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360 Discs Large Enough For Content?
heartless_ wrote to mention a GamesFirst article exploring whether or not Xbox 360 Discs are large enough for their expected content. From the article: "The first Prince of Persia occupied 2.44 gigs, the second 2.88, an increase of only 18%. Knights of the Old Republic went from 3.65 gigs in the first installment to 3.99 gigs in the second, a 9% increase. The Splinter Cell series went from 3.71 gigs in the first to 3.05 gigs in Pandora's Tomorrow, a reduction of 18% (though it should be noted that Chaos Theory, after switching development houses, ballooned into one of the largest games on the Xbox at 5.62 gigabytes). So the assumption that games, by their nature, grow in size as they evolve is not absolutely true. They do become more complex, but not necessarily at the expense of filesize."
I keep hearing arguments about how textures for "HD" games will take a lot more memory. But remember, PCs have supported HD (or even greater) resolutions for many years now. Games like Half-Life 2 or Unreal Tournament 2004 already have high-resolution textures (certainly enough for the 1680x1050 resolution of my LCD) and they certainly don't require an insane amount of space. UT2004, for example, with its 100+ maps, is still only 5.2GB. That's about 1/2 the space of a DVD-9.
Most PS3 games will be released on DVD. DVDs will remain cheaper than Blu-Ray discs for most of the PS3's lifecycle, and fitting a game in 9GB of space just isn't that hard, "HD" textures or not.
Microsoft's choice of DVD was the right one. The XBOX 360 is out there, right now, capturing marketshare and selling games. Microsoft is fixing bugs in the hardware, improving the online software, and gaining momentum in the 3rd-party development world. Meanwhile, PS3 is nowhere to be seen. The samples presented at CES and E3 are identified as "Conceptual Designs", meaning that the hardware isn't finalized or even in the prototype stage. Blu-Ray drives are beginning to appear, but they are extremely expensive and the media is nowhere to be found.
Building a system around a technology that doesn't exist is a foolish move. NEXT tried it with a Magneto-Optical drive, and when the technology was late, expensive, and buggy, NEXT took it on the chin.