
Killzone 2 producer Steven Ter Heide and Guerrilla Games managing director Herman Hulst would be out of jobs if it weren't for the PS3 and Blu-ray. In an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK, Heide and Hulst tag team to deliver major props for their system of choice, all while bashing a certain competing console.
"We really need Blu-ray to make the game. I don't know how you could fit it on Xbox 360 without taking some shortcuts", producer Heide explains. And with graphics like those seen in this 25 minute video, there's little doubt that he isn't just speaking the company line.
Continuing on about Killzone 2's Blu-ray dependency, Hulst adds, "Blu-ray isn't important for watching movies; we need it for making games". Something tells us that a few companies beg to differ.
1. I'm all for blu-ray winning the format war, and for the PS3 winning the console war, but so far the arguments for the merits of blu-ray in games have been weak at best.
One argument that devs keep making for Blu ray being necessary is that "This one level demo we showed at E3 was 3 gigs alone." - like Naughty Dog said of Uncharted. Sure, maybe the entire demo is 3 gigs, but that also includes the engine and sound library, which you only need to have once, so I find it hard to believe that you couldn't fit 10 more levels worth of textures and maps on a 9 gig DVD.
A similar statement was made by Guerrilla, who if I recall correctly stated that the demo they showed clock in at over 10 gigs, so even ONE level wouldn't fit on a DVD. I find this extremely hard to believe, since even if you had the drive spinning at MAX speed on the PS3, taking data off the disc as fast as possible, it'd probably take more than 40 minutes to pull 10 gigs off a BRD. Even with level streaming implemented, there's no way in hell you could "play" through 10 gigs of data in less than an hour. Also, in a game like killzone, it's likely that a HUGE amount of assets like textures, models and sounds in the first level would be re-used in later levels.
Some people argue that having 5.1 surround sound etc takes up a lot of space. It doesn't. You're still using the same mono or stereo samples at the same bitrate. The only thing that changes is that the PS3 has to do some processing to output in 5.1.
Anyone notice how Warhawk would fit on a single layer DVD?
Compression is an amazing thing. Windows XP Pro takes up about 600 megs on a CD. Installed, it extracts to over 2 gigs.
I don't think that Blu-ray will REALLY be necessary for games till developers decide to 1. Never repeat textures and 2. Have 1080p cinematics with uncompressed audio.
Posted at 3:53PM on Sep 4th 2007 by Stef Geiger