It won't really be justified until gamers start buying more PS3's over Xbox 360s.

Explains why Forza 2 never had rain now night mode =/

I think it'll be justified if developers start taking their games of 360 for favor of PS3 and Blu-Ray.

It also won't be justified until they don't need to double data on discs to make up for the piss-poor read speeds of the BD drive.

Well then, they do have a point.

Now if they can only convince more devs to actually use that potential...

Sorry for the double post, but I don't understand why they need a set of textures for each time of day, instead of just changing the lighting effects.

This one looks like it could be fun... popcorn anyone?

I've wondered if bunch of 360 games were so short simply because of space limitations.

Could gears of war been longer? Did they fill up that DVD full and thats one reason it was so short? How about GRAW2? And many other games. Are these full discs?

I can see some games suffering because of it, heck just a few maps for Call of Duty 3 for mp are almost a gig to download.

@Havok154: Because lighting effects are often not realistic enough in video games. Lighting effects are often very exaggerated and simply relying on the effects is not going to give you best results, so they will sometimes need to have special textures to use for different times of day.

does anyone know the current storage capacity for xbox dvd's?

@dye: 8.5gb if they are using DL DVDs.

I'd say Blu-Ray was worth it having just finished watching 300. Who knew there were so many hair dryers in Sparta? Oh wait, that was the freaking fan...

Quick! Grill Sony on something else to cancel out this possible wise decision they've made. We can't let it sound like they know what they're doing!

I know! Pull the price card again! No wait- pull the "There are no games for they system. Thats right, literally- none at all!

Quick! Then call Sony dumb! Then call them dumb again!

-Niric

If they had issues with space why didn't they just release the game on two discs? Ps1 and Ps2 games were many times released on more than one disc so what the hell is the big issue?

@Buttah:

It's not so much the PS3 vs 360 debate as it is DVD vs Blu-Ray. Consoles come and go but media formats stick around longer. Even if the PS3 doesn't win this generation, Sony will have heralded in the next generation of media format which, in it's own right, is a victory all its own

The advantage will only become more significant as time flows.

Also, since Sony has built in their BD drive into the PS3, the format war is going very well for them. I said that once already, but I had to go into 5 stores to find BBC's Planet Earth on Blue Ray, but all the stores still had tons of copies on HD-DVD. It says a lot. Probably will be (is?) the same for 300.

Yes, yes... All that space is just dandy. Now how about making a drive that can read all that data at a decent speed?

I'm no PS3 owner, but even I know that having a 1x or 2x drive is downright awful.

Greeeat. Now every time a 360 game is released with a campaign that's a few hours short (As it turns out, 12 year development cycles are impractical) people are going to blame the discs.

Well it was only a matter of time before this started happening. It's really a matter of common sense, I mean, how many PS2 games use the blue compact discs anymore? Zero. With more textures, better sound, etc, you're going to need the space.

Once more developers start to get used to programming on the PS3, you'll see why Blu Ray is essential. Blu Ray is even starting to pull away from hd-dvd in movie extras. According to bluray.com Paramount will have 5.1 PCM sound on Blades of Glory which won't be on hd-dvd due to disc space, and the movie face-off will also have bluray exclusive extras because of the extra space to do so. Even hd-dvd doesn't have enough room!

Oh, and I can't wait to purchase 300 on Blu ray, even if I don't have an HDTV at least i'll be helping hd-dvd into it's grave. Blu ray will win the format war because of PS3 gamers.

@Kaneda: A co-worker and I were having the "300" conversation the other day. It should be interesting to see which one does better. I think this is maybe the first big blockbuster that has been on both formats. Now we all know DVDs will destroy both but it should be interesting to see which version sells more.

I must be the only one left on the planet who thinks that swapping disks isn't the most painful thing ever.

Seriously, I have no idea why it bothers people so much.

reply to kyle8,

Thats excatly why Gears of War was so short. Limitations with DVD9's. Now to see if any dev's actually use the space Blu-ray offers.

Im sure more and more developers are going to start seeing this as a problem with storage space on DVD. M$ will have to come out with a Blu-Ray add-on. I don't think games will become longer due to space, but I think more detail, particles, and all that other stuff Sony was talking about before the PS3s release will start to show its worth on Blu-Ray. This will be a Sony format that wont fail. Not to HD-DVD anyways.

@dye: its a DVD,4.7 GB (single layer), 8.5 GB (dual layer)

@TetraNitroCubane:

it'll become more of an issue down the road as games are becoming more and more emotional, really drawing the player into that world. If you were really involved in the game wouldn't it be a pain in the ass to snap back to reality just to change a disc?

So I guess this means Halo 3 will suffer.

@nickman5: Yeah they could've had 2 discs "PGR4 day" and "PGR4 night". (sold separately)

@Balance_In_Life: Well the blu ray version is outselling the hddvd version on Amazon.com .

