Oblivion Expansion Confirmed

The rumored first 'real' expansion to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been confirmed. Shivering Isles will be available for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, with the expansion available as a download for 360 owners. In additional Oblivion-related news, GameSetWatch made a point to single out the double-layering of content for the PS3 version of the game. The title (due out next month with all 'add-ons' included) overcomes the slow speed of Blu-ray discs via a simple kludge: putting the content on there twice. From the article: "A perceptive comment from 'Marvin' is worth reprinting: "You'd automate the duplication at the image creation stage to avoid any stale data problems. People have done this on other platforms before for the same reasons - particularly the PSP, with its horrible UMD seek times. However, it does rather negate the whole increased storage capacity advantage."

Comments

Re:Theoretically, seek times should be better

[NonSequor]

The Blu-ray drive in the PS3 only spins at 2x speed. Even with the density advantage of Blu-ray it ends up only giving slightly better transfer rates than the 4x DVD drive in the PS2. The 360 uses a 12x DVD drive and I can't find any information on the speed of the Wii's drive, but it's probably also somewhere in the neighborhood of 12x.

The Blu-ray drive's slow transfer rate is only made worse by the fact that high definition games have to pull a lot more data off of the disc and the hack discussed in the article will only improve the seek time. I can't help but think that Sony going with Blu-ray at this point in time was ill-advised. If Blu-ray were a bit more mature they would have faster drives. As it is now, they're trading speed for capacity and games REALLY need speed and if they lack capacity it's generally feasible to spread the game across multiple discs.