Quote:

During his Austin Game Developers Conference discussion on storytelling and technology, id Software lead designer Tim Willits the developer is cutting back on t

he amount of content they would have liked to include in their upcoming shooter Rage. The main reason for limiting the game's content is the Xbox 360's limited disc storage, which allows about six to eight GB of data.

"The PC is limitless in the amount of data you can put on it," said Willits. "The PS3 has about 25GB. But the Xbox 360 roughly has 6 to 8 GB of data. We're hoping we can squeeze the game down to two discs for the 360 version."

According to Willits, the game was supposed to feature several wastelands for the player to explore. Because of the limitations of the Xbox 360's media, they had to cut down the wastelands to only two, which are themselves split into multiple instances. These changes have been made across all versions of Rage, not just the 360 port.

"I wouldn't say the overall story was changed in any way in order to fit on the Xbox 360 version," Willits said, "but how the player experiences Rage's story has been

altered." Unfortunately, that means the experience has been altered across all platforms. This is one of the first signs we've received of the 360's older DVD media showing its age, but we expect some fans won't be terribly pleased that it's affecting other versions of the game as well.

Source: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3169963

Strange how this is the first we've heard about a game being cut down for the 360's media. I suspect that this is less of an endemic problem, and more the tech-heads at id being lazy with compression techniques.

id already said back in June that there are compression issues with the 360...they said textures in remote and 'hidden' areas would not be as nice as the PS3 version...now they have gimped ALL versions as the 360's media can't hold all the level content.  And you can't count on a HDD for the X either.

i think it is unfair for the other versions to suffer because of this, if i was the dev i would have continued the game as planned and just cut back on the 360 version, or just simply put it on more disks.

Why don't they use 2-4 disks for the 360?

id is one of the few companies that you cant realy say that.  they are so ridiculously tech oriented that most of their problems are entirely hardware/game specific.  this goes under a hardware problem.

time for xbox 360 to implement blu ray or disapear from this console race, as games will only get bigger.

360 owners will end up getting 4/5 discs with every game come 2010, fix up Microsoft before its too late!

This is were I start getting displeased. There is no reason to gimp a game because one platform can not play it. If that is the case either;

A. Keep your mouth shut because you are going to unhype your game for the people that own platforms that you are claiming you have not takin advantage of.
B. Upset only the fan base that would be effected since that is a lesser crowd.
C. Just don't make it on that platform.

I do not want to see this happening throghout the industry. If a company (EA) can add a ton of extra features to one of their big games (Madden), but they refuse to because 1 console can't handle the improvments, that is lazy buisness. It is everyones job in any feild they work in to do the best they can. In the gaming buisness that means you make the best product that you can and scale back from that. It does not mean you can just shoot for the middle and think it is fine. If we were to do that in my line of work we could be risking serious injury to people or loosing millions for airliners.



To any 360 super fans this is not a bashon 360, I am aiming this at the developer.

No, id isn't lazy, it's just that the game utilizes huge megatextures for their world.  It allows every part of the world to have a completely unique texture instead of just mapping a repeating texture over the terrain.  Compression techniques can only take you so far.

He also mentioned in an interview that they had to work twice as hard with the PS3 version just to bring it up to par with the 360... Maybe if they'd put that effort into the 360 version instead, the 360 version would be even better. So in a way the PS3 gimped the 360 version.

See, I can do the same thing...