Games already filling 25GB Blu-Ray discs

[Ace Pace]

Great, lets not use compression and use pre-rendered movies!

Launch titles for the PlayStation 3 are already "getting up close" to the 25GB limit on current Blu-Ray discs, according to Sony's worldwide studios boss Phil Harrison, who was responding to criticism of the PS3's adoption of Blu-Ray.

"Already, at our launch titles, we're getting up close to the 25GB limit that we have on our Blu-Ray discs this year," he claimed. "Next year we'll raise that to 50GB, and I'd expect that we'll be getting close to that in the fairly near future as well."

Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer's Rob Fahey, Harrison decried suggestions that the Blu-Ray drive had been included in the machine purely to push Sony's agenda with regard to Blu-Ray movies.

"It's got nothing to do with movies," he responded. "DVD is not sufficient capacity to power the kind of data consumption, or to feed the data consumption needs of Cell and RSX - just purely as a gameplay device, we need Blu-Ray to supply the kind of data that PS3 games use."

Harrison also responded to questioning about the claim that the capacity of Blu-Ray will be used simply to provide more high definition movie sequences, effectively filling the discs - and games - with non-interactive content.

"It's not just about graphics," he said. "It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it's high-res textures, it's animation, it's everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience. Partly it's visual, partly it's sound, and partially it'll be down to gameplay benefits as well - more levels, more detail, richer experiences."

However, he also defended the right of developers to include rendered video in their games - a key feature of many titles, even on next-generation systems.

"I see nothing wrong with having non-interactive, full HD sequences as part of the game," he said. "That's all part of the production value and the experience that you get when you buy the game. I don't see that as a weakness at all."

The Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 has been blamed both for contributing heavily to the cost of the system, and for causing the production delays which ultimately led to the decision to move the European launch back to 2007. Microsoft has accused Sony of taking choice away from consumers by including Blu-Ray - the Xbox 360 will have an optional external HD-DVD drive, although this can only be used for movie playback and will not be accessible to game developers.

Meanwhile, some consumers have questioned the value of Blu-Ray to videogames, given the ability of developers to fit games on the scale of Xbox 360 and PC title Oblivion onto a single DVD - although it should be noted that Oblivion, despite its scale, is a relatively early next-gen title. Many early titles in the previous generation shipped on CDs, but DVDs were widespread within a year to eighteen months, as developers learned to exploit more of the systems' functionality and streamlined the content creation process.

Harrison acknowledged that some early titles will not make full use of Blu-Ray's capacity, but was adamant that the standard will be vital to the PS3 in the coming years. "Not every game is going to fill 25 or 50GB," he said. "I completely accept that - but there will be games that require that this year, and will push that further in years to come."

[Spyder]

Microsoft has accused Sony of taking choice away from consumers...

[Netko]

Meh, of course they are going to say that. It isn't difficult to fill up the disc with 1080p mpeg2 movies, which are also in most cases overkill (animation generaly benefits less from higher resolutions and just eats up more costs for creating higher res textures etc. beyond a certain point). The "more levels" speil is bullshit, 3d data and such is a small component of total install sizes.

[Nephtys]

Filled up? 25 Gigs of content? My ass. There's no way anyone can rush the games they're rushing, with 25 gigs of textures and models and whatnot. Voice acting? Please, FFX fit hours of continuous voice acting onto a DVD years ago.

It's the usual sony whatnot. *yawn*.

I just want both HD-DVD and Blu-ray to fail badly at least for another few years., to show why you don't force new products on people who don't want it, and/or can't use it.

Anyway, is disc-swapping that big of an issue? Oh no! I'm past level 8, now I need to put in /disc two/ to play level 9!

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

There is still the occasional modern game that ships on one CD, nevermind a DVD. The only way you can fill up a BD is if you actively try. I guarantee that these games could have been made to fit on a DVD and no one would have noticed any quality or content difference whatsoever.

[lukexcom]

At this point in time, the only software that I could see truely fill up a blue-ray (or HD-DVD) with actual non-movie content, would be the next iteration of Flight Simulator. A large portion of the new MS Flight Simulator 10 is terrain mesh. One could take all of NASA's SRTM data, convert it to a useable format for MS Flight Sim X, and dump it on a bunch of blue-rays, sell a few thousand copies to the Flight Sim die-hards, and let them drool over the 30m world-wide terrain mesh. Hell, maybe throw int a few landclass databases to that.

But beyond that I do think that the extra fat on the upcoming PS3 games is most likely 1080p movies with the old MPEG2 codec.