[gamespot]Microsoft: 360 HD-DVD drive will be cheapest

Did you see a demo disc? Cuz that's not the same as the actual Blu-rry discs being released to stores. Just read the reviews. Most of them are disappointing at best. The recent Robocop release is a disaster. It was compared by one reviewer to the original Highlander DVD which I hear looked so bad it became legendary.

And the fact that the public is being told to "wait for a better blu-ray player" is not the way you launch a new format.

 

Not sure if I'd call them on par graphically, at least at this point. They're pretty close (especially in multiplatform games...maybe even with the 360 version being better sometimes), but I think the average PS3 game tends to look a little better (maybe not just with graphics but in other areas too). It is probably too early to really make good comparisons; I just know there are some PS3 games (MGS4, FFXIII, Naughty Dog game, etc.) that look much better than anything I've seen from the 360 (which, to be fair, could be attributed to the developers making the games at this point).

Even if HD-DVD wins, Blu-ray would still be important for the PS3. Since I'm more or less convinced that DVD won't be enough for games in the next ~5 years (let alone 10), I'm fine with any format as long as it supports more than 7GB per disc, whether it plays movies or not (although that is a nice bonus).

I just think it is funny how people criticize Sony for "forcing" us into the format war and not keeping the PS3 as a gaming machine or whatever. I'm pretty sure that if BR was never an option for movies, or if some other special disc format for games was created (basically Blu-ray without the movie side of things), the PS3 would still cost $500-$600 (maybe even more since they can't rely on other devices using BR to drive down costs and help R&D). I think the decision to use Blu-ray was more of a way to improve the system for gaming than it was for pushing a new movie format or something like that (although, thanks to the situation, it plays a big part for both).

Asking for a PS3 without Blu-ray would be like asking for a PS3 without a HDD (that's actually a good comparison), or even Cell/RSX (although in that case, you'd be asking for lower specs). Maybe even asking for Sony to charge for online play as well (might be able to use that to charge less for the PS3). It will cost cheaper sure, but the overall gaming experience will suffer, along with some non-gaming features.

Now don't get me wrong, the PS3 is expensive (which sucks), and it will prove to be the biggest challenge for Sony in "winning the war." I just don't think it would cost ~$300 if only the gaming side of things were considered.

 

MGS4 wasn't CG, but it wasn't playable either. I was comparing basically everything at E3 that was at least done in realtime/in-game (including Halo 3 and some 360 games). Considering that MGS4 cutscene graphics looks identical to gameplay graphics (almost the same said for FF as well IIRC), I'm assuming that MGS4 will still look better than practically everything else when it ships next year.

Nevertheless, if you want games that were playable, Heavenly Sword and MotorStorm were playable, and they look better than pretty much anything I've seen playable on the 360 (with Gears of War being a possibly exception, although it has some animation and framerate issues IIRC). Of course, comparing a off-road racing game and a God of War clone to a FPS isn't really a good way to compare games (kind of what I alluded to earlier).

I know it's not all about graphics, but I was just responding to the point about how the two systems are on par graphically speaking. Luckily, MGS, FF, and games from Naughty Dog tend to be a lot of fun, so those should look great and play great.

 

Yeah, I realize that the general public won't really see the graphical differences than I see (or even care about it). The best-selling game(s) by far this generation is GTA, which looks kind of like a PS1 game.

Again, I'm just responding to the argument about the graphics being the same on both. Whether or not they matter is a whole other story (PS2/Xbox revisited basically, although sides are switched in terms of hardware). The system with the best games (not the best graphics) will get the most attention; I don't disagree with you at all there.

 

I'm pretty sure they can. Gran Turismo is about as big a franchise as Halo is when it comes to sales (it is big around the world, while Halo is mostly just big in the US). SOCOM is also a big franchise from their 1st party studios. There are a couple of other franchises or big developers from their 1st party that could help make games a "must have." (God of War, MLB games (just because they can use the MLB license too and the 2K games have apparently sucked), Naughty Dog, Team Ico, Incognito, etc.) Their 2nd parties are decent too (Heavenly Sword, Lair from Factor 5, Insomniac with Resistance and Ratchet & Clank, etc.).

