Interesting new Blue Dragon details
There’s an interview with Mistwalker honcho Hironobu Sakaguchi in the latest edition of Famitsu and thankfully the friendly guys at GAF posted the most interesting tidbits. Apparently their upcoming J-RPG Blue Dragon is going to be 40-50 hours long and comes on no less than 3 DVDs, and there are more games in Mistwalker’s pipeline.
- Blue Dragon is now officially a series, in an interview Sakaguchi reveals a sequel is planned. There are two different design plans for the Xbox360.
- There will be free downloadable content for Blue Dragon.
- The game itself is about 40-50 hours long.
- Mistwalker has 3 other titles in production at the moment.
- It appears that out of the 3 Mistwalker games in development, one of them in particular is a joint production with a developer in the West (of Japan that is) and if for either the Wii or the DS. That implies that it might be a Nintendo joint production.
- Blue Dragon is a 3 DVD game.
Three DVDs, that’s a lot of swapping. Makes you wonder whether it’s just Mistwalker that has inferior compressing techniques or that it’s really time to move on from the DVD era. Time will tell… I know that I definitely prefer 50 hours of gameplay on 3 DVDs over 5 acts worth of gameplay on a single disk. Combine that with free downloadable content and the heartwarming graphics Blue Dragon has and I’m sure we’ll have a solid hit on our hands in a genre we don’t see too often on the 360. Blue Dragon is scheduled for a release on the seventh of December in Japan, a western date is still to be announced.
Three DVDs + Japanese developer = /me smells tons of prerendered crap
I don’t like more than one DVD for only one game.
yea it probly is like that but you guys remember he did it with final fantasy on ps1 so its not like ive never seen this.
Could be a lot of prerendered, or maybe a lot of voice acting.
Uhhhh 1GB of voice acting = 2000 minutes in 64Kbit MP3, that’s over 30 hours in a more than acceptable quality for voice. How much voice acting could you want?
Wiki says that Mistwalker was partly funded by Microsoft, so how much “say so” does MS have in future development and for what platforms?
Not a whole lot, MS just funds Blue Dragon like they funded Gears of War, Epic is still free to do whatever they want with future development and so is Mistwalker.
I’ve been reading this somewhere else a couple days ago already and was wondering … 3 dvd’s … just one year into “next-gen”. I don’t mind huge games at all, especially not if it’s a jrpg (love ‘em) but honestly … 3 dvd’s ? Makes you wonder if Microsofts choice to stick with DVD for 360 games was such a wise choice after all.
Certainly brings down production cost for consoles and games but 3 discs for 1 game reminds me of the final ps1 days where each and every rpg came out on 2-4 cd’s. Heck, even the PS2 sees 2 disc games at best in it’s final days.
Now one could easily say “so what, change the disc every now and then” and that’s fine depending on how it’s done (could turn out to be annoying tho) but the simple fact that they already release games on 3 DVD’s tells me there is an obvious problem with the 360 which explains a lot of my complaints about most so called next-gen games: Lack of content
They simply run out of space much quicker than anticipated I guess. HighRes textures and more detailed 3d models …. there is a price for that, too. And obviously Microsoft didn’t pay it when it came to disc space.
With that in mind one should hope they’ll rethink their stance on using hd-dvd for games and that they will offer some kind of upgrade program so the 360 gets an internal hd-dvd drive.
ok thanx Nino for the info. It would be a very good investment for MS to have Mistwalker, like Sony have Square (not owning, but a good relationship). Sorry for being off topic…
It’s entirely ontopic and I think they could benefit from each other too.
I really don’t mind the 3 disks, IF it’s not 3 times the normal price
i guarentee you its 3 disc due to high res pre rendered cut scenes. And how many American based games have that? not alot and if so, they don’t abuse it as much as Japan devs do. Three discs is fine knowing that its a Jap Dev game. Now when the three disc start being Game content and ingame cutscenes. Then we’ll have a problem. until then no.
it’s very obvious why they need all the space. I bet they’ve got more than an hour of high-defintion video on it! Why do Japanese developers often insist on having CGI!!??
Make it use the in-game engine and it would easily fit 1 DVD
I like it. 3 DVDs reminds me of the FF7 days, only on my 360!
“the simple fact that they already release games on 3 DVD’s tells me there is an obvious problem with the 360 which explains a lot of my complaints about most so called next-gen games: Lack of content”
First off, I love how people come hear spit their knowledge as if it’s fact. Listen to this guy talk about obvious problem with the 360. Did it ever occur to you that it my be a problem with the developer. Genius. So tell us which 360 game has lack of content? Madden? Brilliant. The japanese uses FMV to tell their stories because it’s a lot easier instead of using in-game. The new Zelda is about 40-50hrs of gameplay and it’s coming on one disc…no FMV. Same with Oblivion. One disk of gameplay, no FMV. It’s obvious alright. It’s obvious that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are for movies. That include movies in games.
My complaints about games ranging from saints row or just cause to TDU and especially GoW is a simple and obvious fact: pretty engines, lack of gamecontent. All those next gen games offer pretty amazing engines, one way or another but they all lack the amount of content you would expect. There simply isn’t a whole lot of gameplay in the next-gen box.
