GTA IV: 360 Beginning To Show Technical Limitations Vs PS3?
The Xbox 360's lack of a built-in high-capacity optical format (ie, they built an 'Elite' model without an internal HD-DVD drive to compete against Blu-ray?) has worried me before for several reasons. First and foremost, it reflects or at least looks like Microsoft doesn't have enough faith in its format to risk its gaming wing on what may ultimately be a dead format; it also means that as games are developed simultaneously for the Xbox 360 and the PS3, that the PS3's high-capacity Blu-ray format will comfortably hold whatever amount of data a developer needs or wants to include, while the 360 will continue to be limited by the space limitations of DVD. Will this be a big problem, or something easily accommodated?
The 360 is also late-to-the-game with a large hard drive, which is fine for most of us but problematic for developers who may need to know that everyone who buys their game has a hard drive - and one with enough space for their purposes, whatever they may be.
We may be seeing the first roll of developer chatter about these differences between the two powerhouse next-gen systems, although "chatter" is hardly appropriate in this case. OPM asked Rockstar creative VP Dan Houser this question:
"On PS3 you've got a guarantee that every machine is going to have a hard-drive and, with Blu-ray, you've got plenty of storage, whereas on Xbox 360 there's no guarantee of a hard-drive and you're working with the DVD format. Does that create limitations?"
His answer?
"Yep."
While Houser didn't elaborate, he did mention that when it comes to making games, both systems have "their own particular pleasures and pains." Kinky.
Xbox 360 is limiting GTA IV, says Rockstar [CVG]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 4 May 2007
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: grand theft auto IV, gta iv, ps3, rockstar, xbox 360
while I have to agree that microsoft should have given them all HDD I'm sure with enough optemsing a lot is possible.
If it's such a problem couldn't they split it onto 2 discs with the option if you have a HDD to instal it so only one disc is necessary to play
They'd get a load of flak for that for sure but tbh It wouldn't bother me too much
You've got to admit, that's a pretty leading question. And from Official Playstation Magazine, too.
In Sony's defense, I'd have to imagine the differences in capability and disc capacity will have to show their head at SOME point. If the whole point of these new fancy consoles is to have deeper, richer, more engaging experiences, at some point one has to assume the 360 just won't be able to keep up with DVD media.
"First and foremost, it reflects or at least looks like Microsoft doesn't have enough faith in its format to risk its gaming wing on what may ultimately be a dead format; "
Yeah, but that makes no sense. What's the worse that can happen with a "dead format"? You lose money? I mean Microsoft has NEVER made money on it's gaming wing. It's lost more than a billion dollars. It shows no signs of making money yet. Microsoft can't care about risking its gaming wing because in a traditional business sense it has nothing to lose.
This is the economics of the madhouse!
If Microsoft had of chosen HD-DVD they would have had postpone the 360 launch has the format wasn't ready. The DVD capacity of 9GB is fine as long as you don't use any prerendered FMV. Obviously Sony wanted a bigger capacity format because those Japanese RPGs are all about FMV. Rendering that stuff in 1080P means you endup with some big files.
We can all say that Microsoft should have included a hard drive, but the issue for them was choosing the correct capacity because 120GB is expensive and most consumers wouldn't use even 20% of that. Yet they wanted to do HD film downloads and the option for IPTV. So that means they where forced to either do multiple versions of the 360 or do an add-on drive. I think they did the right thing because it means upgrading is currently very easy.