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

Pshaw

[brilinux]

I play no games which do not fit on a 5.25" floppy.

A problem that's going to get worse too

[ChrisRijk]

Xbox 360 games are likely to get more detail and more complex over time, so being limited to 9GB per disk is going to become more and more of a problem.

Anyone want to bet Microsoft do an "updated" Xbox with higher capacity DVD and other tweaks...?

Meanwhile, PS3 developers get to use a whole Blu-Ray disc...

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.

Re:No wonder

[Keeper]

Not only that, but the pc version is shipping on only one disc.

All of the "oh no, the sky is falling in because HD games need higher res [foo]" talk is just rediculous. PC games have been running at > HD resolutions for years, and they still manage to ship on one or two CDs.

Re:Worst Console Ever

[RoadDoggFL]

MS got ass raped at E3? By pre-rendered videos and a god-awful controller? And MS made very few mistakes with the Xbox, reading Opening the Xbox by Dean Takahashi would offer insight into the thought that went into the console and the intentions of those who were instrumental in ensuring that the console not end up as a WebTV box on steroids (pretty much what the PS2 was pormised to be, the 360 ended up being, and the PS3 is going to be).

Sony seriously dropped the ball but luckily was able to build enough unwarranted hype around its PS2 that by the time people noticed that they weren't coming through on any of their promises, they'd sold millions of the things and good games were on the way. As a console, the PS2 isn't impressive at all. The Xbox was designed for developers, and MS went to great lengths to make sure it was what developers wanted and needed, and provided them with tools to create games for it. Sony? They were busy designing a machine that performed better on paper than in the real world.

I really don't agree with the direction MS and Sony are trying to take console gaming. Nintendo's not exactly right, but they're a lot closer than the other two. Since MS is trying to invade homes worldwide and Sony's trying to milk the industry for all it's worth before possibly destroying it and probably bailing out, they're naturally going for quick earnings rather than looking out for what's best for the market. The charm of console games is all but gone, I feel that the generations that follow will see even more pronounced "multimedia machines" that play games as almost a side-effect, then maybe a small company will release a dedicated gaming machine that turns some heads and grabs the attention of some developers so the process can start anew.

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.