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Originally Posted by Ricochet
True, Guerrilla games told Microsoft that Killzone 2 won't be available to 360 as it needs a huge storage space like Blu-Ray.
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That's an odd thing to say. As far as I'm aware Guerilla were under an exclusive development contract with Sony since 2004, and were bought outright by Sony in 2005. Killzone's as exclusive to Sony as Mario is to Nintendo.
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Originally Posted by LowKey
I tired of games that have been dumbed down because theyre released on the 360, and don't even try and tell me that they arent, i don't give a shit what you say, or what "facts" you try and regurgitate at me
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That's very honest of you. "I don't care about reality, I like to believe truths I've made up". Good for you, I guess
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We are in the next gen people and games need to be bigger and longer. And please don't give me the whole dev cost speech again, cause companies knew what they were getting into with next gen.
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I'm less impressed with this part though. It's Sony and Microsoft who pushed for the jump to HD, not developers. Games are often shorter these days, and the huge jump in the cost of making HD assets is a key factor. The audience of gamers hasn't grown that much (at least among the hardcore), so for publishers to make similar amounts of money from games that are more expensive to make, they need to make less game. I think the Escapist's Shamus Young
explains it well:
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In the original Wolfenstein 3D, the "level editor" was a simple little program that let you draw squares on a grid to create gamespace. You could make a playable room in well under a minute. It was laughably simple and primitive by today's standards, but the game was at least forty hours long because the content was so easy to produce. (It would have almost been possible for someone to make levels as fast as you could play them.)
A few years later in the Doom and Duke Nukem 3D era, level design had become slightly more elaborate. It took time to get the textures to line up and make the lighting interesting; that same room of gamespace might take five or ten minutes to produce. With Quake, the bar was raised even higher. Level design was basically 3D modeling, and it might take a whole hour to make the same amount of content.
You can see where this is going. The one hour room gave way to two hours, and eventually led to teams of people working for days to make just a few moments of playable content. Now you have someone designing the level, someone else making unique meshes to decorate the space, a specialized texture artist, and a lot of work being done to set up complex lighting systems, moving machinery, special environmental effects, and all of the other steps needed to take advantage of current-gen graphics engines. That's more than a thousand fold increase in the amount of work required to give players a few seconds of entertainment.
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Another option is for the price of all new games to double, triple, or more. Of course, that wouldn't really help either because people still have the same amount of money and would just have to buy less games, which would make things even worse.
Games aren't likely to get much bigger this gen, although things should improve a bit as the generation continues, as developers will be able to reuse engines (cutting costs) and the install bases continue to increase (increasing profits). At some point though (probably the next generation or the one after that) we're going to go through the digital download phase, and even with disc formats being phased out there will likely be a new focus on compression and keeping game sizes relatively small.