Day Two of Ignorance Getting Owned
After justice was served yesterday, you would think that the War on Ignorance had ended here at UNSCleric.com, well you’re wrong. Recently, anti-Xbox trolls and even Sony’s Dave Karraker have begun running their mouths about rumors of Project Gotham Racing 4 being limited by the DVD-9 format that the Xbox 360 uses.
Microsoft, unlike Sony, does not force an unproven next-gen format down your throat at a cost of $200+ dollars in their system, but that doesn’t stop Sony from repeatedly boasting about their trojan-horsed format and then quickly having their foot shoved in their mouth. Here’s the details:
“We took a lot of heat at launch for including Blu-ray in PS3. Now it looks like that investment is being justified,” said SCEA spokesman Dave Karraker, speaking to GamesIndustry.biz.
“Next generation games simply need more space on the disc to contain all that high definition content. Take a look at Lair, for example, already pushing 25GB of content, and that is a first-generation title. At 50GB storage capacity, Blu-ray gives the PS3 plenty of headroom for developers to fully realize their visions well into the future.”
Guess what Dave? You’re still going to take heat for it, because it’s a negative thing for the gaming industry to be price gouged just so Sony can brag that its backstage deals with Fox and other movie studios weren’t completely brain-dead moves. As far as PGR4 and DVD is concerned, here are the facts right from the developers themselves,posted today on their website:
It’s time we cleared this one up…
When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games… and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys.
The previous game, PGR3, had five environments. That’s how much we could create given our time and resources for that game. With the longer development cycle we’ve had for PGR4, as well as the advantage of having final hardware, we wanted to create a far bigger and better game by this time including 10 environments, as well as a whole bunch of new gameplay features.
Rather than having two “fixed” times of day, this time around we decided to use our time to create a dynamic weather system, which effectively creates a much more dramatic palette from which to work with. To show you where we’re coming from, have a look at this screenshot crop sheet. This is something we use internally to compare our environments, lighting, and weather effects… but it’s certainly useful for demonstrating the breadth of the game here!
Click for larger size… (aprx. 5MB)
We’ve never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.
Each next-gen format has its own merits. We should know, as we’re currently developing games for all of them in one form or another. It’s not a case of one system having less of this, and the other having more of that. As developers we are given a fixed platform, and that’s what we work with. At the end of the day we’re games developers, and we try to create the best we can irrespective of platform. We hope you end up agreeing with our design decisions when you see the game for yourself.
Another day, another pointless debate ended. Commence flaming in the comments.