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!”

Blue Dragon is proof of that.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.