Their bigger games probably come from 3rd party studios, which would include Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill (assuming the developers are still interested in the franchise), Devil May Cry, Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Ace Combat, etc. (maybe RE5 too if Capcom kills the 360 version due to its performance in Japan).

I'd think that at least a few of those could be "must have" games (and a combination of them would make the PS3 a must have system IMO...though maybe not on day 1 when it costs $500+).

 

I disagree. I think it had jack all to do with gaming. Without Blu-Ray, the PS3 is already a strong machine that has plenty of tools for developers to work with. There is currently no hard proof that the majority of games need that space that the disc provides; the 360 has done fine. And if and when it does become an issue - in terms of movies - an add-on player would have been just as viable an option as stuffing it in the machine now.

The PS3's purpose is to get the Blu-ray into the majority of homes. It can't be a secondary goal when so much is banking on it. The winner of what could possibly be the major media format on the market is a big, big deal. Knowing that, and all that Sony has invested in Blu-Ray, you really think they went this route with the PS3 mainly for 'the good of gaming'?

 

If Sony stuck with a DVD format, I could see them launch the PS3 at 400. Because all 3 consoles are limited to that format, developers wouldn't have an opportunity to b**** about the disk space.

Hard drives are much much cheaper to sell and wouldn't be that bad an alternative. As mentioned before, PC games support much higher resolutions and make due with DVD disks.

 

We'll most likely start seeing more proof as PS3 games start trickling out. I doubt we knew the full significance of DVD and CD for games before the PS1 and PS2 launched.

Nevertheless, developers have been loving Blu-ray from what I could tell:

That’s just some of their comments regarding this situation. IIRC, I think Kojima and a few other developers have said similar things.

BTW, that info was mostly from another board and I added some extra info. That's why the format is a little weird in some areas (not done by me ).

I think that Ken Kutaragi and the guys at SCEI (including the developers either at Sony or those with good relationships with Sony) wanted to have a new optical disc format for the PS3. When they were coming up with the design years ago, they knew DVD wouldn't work. At that same time, the divisions at Sony working on Blu-ray (their electronics and movie divisions I guess) were needing to find a way to help launch that format. SCEI was happy to have their new optical disc format (helping them create their "perfect gaming machine"), and the rest of Sony was happy to have the PS3 including Blu-ray.

I don't feel as though SCEI wanted DVD, but the other divisions forced them to incorporate Blu-ray in order to push the format for movies. If SCEI didn't like it, it probably wouldn't have it considering they should know what they're talking about (they've help keep Sony profitable during the low years).

I'm not denying that Blu-ray is incredibly important to Sony as a movie format. But if Blu-ray had never been invented (or whatever), I'm pretty confident that the PS3 still wouldn't have a DVD drive (and thus, would probably be expensive).

I'm sure they could have. They could also have reached $400 by dropping the HDD (might need to charge for online play too), but no one ever complains about that. The HDD might be more useless for games than Blu-ray, and I love HDDs being standard in systems.

That's a great way to design a console.

So what happens if Samsung, Sega, Panasonic, Toshiba, and/or some developers team up to make a new console in 2007-2008 that has Blu-ray/HD-DVD standard, causing all the 360/PS3 devs to jump ship to this new platform since they actually care about them?

Possibly a more likely scenario is Microsoft (or possibly Nintendo...but I doubt it) coming out with a new console in a few years in case things don't work out for them (and they want to catch Sony at a bad time). Guess what they might include in their system?

Not at this point. HDDs cannot come close to offering the same price/capacity that optical disc formats can, not to mention that it is really difficult to reduce costs in them over time (compared to other technology). We might have a $400-$450 PS3 now, but it might still be almost the same price a couple years later since Sony can't reduce the price of the HDDs as much as they'd like. On the other hand, a Blu-ray disc drive should be much easier in regards to reducing its costs over time (especially if it takes off).

edit: Also, are you talking about using DVDs (or whatever) to distribute the games (install on HDD), or having people download games to their HDD? The availability of broadband at this point makes one of those things practically impossible to do right now (maybe in the future).

