It’s often joked that big-name PS3 titles would need to ship on multiple DVDs if they came to the Xbox 360, and Final Fantasy XIII actually needed three of the bastards when it launched. However, who could have imagined that the next game to need multiple discs would be Castlevania: Lords of Shadow?
Mercury Steam boss David Cox has stated that Lords of Shadow requires two discs. The first disc allows players to install the game on their hard-drive, so that they can play it fully on the second disc. It’s like the age of nineties PC gaming never left us!
“Microsoft actually sent their tech guys to the studio to see the game and look at [how we’re] compressing it, but they said: ‘Okay, it’s good. You’re doing all you can’,” reveals Cox. “I think it’s something Microsoft are going to experience more and more — that they need to help developers overcome the storage problem. I mean, each console has it’s own issues [360’s smaller disc capacity and PS3’s slower loading times], but you have to work around them.”
Since Hideo Kojima is involved in this game, it’s hardly surprising that the game is so bloated and is struggling to stay compressed, although Cox is adamant that huge cutscenes aren’t a problem, with the longest one apparently being “fourteen minutes long.” Uh … that’s a pretty long f*cking cutscene, mate.
I never know what to make of developers who complain about this stuff. The vast majority of developers never seem to have a problem with it and it seems to me that some devs (coughKojimacough) are filling up Blu-ray discs simply because they can, not so much because they need to. I never truly believe a developer who claims he can’t compress his audio or video, especially since it’s always a small handful of the same devs complaining.
When we can get gorgeous download titles for under a Gig, I struggle to believe some huge-name developer is having such a problem getting what they want onto a DVD. Seems to say more about the developer than the storage medium, really.