When I went this morning to best buy to get the movies for the week when they opened, they have almost three times the amount of copies on blu ray than they did of hddvd. Course best buy is blu ray happy, they got four displays just for blu ray to the one for hddvd in our local bb's.

Dev time and content arent necessarily parallel to each other. One the engine is built, the physics done, and primary art assets compeleted, like characters and animations, its not too hard to add levels for things such as racers, or fps maps. Shit I can make tracks and levels on my pc using mapmakers that come with some games. Are you telling me adding some more tracks or levels to an fps are going to make dev time balloon?

@mphz:

Wow a HD-DVD troll here even. I thought you guys were kept on display only at the AVS forums.

@nickman5:

I don't seem to remember many PS2 games that did that. Maybe a handful. Well honestly. MGS3S is the only one I can think of off hand.

But that aside you need to realise the Xbox360 is kicking out some much more detailed graphics compaired to the PS1 and PS2. That old DVD space is going to get burned up in no time flat.

If they're already hitting a ceiling with Xbox360 games due to the DVD format and its only over year old in it's life cycle- its hard to know what to expect from the system in the near future... I could guess a lot of developers maybe considering jumping ship.

-Niric

Oh and as an off topic to this debate, BD 300 is freaking amazing.

@TetraNitroCubane: Swapping discs is fine for a long game, but for a racer in which would force you to change discs every time you choose such and such courses or other settings, then thats going to get annoying. Swapping discs is just not practical for all games

300 on HD DVD has PIP, the Blu Ray release does not.

Lair using 25gigs.. for what? A review of 5.0/10? :)

For everyone that is wondering about why they don't span multible discs, you have realised that this is a racing game, right? Can you imagine how much it would suck to have to change out your disc everytime you had to visit a different race on the same track that you raced on the first disc and then back?

I can understand spanning for RPGs and some action games, but sports or simulations is a whole different story.

@TetraNitroCubane: because want to get off their lazy asses stand up and change the disc i have know problem it takes like 2 minutes

Anybody who disputed Blu-Ray as being "Not Worth it" deserves a PIMP Slap with the Hammer of THOR. I never knew I see the day when people would actually argue the fact of having more storage being a problem. Is like this slackers never went thru the Floppy Disc phase of installing PC games. MS should of went with HD-DVD drive bulit in.....Imagine how different the format WAR would've been?

But, whatever, discuss all you want about price and all. But SONY was right on going with the format. And is going to pay of in the long run.

@Kyle81: Heh, i work for best buy and noticed this all day. It isn't because Best Buy is blu-ray happy. Well maybe a little, but all those end-caps are paid for by Samsung, Sony and so on and so forth. Even Magnolia has a paid end cap by pioneer for the new elite player. Toshiba paid for a end cap and a cool looking end cap at that but still its always been 4 or 5 on 1.

@alucard_0007: Not if a developer had any sense of timing. You place disk breaks where there's a break in the action, not in the middle of the final boss battle.

Doesn't anyone remember FFVII? I didn't hear any crying about disk swapping back then. Probably because there wasn't an "INSERT DISK 3 NOW" pause in the midst of fighting or plot. If the devs are halfway intelligent, they make it possible to launch the game from any disk, and pick up where you left off - Or partition content between disks intelligently (I.E. Singleplayer / Multiplayer in some cases).

Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to have everything on one disk. I'm as lazy as the next guy on the couch, but I'm not going to say "Eeeehh, this game comes o TWO DVDS? No thank you! I hate the 360 now!"

@NotoriousMofo:

PIP o.O Wow so you can watch non HD-extras in a small window at the same time as you watch a movie? I do not buy movies for extras I buy they for PQ and AQ wich Blue Ray does better then HD-DVD.

HD-DVD is the Universal only format. The sooner they go format netural the better for everyone.

@mphz:

Uhm Blu-ray 1x is much faster then DVD 1x.

@Havok154:

2x Blu-ray Drive (72Mbps(9MB/s))
Single Layer (2x CLV) - Constant Linear Velocity (Same speed across entire disk)
Double Layer - Couldn't find any data but no games have been released on a double layer yet.

Entire Blu-ray Disk is read at 9MB/s.

12x DVD-Rom Drive SL (9.25MB/S-15.85MB/s(AVG ~8x(10.57MB/s) DL (4.36MB/s-10.57MB/s(AVG ~6x(7.93MB/s)
SL(DVD-5) 12x Max (5-12x Full CAV) - Constant Angular Velocity (Speed Varies from edge to edge)
DL(DVD-9) 8x Max (3.3-8x Full CAV) - Constant Angular Velocity (Speed Varies from edge to edge)

SL DVD is 1.57MB/s > SL Blu-ray
DL DVD is 1.07MB/s < SL Blu-ray

Majority of 360 games are on DVD-9.

that should be enough to explain.

when the 360 was in development, to use a next gen format would have been just plain mental, sony on the other hand had a whole year to work and re-work their hardware as well as their own format, though they did rush their format out and sacraficed the whole interactive feature of next gen. Hopefully they can get it down soon.