I said this before, but PC games aren't like console games. PC developers can compress things heavily on DVDs (not like they can on consoles since consoles would have to decompress during gameplay) and not worry about data redundancy or anything like that since the game would be running off the HDD.

You can't do any of that on a console (at the moment anyway). If it means anything, there were games coming on a single CD for the PC while console games were filling DVD(s) this-gen IIRC.

 

Isn't Enchant Arms already out? On one DVD? Maybe I'm thinking of one with a similar title.

And Rein is on there, but that sure doesn't stop his guys from making Gears Of War - which looks pretty good.

Come to think of it, isn't The Darkness coming for 360 and PC as well?

I just don't think there is some great need for a 'new' format, or that the industry is being held back by the current one. I don't agree that, all the sudden, DVD doesn't work.

Perhaps 5+ years from now; but in this industry that is very far down the cycle.

And, as such, it is being pushed forward much more quickly...primarily because of the format war.

 

Despite what Sony's suits say, I think a console's lifespan is 5 years. By that time, games will need all the space HDDVD or Blu-Ray offers, but not right now.

How can a harddrive be 200 dollars in the PS3's pricing? Even most proprietary drives are that expensive. How much do you think the core Blu-ray reader in the PS3 is worth?

Even at the $600 asking price, do you realize how much Sony is losing?

Not many games require that capacity for the next five years. The average game during this span might not need more than 15-20 gigs. That's being generous considering development houses don't always have multi-million dollar budgets.

The PS3 allows using 3rd party harddrives. You could load the entire game onto the drive. Sony would also sell expensive 1st party HDD modules for people without computers.

For one thing, the PS3 would've launched by now. Most of its delays are blamed on the Blu-ray drive and licensing issues.

Another would be that it'd retail for 600 dollars (likely more because Sony is banking on success despite taking in huge losses) when others are selling around 300-400 range.

You might have some exceptional games that need all of that space, but these companies are still concerned with their bottom line. Since the average game doesn't even fill a half of Blu-ray's capacity, most would be ported to the 360 or PS3 anyways.

And I'm sure they'd have "greater ideas" in console design than Sony or Nintendo....

This is as likely as it is right now. In the current case, the PS3 is saddled with a new blu-ray system, so price cuts are out of the question. A blu-ray less system could be ditched easier because the other costly component, the cell cores, is modular and could be used in the next system.

....

I'm not buying the cutting edge angle. This only benefits a small minority of developers who can afford to cram detail (10 times more detail) onto a Blu-ray disc.

 

PS2's lifespan is already at 6 years, and will probably see a lot of games in 2007 and 2008 (maybe even up to 2009). Even if DVD would be good enough for 4-5 years (debatable), that might not help sell PS3's 5+ years from now (might even be more vital for Sony this time around considering the higher launch price).

Were you using the $600 SKU or the $500 SKU? I'm talking about taking out the HDD in the $500 SKU ($500-$400=$100, not $200). The main difference between the 360 Core and the Premium (and the $100 difference) is the HDD. So why can't the PS3 be the same? Even if they lost more money on that (probable, since I'm guessing the HDD is more like ~$50 or so I guess), they'd make it back by selling HDDs at $100 or whatever just like MS, not to mention that if they included a Memory Stick port, sales of those would help (kind of like what the PSP did). FWIW, I'd guess that if they were going to allow sales of 3rd-party HDDs in the current situation, they wouldn't if the HDD was not standard. Also, there might be some additional cost in installing Linux on the HDDs (which they might also drop if the HDD wasn't standard).

Besides, if that doesn't workout by itself, I said they could also charge for online pay and some of their other online services (unless plans have changed and they're doing that anyway). I forget how much XBL is, but Sony could charge maybe $50 per 6 months of usage (like $400-$500 extra for anyone who uses that for 4-5 years straight...you practically bought 2 PS3s doing that ).

Exactly how big of a HDD do you want? Realize that it will probably have to be 2.5" as well.

