Zackman <zackman RemoveThis @spamisevilearthling.net> wrote:
> Tom spake thusly:
> > What game and type of failure was that?
> I'm curious about this too.
Resistance: Fall Of Man was supposed to show the world why exactly blu-ray
was necessary for next-gen gaming. It failed in that the overall game
wasn't shown to be larger than a DVD, but had been replicated across the
blu-ray disc to make up for the drive's slower seek time modern DVD drive.
> I think Android makes a very good point -- until each new storage medium
> was introduced, we didn't really know we needed it. But then developers
> found a way to use it.
I don't think that's necessarily true... Before CD became affordable, you
already had PC applications coming on a small stack of floppy disks.
There was DEFINITELY a need, but it just wasn't feasible yet because CD
drives were very expensive.
I think the same could be said of video games as well. I mentioned Myst
as my example of a game that very clearly showed why you needed a larger
format than either your floppy drive or even hard drive (at that time,
even hard drives were maybe 200-300MB in size, compared to the whopping
650MB that a CD held!)
Even before the PS1, we were already seeing what could be done with larger
storage mediums, even if the majority of the new material was pre-rendered
FMVs used in RPGs or maybe an opening for an action game.
The PS1 showed from day one that CDs were necessary for their larger
storage. While you could still have done the games using conventional ROM
chips, the price would have been prohibative. Even the PS1 outgrew CDs,
as once again, RPGs grew to be 2, 3 even 4 CDs in size.
The PS2 used both CD and DVD for its games, but many of the launch games
used the more expensive DVD, and again illustrated that the larger storage
capacity was necessary for many games.
But during the PS2 (and Xbox for that matter) we didn't see games outgrow
the DVD medium. The only multi-DVD games I've seen are RPGs where
mutli-disc games have been the norm for close to 20 years now.
> Couple of things tho... having acres upon acres of storage space doesn't
> end up being that big an advantage if you can't pull that data off the
> disc quickly. A Blu-ray disc could hold a ton of uncompressed textures
> and audio, but the drive transfer speed is too slow to make that
> feasible. It's far better to compress that data as much as possible and
> have a robust CPU to decompress it on the fly.
Exactly. Besides which, the one thing the PS3 doesn't lack in is CPU
power, so doing the decompression on-the-fly shouldn't be a problem. Of
course, you then need acres of acres of RAM to store this data...which is
another problem area for the PS3.
> So what's all that space good for then? Sure, you could make an entire
> virtual model of a major metropolis, but developing the assets for that
> would be unfeasibly expensive. It really seems to come down to having
> lots of room for HD cutscenes.
That's really about the only advantage Blu-Ray has over DVD at this
point. And even then it's arguable that a 15-30 hr. action game is going
to have enough cutscenes in it to use more space than a DVD. Also, with
more powerful processors, it's becoming more and more feasible to do the
cutscenes "in-game" - that is, use the engine to do the cutscenes instead
of loading a pre-rendered movie. Halo is a good example of in-game
cutscenes.
Even with RPGs, you're generally looking at maybe an hour total of
pre-rendered movies that are scattered throughout the entire playing
experience. Xenosaga is an extreme example with, what, 4 hours of
cutscenes for a 40-50 hour game? (but I don't think all 4 hours were
pre-rendered - don't recall.)
> The other point is the 360 is already a year and a half old. Meaning we
> can expect to see the next Xbox around Xmas 2010, or 2011 at the latest.
> By then there will be absolutely no question which format has won, and
> Microsoft can go ahead and put a dirt cheap Blu-ray drive (or HD-DVD, in
> the unlikely event it ends up winning) in the Xbox 720 or whatever.
> So the question is, will the *need* for over 9 GB of game storage make
> itself completely apparent in the next three to four years? Because if
> it doesn't, it means Sony jumped the gun and paid a lot of money to do
> so, while Microsoft stuck with an acceptable "last-gen" technology and
> can make the jump to the next level very cheaply for the next console.
As I've stated, the need for a new storage format was clear even before
the new generation rolled out with a larger format.
Coming off the PS2/Xbox generation, there really wasn't quite the apparent
NEED for a larger format. So, why then did Sony insist that Blu-Ray
wasn't just good for games, but NECESSARY? I know people scoffed when
Sony put a DVD drive in the PS2, and offered DVD movie playback with it,
but at least in that case, there were already clear cases for use of a
larger storage medium like DVD for games. Adding the DVD player software
was an obvious choice.
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