@TetraNitroCubane:

Dammit, you beat me to it. Multi-CD games weren't *that* long ago, I think most gamers are at least old enough to have had a few of those. And it's not as if there aren't already a few multi-DVD games out there already, particularly RPGs or other high content games.

Aside from the disc swap though, if there's really not much content beyond the 9gb disc limit then there isn't much reason to produce that 2nd disc - the features that get the axe are likely pretty trivial if that's the case anyway. If there's significant content, then they'll probably do a 2nd disc.

@TetraNitroCubane: No, not the worst thing in the world. No, I'm not going to do it when there's a transition from night to day.

This isn't a condition of "there's more to the story that requires additional storage space," this is "there's a graphical feature that we'd put in if not for the fact it doesn't fit on the disk with all of the other gameplay elements we've created." I don't see that being solved with disk switching. I'm not closed to seeing a way in which it is, if you have one.

@Rukland: Agreed, i hardly ever watch the extras anyways. Every now and then i will check it out but I really don't care for a small PIP ruining a beautiful movie.

@TetraNitroCubane: I don't have much of a problem with disk-swapping (look at RE 4...nobody even cared), but the problem is that it only works for linear games like FF VII/RE 4 etc. You can't do it for PGR 4...

It was only a matter of time before it became a problem, but given how we are getting games like Halo 3/Bioshock/GTA IV/Call Of Duty 4 and others on a DVD I think it's not that big of a deal...

@TheBrain76: not necessarily sold separately, but that is exactly what I was thinking.

@Maldron:

For a racing game, I think it'd be simpler to have all tracks on both discs, plus whatever is absolutely necessary to run the game.

I've never played a PGR game but I would divide it by game mode. One disc for single player campaign mode (does PGR have one?) and the other disc for purely multiplayer modes. My memory is fuzzy, but I think Gran Tourismo 2 on PS1 handled it something like that.

@mphz: You say this like the current PS3 games are using less or equal amounts of storage space as DVD. Well thats not the case. And you don't really hear people complaining about load times when they bash the PS3, do you? I can't say I've ever seen one. None the less- If load times are a problem for you- several games allow you to an install of sorts onto your HDD. This cuts down on load times significantly. Hell, Ridge Racer 7 even let me play a classic Namco game while it ran it's little install to help me pass the time.

I remember hearing Sony mention that the drive is not limited to 1x speeds. Thats just what its currently running at. So it sounds firmware updates maybe able enhance the speed.

For the record I'll give a quick run down of how my stock 60gig model is doing on HDD space. I've installed 3 games and 12+ HD game/movie trailers. 20-songs. Full tekken 5 PSN DL version, Full Blastfactor, about 8 game demos- and I still have 25 of 60 gigs left.

-Niric

@Maldron: Quite agreed for this particular case. But I think we can all agree that PGR4 is an exceptional case at this point in time. Hell, very few games even come close to PGR3 right now. Those guys are doing some crazy high-def voodoo, so I'm not surprised they're eating space like candy.

True, though, to everyone who says a racing game isn't agreeable to multiple disks. But the only other genre that might have that problem that I can think of right now would be sports games.

@Buttah:

True man.

Anyhow, I own both systems and still like 360 more because it has better games. Bigger storage medium means nothing when you don't have a good game. Will the next kotaku article be "Genji 2 was better than Gears of War since it was on bluray!"

@BALANCE_IN_LIFE:

I can't wait to see either. But it seems to me that a lot a people who like games also like 300. So Maybe it gives an edge to the PS3 and the Blu-Ray format?

One thing is for sure, I'll go pick up my copy tommorow after I'm done work. I just didn't have time today. So one point for Blu-Ray!

@dalejrfanfreak: "Oh, and I can't wait to purchase 300 on Blu ray, even if I don't have an HDTV at least i'll be helping hd-dvd into it's grave."

You realise by reducing competition in the market place you immediately remove all associated benefits that you as a consumer could expect?

Why on earth would you take sides in this format war? If both formats co-exist there will be plenty of players released that will play both formats (these are already on the market). This benefits everyone because the competition will be fierce and the resulting price/value ratio improves for the consumer.

Look at the bigger picture. Willing a monopoly to exist in a capitalist market place is pure madness.

@Rukland:
I'm not an advocate of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. If anything, I'm anti-HD. I don't believe that anything high-def (televisions, movie players, games, etc.) are worth it at this point in time. My stepfather has a 60-something inch high-def plasma television ... Anything besides media designed specifically for HD looks like complete shit. The ends are not justified by the means in my opinion.

@JayD16:
Ok. Your point?