Certain Xbox 360 Titles May Fill 4 DVDs

MBCook writes "A Joystiq post says that certain 'highly anticipated' Xbox 360 titles will fill four discs-worth of content. From the post: 'From the high-res textures fit for an HDTV to the higher polygon counts befitting a next-gen console, the space available on standard DVDs is suddenly in increasingly short supply. [...] According to Game Informer, nearly every developer they talked to at X05 expressed difficulties fitting their launch titles onto a single disc. One unnamed yet highly anticipated game in particular is said to currently occupy a full four 9Gb DVDs.'" Relatedly, Microsoft has announced that mainland Asia should expect a March 2006 launch date for the 360 console.

Comments

What's actually in those 36 Gigs?

[ScaryFroMan]

Until they start filling those 36 gigs with AI, Physics, Ginormous dynamic levels, or dare I say it, Gameplay, I'm not biting.

PC Games?

[coolestdickofall]

I'm not sure I quite understand this.. PC games have been high res for many years. They don't seem to require multiple DVD-9s...

Re:PC Games?

[TubeSteak]

From TFA:

Microsoft's J Allard downplayed the storage issues, citing that improved compression rates in the future will allow much more data to be held on an individual disc, and that the pre-launch crunch forced many current 360 titles to use space far more inefficiently than they would have otherwise.

It helps... to read... TFA.

Re:Never

[/ASCII]

I can't help but feel that the only reason for needing more than 9 GB for a game is huge amounts of laziness. What takes up all that space? Here's what I can come up with:

• The game code. That should not be more than a few magabytes, obviously a neglectable part.
• Sounds and music. Should compress very well. One gigabyte should give you something like 12 hours worth of high quality sounds, if properly compressed. I excpect that using lots of uncompressed sounds may be one of the causes for the huge amounts of used space.
• Textures. No matter how many static textures you have, and how large they are, they will always end up looking repetitive. The only way to get truly good looking textures is to create them procedurally. You often need some data to generate good procedural textures, but not more than a few megabytes. I would guess that all the first-gen 360-titles used static textures, so this is probably the main culprit.
• Models. Plygon models are dwarfed in size by textures.
• FMV. While in-game cutscenes usually are preferable since they use the same visual style as in-game graphics, developers are lazy. I excpect this is one of the things that take up a lot of room.
• Other stuff like background images, animated company logo FMV, trailers for other games, etc. Might take a bit of space, but most of it would probably get cut in order to save the cost of adding an extra disc, so this is probably not it.

My guess is that game developers will bite the bullet and learn how to use procedural textures to make smaller but better looking games, and in the end we will see huge games with great graphics that fit on a single DVD9.

Death to pre-rendered cutscenes!

[Stormwatch]

Maybe what's taking all this room is pre-rendered cutscenes! It seems japanese developers love to fill discs with them... and Microsoft's decision to stick to DVD could help them break out of this vicious circle! There was a time when CGs made sense, but no longer; rendering all cutscenes in real time is now feasible - and it even adds a sense of visual coherence to the game.

the good olde days

[Rs_Conqueror]

Anyone else remember when three entire game discs were filled with storyline and had a real emotional impact on you? I'm referring mostly to games like FFVII. It seems the problem with the game designers today is that they're so stuck on graphics that they miss some of the most importent elements of a game. A storyline that moves you. Ok I'm done being sappy, but this is one thing that has been bugging me about quite a few of the "next gen" games.

Blueray

[gullevek]

Perhaps Sony thought about this, and thats why they "loose" extra money for putting a Blueray drive into it.