At 15GB per game, you'd probably need at least a 150GB HDD to work with games (previous tie-ratios for PS consoles were 10+ games per console; I think I have 20+). Then you'd need more space for microtransactions, demos (a lot are approaching ~1GB in size, and that's with games taking up less than 7GB), HD trailers, game saves, XBLA/VC style games, and a bunch of other downloadable content. In the case of the PS3 (and 360 to a degree), you might want to store a lot of pictures, video and music too (which could be used to stream to the PSP and other devices). I just don't think there is any HDD out there that can easily store all that data AND not cost very much to make (especially in mass numbers...IIRC, 360 HDDs were in short supply at launch). I think the biggest 2.5" SATA HDD is 160GB, and there is only one company providing it (supply might be an issue for a launch).

Don't forget that the renting and used game business would probably suffer big time from this (although I guess they should be expecting it eventually...just not now).

I'm not sure it has been completely confirmed that you can just use any HDD, although I'm hoping that to be the case (what they've said depends on how you interpret it, but I'm a little optimistic).

Still, I don't know how that meshes with what I said. The ability to connect a 3rd-party HDD on your own doesn't change the fact that Sony still has to include one in the PS3 and still make it affordable. Not everyone will have a spare HDD to use (especially one that is 2.5" I guess...don't think I do, and there are 3-4 computers at my house), and Sony can't assume that they'll buy one. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make here.

You brought up some good points. I think some of that is debatable, but none of it really helps my argument that much, especially since it was too many hypotheticals on my part.

A minority of developers? The list I had pretty much included the majority of the industry, or at least most of the developers/publishers that matter (EA, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Starbreeze, etc.), and that's not everyone that's commented on the issue AFAIK. I've yet to see a single developer say anything about Blu-ray not being highly beneficial for them....and I'm guessing they know what they're talking about.

I think pretty much every developer could experience lower costs and shorter development times from using Blu-ray, especially if they didn't have to bother making DVD versions for their games. For example, every developer could greatly benefit from releasing worldwide SKUs for their games (avoiding the time and money needed to fit necessary languages on the disc in a certain region). Considering that most developers (AFAIK) start out with tons of textures at insane resolutions, a lot of audio at high bitrates (plus video/CGI), extra content that could make it into the game (behind the scenes), etc., they could all benefit from extra disc space. And we'd benefit from shorter development times, shorter/nonexistent waiting periods for US versions of games (plus the option to listen to other languages in case the US VA sucks), better quality audio and video (possibly more of it too, avoiding repetitiveness, at least in audio), possibly any bonus content (maybe like the stuff on God of War), and no telling what else. And that's if the budget stays more or less the same (might even save enough time/money to add more, which wouldn't be a problem thanks to the space).

 

I think this is going in circles. To rehash my points:

Without the Blu-ray player, the stakes for the PS3 wouldn't be as vital.

Since this generation's already set, Sony would still have a great chance of winning (therefore lasting longer than the 5 year period) despite having a DVD drive.

Without the Blu-ray player, it wouldn't need that high a price....because:

It can't be the same because standalone Blu-ray players are selling in the high hundreds. If they price a HDD-less version at $400, it'll kill the competition and Sony's own standalone players. Heck, I'm betting some department heads at Sony ar cringing at a $500 blu-ray player. It's probably why hdmi wasn't included. Just like the PS2's launch, some people will buy it for playing movies instead of playing games, which hurts Sony's bottom line even more.

I don't know why there'd be cost in installing Linux. External drives might just need simple formatting. Since the PS3 is a computer, they could include a startup DVD.

Honest question, does it need to be SATA? Optical drives have much slower data transfer speeds than HDDs. I guess a console is a gaming rig, but I'd think it'd have different bottlenecks. The HDD doesn't need to keep an eye on Windows all the time.

Of course, I'd want all the bells and whistles, but the costs come from somewhere.

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My idea would be to have a decent sized main drive in the console itself, while allowing the option to offload games onto other external drives of your choosing. The drive doesn't need to be SATA, but the connection should be at least USB 2.0.

I guess paying a 100 bucks a year for online gaming would need a reason to justify downloading all that crap.

I just want to play games, and if I like demos, I'd fork over for a magazine subscription that has a demo disc.

