More thoughts on game size and Blu-Ray
Awhile back, my friend Ozymandias and I had a discussion about Blu-Ray. He made some assertions about new compression codecs shrinking down the size of game assets so that, really, discs the size of what the PS3’s Blu-Ray provides are not necessary. Ozymandias suggested that DVD-9 is big enough, which is what Xbox360 ships with.
Last night I discovered that Blue Dragon, a very important Xbox360 title in Japan from Hironobu Sakaguchi, shipped on THREE DVDs. Moreover, Sakaguchi-san says that “the game required compression technology to fit onto the three disks.” Apparently, “In uncompressed form, the game’s data takes up over 30 Gigs of space!”
Three DVD-9’s allow for around 25.5 GB of data. Wouldn’t it have been better for the game player if the title had shipped on one 25GB Blu-Ray disc, or even a dual-layer HD-DVD (30GB)?
I find it humorous that the very thing that was touted during the PS1 era (more than one disc games) is now something Microsoft tries to avoid talking about… I personally have no problem switching discs after 10+ hours of gameplay as I rarely last that long in a game (I have game ADD)… At least Obivion shipped on one DVD-9, it would have really sucked if I had to get up and change discs everytime I entered a town…