What do we get ? Just Cause 6-7 hours ? GoW 6-7 hours ? SR maybe 15 hours, TDU 10-50 depending on how bored you wanna be at some point. It’s the same for pretty much every 360 games with a few exceptions (naturally).
Content requires storage, highres content requires lots of storage, simple fact. And storage is a very limited resource for the 360. also a simple fact.
So don’t you come here spitting your childish fanboy bullshit at me without getting your facts straight. Thank you very much.
I am not attacking the 360, I am saying it’s storage solution is a design problem considering the much increased requirements of next-gen games (did you understand this sentence up to this point ?) and Blue Dragon is proof of that. And that has nothing to do with holy american developers vs dirty little crappy jap devs. CGI looks a hell of a lot better than anything one could possibly do ingame and reason for doing CGI instead of inengine cutscenes is quality, not lazyness. But that is probably way beyond your biased grasp of reality.
More multi disc games are already announced btw., Blue Dragon is just the first of many.
So in the end we can only hope that Microsoft will reconsider and release games on hd-dvd so we can actually get more than pretty engines and overhyped graphics demos. I honestly fail to see what’s wrong with that and why this would give you reason to attack me the way you did.
Blue Dragon only proves that prerendered cinematics take up a lot of space, and HD prerenders take up even more space. Had they used in-game cut scenes, I would be willing to bet that this game would fit on just one disc.
Me? I prefer in-game cut scenes. The prerendered scenes always look so alien compared to the rest of the game that it just kills the feeling of immersion for me.
True, and somewhat true. But cinematics != content. Oblivion (in HD) had very little in the way of cut scenes, but had enough content to keep me playing for 160 hours. Twilight Princess, while not HD, is on a single DVD, and is a 50-70 hour trek through Hyrule (plenty of content, if you ask me).
Storage space has very little to do with the length of most games. I doubt GoW took you 6-7 hours to finish solely because it had to fit on one DVD. Look at some of the PS3 games that are out. They’ve got a ton of space on those Blu-Ray discs, yet the games aren’t any longer than what we have on the 360. Game length is more of a design decision than something that’s restricted by storage requirements. They’ve got to figure out how long to make a game, without making it so long that it bores the player, and without making it so short that they feel ripped off. They’ve got to make you feel like you got your money’s worth and make you want to come back for the sequel. I think GoW did that for most people.
Another example: Half-Life 2 was only a 10-12 hour adventure, and it was a PC game. With a PC, I can have a hard disk that’s several hundred gigabytes, quite a bit larger than any “next-gen” disc format, but PC games are rarely over 10-12 hours, and rarely use more HDD space than would otherwise fit on one DVD.
Let’s do some more analysis of this 3-DVD “game.” Let’s assume that each of these DVD’s is dual-layered (8.75GB) and filled to the brim with “content” (read: prerendered cut scenes). That makes it 3*8.75GB, which is 26.25GB. If MS had put games on HD-DVD discs, and Blue Dragon were one of those games, it would still need to be on a dual-layered HD-DVD (30GB), or two single-layered HD-DVD discs (2×15GB). Even if they used Blu-Ray, it would STILL have to be on a dual-layered disc (or two single-layered discs), as a single-layer BR disc has a storage capacity of just 23.3GB! You can’t tell me we’re already hitting the limits of our “next-gen” disc formats already…
Any game with that amount of prerendered cinematics shouldn’t be referred to as a “game.”
It should be referred to as a “movie.”
uncompressed form dot get mad now if thei compressed fix in 1 or 2 DVD
3 DVDs is compressed
Who cares if it’s freaking 3 DVD’s
For the MSX-2 I had Metal Gear Solid Snake II on multiple diskettes, I think about 7 of them!!!
Now that was swapping and too much. But three? And then only after a long time playing a switch?
Who cares?!?! It saves a shitload of money on the console. A BR drive costs 300 dollar to include, a DVD player costs 20 dollar. I’d rather have the last one if less then 1% of all games go over a DL-DVD
LOST PLANET DEMO IS OUT! I just went to the newly released and it was there
It’s only 233.32 MB
“A special version of the highly anticipated SciFi action shooter LOST PLANET is here! A brand new stage has been added for snow pirates around the world!”
Thanks for staying on topic.
Pfft… screw the topic, man! It’s Lost freakin’ Planet!
Well, it HAD been 2 hours since anyone had posted anything new. AND I’m sure everyone wanted to know about Lost Planet.
Voyager2K is a moron. He has no idea what the hell he’s talking about. This dope believes that games are shorter because of the space on the DVD. First off Oblivion is not a short game by any means so that makes you look like the real idiot you are if you stayed on topic. How do you explain the new Zelda with tons of gameplay/content (40-50hrs) on one disk. Go find another game on any other next-gen machine that gives you more content you loser. I have a PS3 you nut job so try again. Your lunatic ranting about CGI make absolutely no sense. We are gamers and buy games to play games. We do not buy games to watch CGI movies. The point of is simple. Games don’t need HD-DVD or Blu-ray for content. They only need the space for CGI. Do us all a favor get a life.
I think I have to agree with you guys. Voyager2k is a porta potty in a Mexican Village…. full of shit.