But I understand that some people do want the features you listed. There might be a future trend lurking under there, but it's going to be expensive to even get the right to download extras. I wouldn't be surprised if Wii's retro games will cost at least 5-10 dollars a pop.

I'm not the set-top box type. I'm also a CAG.

Not that Sony cares.

Yeah, we're moving into the hypothetical here. If Sony was liberal on its HDD stance, then it's definitely workable.

You also have good points. I'm thinking from a utilitarian perspective because there's so many extra options that a gamer doesn't need but have to pay just because a company says we need it.

I guess I haven't reflected this in past topics. All developers want more space. It's a matter of whether they really need it and whether they're going to use all of it. Only a small minority will be able to use 90% of blu-ray discs that's for the game itself and not extras.

I'm not sure how much is saved when they still have to make the regional versions anyway. If you're saying the dev can worldwide release their game on a Blu-ray disc, then it means that all versions have to be completed for that to happen. More likely would be a local release and subsequent editions that have the foreign region along with the local version.

This is similar to the debate of having multiple DVDs for one game....

Of course, they save time and money, but I doubt that takes a big chunk out of their budget, and it's probably the publisher's responsibility.

I like the idea of insane resolutions, but I only have a TV that can play 1080i. Aren't there other bottlenecks to consider such as video ram or the game being fixed to 720p to preserve frame rate? Am I going to see those insane resolutions or are they scaled down for a reason?

Great sound and a longer soundtrack is always a bonus.

I'm not sure how behind the scenes content could make the game better other than to justify a high price tag.

Yeah, some people would like the tripe, hooves, and cow skin to be included in order to justify the price of their filet mignon.

It's still a long way off before the benefits of a 40 GB disc will go into the meat of a game.

 

I was talking more towards your comment about Blu-ray being needed for games ~5 years from now. I realize that the PS3 could be the winner by that time, but if games were really needing BR at that point, developers (and possibly gamers) might be less likely to stick with the system for another 3 years or so, and therefore, support for the system would drop during those years.

I guess they might end up losing support in the later years either way, unless they include BR and (easily) win the war.

Why does a $100 difference in price make so much difference? The PS3 won't be THAT much more attractive to people interested in Blu-ray at $400 than it was at $500 (especially since the other players will cost twice as much). The Sony BR player might be better (possibly more features, and, if the SW decoding for the PS3 sucks for some reason, possibly better playback...not to mention some people don't like having a video game console as their movie player). I don't really think there are many people that were ready to put down ~$1000 on a BR player, but would change their minds if the PS3 was $400 instead of $500.

And even if that were the case, people buying the PS3 just for movies wouldn't be nearly as bad a situation for Sony as people buying the PS2 for movies. Besides helping Blu-ray win its war, Sony (AFAIK) would receive royalties for every Blu-ray movie sold (and some of those movies would include their own, so more money for them). Perhaps SCEI won't get great numbers, but the electronics and movie divisions would. That wasn't the case for the PS2 AFAIK (although Sony was a big player for DVD IIRC...just not as big as they are now with Blu-ray).

Plus, there's always the chance that they could persuade some of those non-gaming movie enthusiasts to give gaming a try.

Also, if Sony was concerned about keeping the PS3 at a high price because of other BR players, wouldn't that seem to suggest that they might not be losing as much money as they could be? Or does $500/$600 happen to be a price where Sony loses about as much money as they can afford while keeping the other BR companies (and I guess electronics division at Sony) happy? That worked out rather well.

Creating the PS3 Linux OS (and making it at least somewhat user-friendly...more so than the average Linux OS), creating the Linux software (assuming they include something with Linux), creating the discs, etc., would all add at least a small cost. I'm assuming that if Sony ditches the HDD, they would pretty much ditch the "PS3 is a computer" idea, which would include pushing Linux as hard as they've been. I guess they might do so eventually like they did for the PS2, but not with quite the same effort (and probably do so in a profitable matter).

FWIW, when I was saying there would be an additional cost to installing Linux on the HDDs, I was referring to the situation they have right now. AFAIK, they install Linux on the HDDs before they go on sale. I imagine there is at least a small labor cost there (which would be avoided if they did startup discs like you mentioned...might have to be easier to do for the average consumer though).

