You can use extra disc space to reduce load times? Heavenly sword was only 22 gigs....what happens when you have 178 gigs of space left over? Hypothetically, of course. I know it doesn't exactly exist yet.

Blu-ray will peak at 200gigs, but I say more.

They said it's in development and would only need a firmware upgrade to existing models to play...they wouldn't have mentioned that if they weren't at least considering it for implementation during this generation.

 What do you consider FMV?  Heavenly Sword has lots of prerendered cutscenes, but those are all done inside the engine from what I've seen.  Stuff like that takes very little space when compared to a full cg movie.

Alright, with the 200gb DVD, it's time for a return of the sprite based RPGs.

500,000 hours of gameplay, whos' with me!

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2665668&Sku=L12-1126&SRCCODE=PWATCH&CMP=OTC-PWATCH

gamingdevil, reality.  reality, gamingdevil.  I feel priveleged to introduce the two of you.

A somewhat more original report: http://techluver.com/2007/10/03/hitachi-displays-100gb-blu-ray-drive/

"Hitachi has developed a prototype four layer Blu-Ray disc capable of holding 100GB of data. The company claims to have used a standard Blu-Ray drive optical head that’s only slightly modified to allow it to read and write data across the four 25GB layers. It’s believed this will only require a firmware update to make existing drives compatible."

If they've modified the head, I don't see how a firmware update would work on existing Blu-ray drives.  Of course, the information available regarding this update is rather slim, so we'll have to wait for clarification.

Look at Lost Odyssey. Doesn't most of the games storage go to fmv's, thus the reason for multi-disc? Heavenly Sword might be short, but it has alot of background going on. I ran for miles in the battle with a thousand or more npc's and each were doing there own thing. I literally mean... you see then from afar and then run up to them and they are coming for you.

If HS, needs so much storage and yet is a short game... obviously more space is truly needed for this 'Gen' and 'Next Gen' to have similar uncompressed data as well as long game play. I don't think GOW3 will be a short game and I don't think it will be crap in the gfx department... if you get my drift.

 You may want to rethink that? Look at the rate of change in technology. Sure we don't need alot of stuff now. I remember people saying we don't need dvd for the ps2?  But that went out the window. Games will need more space in the near future - diffenatley within 2 -5yrs.  I think games like mgs4, ff13 and kz2 will prove the need for more space. :D

Most games data is audio. Eg. HS has 10GB of lossless compressed audio (2/1), Oblivion has 3GB of lossy compressed audio (10/1 I think, maybe more).

Edit: if you are talking specifically about LO then most of that will be fmv/audio.