Shack: What's the DVD situation looking like with Rage on Xbox 360?
Todd Hollenshead: We'll probably have two DVDs for sure, and then the question is, will multiplayer be on a separate disc or not? Will we have to go to three?
We believe may be able to get the whole game on two DVDs. The current fallback is, if we can't, the multiplayer may--you have to come up with logical breaks, well, really, practical breaks.
It makes no sense for a player to swap that disc in multiplayer, right? That's fail. They have to keep one disc in during multiplayer, can you just put all the multiplayer content on one DVD? Even if it's duplicative of some of the content you have on the other single-player DVDs.
Shack: Does the fact that you can install Xbox 360 games to the hard drive help at all?
Todd Hollenshead: Yeah, I mean. People with hard drives, I think, will have better performance on the 360 because we'll be able to save off to the hard drive and the read speed is so much faster. I don't think it really saves us any media, because we still have to play on the Arcade units, the ones that come without the hard drive. Why they sell those, I have no idea. I think Microsoft even regrets it.
We do want to be able to run on all the [Xbox 360] systems, so if you've got an Arcade unit, then we've got to think, "okay, we can't install massive amounts of data." If we can't guarantee that, then we have to make sure that we have a fallback, so that could push us to three. I mean, hell, it could push us to four, I don't know.
Best case, we get it all on two, and then we'd be good. We don't think there's any way to fit it all on one. Maybe two single-player and one multiplayer, hopefully not four or five. At that point, we might have to start making decisions about compression ratios and things like that.
link: http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1182&page=2