What else did you have in mind? I'm not very knowledgeable on HDD tech (other than what you said there pretty much). If there's a cheaper method (better $/GB ratio), I would assume they would be using them already.

Are there any downsides to having games on say a external HDD (via USB or whatever)? I've never used them before. If you can run a game off of them like you can the main drive, that might be a possibility.

I imagine there would still be a problem with paying for all that. In this case, perhaps Sony won't be paying for the HDD space needed for this, but we would still be doing so (paying for the PS3 HDD plus any extra HDDs necessary). I'm assuming we'd end up with a $400 PS3 (without BR) which you mentioned earlier. Not sure how big that HDD would be (20-60GB?), but I'd probably want something like a 200+GB HDD. Looking at Newegg, most external HDDs around that capacity are around $100-$150 at the very least. So I'd end up almost exactly where I was in the first place ($500+ for a PS3). I imagine the average PS3 owner w/o a HDD wouldn't be going to Newegg (or some other site with great deals) for the HDD (overpriced HDDs from Sony or other retailers).

Perhaps I'm missing something, but it just seems like we'd end up spending just as much money going this route (if not much, much more) than if Sony just went with Blu-ray. This is also besides the fact that things will probably only go downhill in this comparison as the Blu-ray tech gets much easier to produce.

That's true. I assumed you took that into consideration when you mentioned the game sizes.

I'm not sure how much smaller things would be when going from games running off a disc to games running off a HDD. I'd go with maybe 10GB I guess. That still needs 100GB+ for a HDD just for games (and I'd need like a 200+GB HDD).

I'm not sure what tricks there would be that would allow you to run things off of a disc and greatly reduce space on the HDD. It seems like it would be much faster to just keep things on the HDD. You'd have to give me some examples to figure out how this would work.

Unless PC games are doing this (which they should for pretty much the same reason(s)), and I've been completely oblivious to it. I was under the impression that you only need the disc for verifying that you still own the game (or even owned it at all). And that's just a quick check at startup or something like that.

The $100 a year wouldn't even be for really downloading stuff. I'm thinking about it being more for playing games online and maybe a few other services, ala XBL. It would be much more than $100 a year if you wanted XBLA/VC games, microtransactions, and whatever else you might get charged for (maybe MMO subscriptions, themes, exclusive pics or something). Not all that would be going to Sony though (the ~$100 a year would).

Yeah, I know it will be expensive, but if the XBL stats so far are any indication, people are willing to pay for it. And if there are people doing that, they'll offer more of it. And if there is more stuff offered, they have to make sure that the HDDs available would work out for gamers that are downloading all that stuff. Even if some people only use like 5-10GB of their HDD, if others are using 50+GB, the HDDs have to be able to handle people that download 50+GB worth of content.

That's true. To be honest, I think the big three and developers/publishers wouldn't care if those businesses ceased to exist.

I was talking more about any possible negatives from going all HDD in a console for a gamer. People who like renting games and/or buying used games might not enjoy that happening (have to rely on publishers to make games affordable...which they might if they got the money that these other companies were getting).

To be honest, I don't know exactly how games are made, but it seems like it would make sense to start doing the voice work for the game as soon as the story and script were done. They could be getting that done while the game was finishing up.

Until the game is done, however, the developer won't know what languages can fit on the disc (or if they must be re-encoded to lower bitrates to fit). For example, lets say the English audio was like 2GB, the Japanese was 1.5GB, the Spanish was 1.7GB, the Chinese was 2.2GB, and the Russian was 1.4GB (totally made up without any idea how that would work out). Say the game without the audio would be around 4-5GB. They'd have to figure out how to do their releases for each region (Japanese+Chinese for Asia, or 2 SKUs for Asia? Europe would be hell). I'm not sure since I haven't played games from multiple regions, but they might have to figure all that out before finishing a single SKU; for example, say that the European version (which might need to include English, Spanish, and Russian) required the audio to be down-sampled by quite a bit. In that case, the audio in the US version (which might only contain English...and maybe Japanese/French) might be down-sampled too just to keep things equal (don't have better quality sound in different SKUs). And if down-sampling didn't help for something like the European version, the developers might have find something to take out of the game (either audio or something else; and if it was audio, they've have to change every version).

