i think bluray and graphics in general is a double edged sword, bluray really is all about graphics, imo i think sony took a different perspective on after the ps1 and ps2 than nintendo or microsoft did, sony wanted the highly populated worlds of games like final fantasy and etc. to be realized in HD 3d, i mean if you look at a game like mass effect it's sci-fi it's like halo where you've got repetition of certain textures and designs throughout (although h3 does a good job compared to previous halos)... another example is assassin's creed, huge game, takes 40 hours to beat, but the environments are basically the same thing repeated over and over again and missions repeated over and over again in order to create that 40 hour gametime (they could've at least not repeated the missions)... in previous years textures and graphics were more fantasy based for a reason, because realism is really hard to get to, what that also meant was that you could make a huge vast game fairly easily, whereas now it's MUCH MUCH harder to make a long game, you've got develop everything with painstaking detail now, so the bigger the game the bigger the team to make it meaning the bigger the budget needed whereas last gen long linear RPG's were made a dime a dozen
bluray itself almost forces the developer to make use of its space because as people have said it reads slower than dvd9, lots of reptition of data if you're going to use the same data throughout the whole game, hence why games like uncharted or ratchet & clank have vastly different environments throughout the whole game as the disc is read in different areas, and as game devs use more cinematic techniques to make games more immersive then bluray again is a winner in that respect... but despite everything, what it means is games will gradually become like movies where they get more and more expensive to make and that means less games and less risk devs want to put into them, that's where dvd9 and the xbox 360 and the wii come into play, they're less risky to develop for simply because it's cheaper to do so... the ps3 is a beast, it's not necessarily the most difficult thing to program for, it's just that it requires so much time and money to inevitably create a really great product if done right that nobody is willing to risk that except for a few companies
imo bluray is great but it's almost too much for the gaming industry right now, i really think people will only start wanting to utilize it en masse in the future, but if your aim for a game isn't to be cinematic (or in UT3's case have lots of huge maps) then there's few reasons to go with it, i think if microsoft is smart then they'll start allowing HDD required games rather than just streaming everything off every game disc, they can just do it the PC way without needed hddvd or bluray *yet*, i mean dvd9 is a great medium but as HD graphics become more and more important then people will want more, i think crysis is proof that you don't necessarily need bluray for those kind of graphics (if you do it right)
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