the PS3 is very capable of 1080p including itigachi, the creaters of lair, polyphony, and namco all of which have made or are making 1080p games. In their opinion all PS3 games should support 1080p by 2009. This along with many modes of play and levels will add a great del of data to the discs. Resistance is an example right now of how a game can have many levels, of great size that all look very good. That game takes up 16 gigs of data @720p. Games such as Lair and Ratchet will push this a level further. Insomniac has aready stated that ratchet will use streaming textures, have larger levels than resistance and run at 1080p. The demo level for Lair took 4GB of data and it was not even complete. If that game has 12 levels it is already hitting the end of Blu Ray right know.

Conclusion

This is just skratching the surface of what Blu Ray means to next gen Games. Asking if it is needed is uncalled for, and saying it is a slap in Playstation supporters faces is an act of complete ignorance. Everything mentioned above will play a huge role in filling the Blu Ray and making truley next gen games. Do not underestimate what this means for games as it is more important than Cell, RSx, or Motion. By the end of this generation I would not be suprised if PS3 games were on 3 and 4 layer blu ray. 3rd party will take advantage of this because, if they don't their games will be unacceptable compaered to PS3 exclusives. Anyway just think about the future Blu Ray is the future.

Quite frankly I don't agree about the Audio and Animation & Physics.  Especially the Animation and Physics.

All of the space taken up by these is all code, it's text, text can't get that large, but it ties into the Textures section.

 Honestly if you think a sports game is going to be limited by disc size? I don't think you'r on the right path.

 But overall, yes most of your points I agree with, just not audio for sports games and the code for animation and physics.

How many people buy a game for PCM audio?

Oh man audio is a huge part of the disk. I'll try to find the artical were EA said they could only allow so much of the disc to the audio team last gen and how next gen dvds will make comintary in games a lot better. Audio is not programming buddie it is all MP3, and animations is all done with ingame charictor models. Animations can take up a fair amount of space espically if they get complex.

Except stop motion is very time consuming and expensive, just like animating by hand. You aren't going to see a massive increase in the number of animations due to cost, regardless of how much space bluray adds. Besides things are moving towards procedural generation, like the euphoria engine, so this argument becomes mute.

And add this statistic for some thought:

"Madden 06 NFL 360: 3.3 GB"

Boy, EA sure is using all those 9GB available on DVD for audio!

Regardless, it all comes down to cost. Recording thousands of lines is very, very expensive and time consuming. Besides it's not something that will impact sales significantly as the average consumer won't be able to see the difference on the back of the box.

Going back to my original argument, its cost and time that prevents many of these things from being implimented, not technology.

EDIT: read this, seriously http://www.gamesfirst.com/?id=1132

Here is the promised link: http://computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=160994 copy and paste as I am not sure how links are done from PS3. Back to your statment about Madden 06. That was the first game on the 360, and it was not even a full game. Get me this years numbers to prove a point, because like I said in my post until end of last year it was PS2 gen and 360 games were first priority. Now that it is completely next gen we will see all of that start to change. I think we will see my three disc madden senario by Madden 2010.

I just wanna say that the MLB baseball game on my PS3 was 900megs. It had 1 feild, and about 20-30 players. 2 teams.

I also wanna say that the AC4 demo, was 900 or so megs. Now it carries quite a large sum of data on it, becuase of repeat textures on diffrent 'worlds'. However I know there are many more. I would say the average PS3 game coming out late 2007 will be over 5gb. And the average PS3 game coming out in 2010 will be 15-25gigs. (these are average, not the big ones. If anything this will represent 75% of games. 15% will be much smaller, and then 10% will be much bigger. Kinda like it took over 2 years for PS2 to move away from CD. Dont expect games to go from 3-5gb to 50gb overnight. However it didnt even take 5 years for the average game to go from 300mb to 3gb.)

I feel that once the massive PS3 games start coming out, the 360 will follow style. And that means multi-disc. 

Alright I read your artical and i have to say that it is incomplete data. Thouse games were not the real Xbox 360 games they wereup ports of last gen games minus many features (besides Condemed which I can not comment on). I want to see what PGR3 took up or pefect dark zero thouse are the games that were desent at launch. Plus a lot of 360 games were only pushing 600p at launch which also helped reduce space especially compared to 1080p, plus the metionmed games did not use high res textures like Gears of War which I would love to know how much space that took up.

http:/music.ign.com/articals/765/765093p1.html This artical is all about the musi in Lair. About the 5th paragaph down they say they have enoughf data to fill 8CDs thats around 6BGs of data right their. So if Sony sets a president of this kinda of audio in game it will have to be fallowed by third parties to keep up. Also note this does not include voice acting, or sound effects. I would say the final game will see about 2.5+GB in sound alone. And to get back to your animation point, each studio is doing animation differantly this gen. Looking at how naughty dog does it it will take a lot of time but it will rock in the end. Kwaad I think you are on the right track, but I think we will see big games on PS3 very quickly. Ithink MGS4 will nearly fill a 50GB blu Ray, and the same with most of Sonys first party titles late this year.