Now with Blu-ray, they could just slap all the audio onto the disc and never give it a second thought.

Again, I don't have any idea how game development in this regard works, but I'm just assuming it is something like that by going off of what Ted Price said. For some reason, Blu-ray saves them a lot of time in creating the games in multiple languages. I'm sure they're getting paid to do something during that time, so they end up spending more money and more time than is necessary (at least with BR as an option).

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a decent amount of money that could be saved. It depends on how much time would be saved (not sure how much "huge savings in terms of time" would be), but you would have a fairly large staff (100+) working on something that is not necessary at all. Developers might be underpaid for what they do, but they still make a good amount of money, and I'm sure publishers don't want to be paying them overtime for something that could have been avoidable.

In any case, the developers do save a lot of time and at least a little bit of money by using Blu-ray (not more time and more money). This is something that pretty much any developer could do AFAIK.

Oh they'll be scaled down for sure. I'm not positive, but I think the textures might be something like 4096x4096, or something crazy like that. In-game, they might be more like 512x512 or 1024x1024 for whatever reason (disc space or RAM space). My point was that in the case that textures were downgraded due to disc limitations in DVDs, they could still have better textures in the Blu-ray version without spending more money or time on content creation; actually, similar to the audio issue, they might save a bit of time and money by going with Blu-ray, but the RAM limitations would keep that from being a huge advantage I would think.

However, what Blu-ray could provide a big advantage in would be non-repeating textures (or a variety in the textures might be the better phrase). Again, not sure exactly how it is done, but I've been under the assumption that the texture artists probably set out to make a number of textures (it sounded that way from the "Making of..." disc that came with Oblivion). They probably do so in general just to get different looks on how it might look in-game (would rough, skin be better, or would pale, smooth skin be better for some character). If a game is tight on space, some of these varied textures might be removed. So the plans to have 6-8 different textures for NPC's skin might be changed so that only 3-4 different textures are used.

In this situation, they could use more textures that they created (again, no extra content was created, and time+money were probably saved).

As with the language and texture examples, this is more about not worrying about disc space than having great sound. I think developers will try to give us the best-quality audio that is possible given the disc-space. And in order to do that, they'll have to figure out what bitrate the audio must be and what audio to include. Audio probably takes up a large chunk of games, so I wouldn't doubt it if they had to tinker with this to get it just right. But if they could just keep all the audio at high bitrates (which are pretty much as necessary next-gen as HD-graphics), and not take out any audio that would keep the game from going over the limit.

And as Ted Price noted, this isn't just about a longer soundtrack or something like that. You know how sports games tend to have dialogue that starts to repeat itself after a while? Well, maybe if the developers could fit in more lines, that wouldn't be the case. Same applies to repetive sounds/music that gets old as well as other games that have dialogue.

I really enjoyed that feature on God of War, so I'd like it to be included in a lot of games (especially the big ones).

That was just an example though. From the IGN interview, I guess there's speculation that they might include some anime into the PS3 Gundam game (not sure if that would be a big deal or not...not sure on the implementation).

I'd take any extra content that they could fit into the game. It wouldn't necessarily require a higher price, and thus, I'd be getting more for my money (a good thing). This is sort of a minor thing though.

I think you could get several benefits from the things I listed above, although I'm not sure if it would be of benefit on a 40GB disc. Maybe on a ~25GB disc though.

I actually wonder how much space a game might use if everything created was used (including multiple languages), if everything was kept at as high a quality as possible (restricted by things other than the disc space), and perhaps some bonus content was added. Things could get big pretty fast, and probably without developers even really trying to use the extra space.

 

The Blu Ray launch has been a train wreck at best. Most disks available on both formats have worse video quality, less soundtracks (no Dolby TrueHD and/or Dolby Digital Plus), and less features on the BRD version (limited space on current disks). BRD players cost twice as much and are buggier.