Apparently, it's argued that you can't have epic, long, and detailed games without huge disc storage. I argue that it's only needed for hyper-realistic looking games that have either tons of textures, audio, or movies. As a case against the necessities of these aspects, let me take you back to 1992 with the Ultima series, specifically Utima VII: The Black Gate.
For those of you not familiar with this series, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima
Specifically on Ultima VII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VII
Warning: This is going to be long since there are so many features to describe in this epic game.
Created by Richard Garriott, it featured 10's of thousands of items and NPCs. It had 100's of kilometres of explorable terrain, requiring the use of horse & cart, ship, and a magic carpet to get anywhere quickly as well as teleportation through rune stones and moon gates. Almost any item could be picked up, moved, or interacted with, whether it was a torch that you could leave lit or unlit on the ground or in your hand, window shutters that could be opened or closed, or roulette tables that you could gamble on. Ultima VII was a completely freeform RPG where you could go and do whatever you wanted to (steal, murder, fight or run from the city guards if you were observed, bake bread).
It had day/night and weather cycles that actually affected NPC behaviour. Each NPC had a daily schedule, thus you would see them walking along the streets after work to get to the tavern for dinner, after which they could go home to sleep. If it were raining, the NPCs would head indoors. You could have 8 party members out of 10 (or around thereof) at any point in time and they would not only fight by your side with melee or ranged automatically based on the preset strategy that you assign them, they would also react to your actions, such as complaining, leaving the party, or even outright attacking you when they see you steal or murder. All NPCs also had morale effects, fighting to the death, fleeing at the first signs of trouble, or states in between. Every NPC and party member could be interacted with, having written dialogue for each that differed depending on whether your PC was male or female (a pretty rare feature at the time).
Combat was real-time and required much strategy to overcome your foes. You had to be careful with missile weapons which, though deadly and weakening foes from afar, could inflict friendly fire unless you had your ranged flank the enemies. Battles typically involved your 8 person party versus 1-12 enemies at any given time ranging from roaming bandits to huge dragons that could quickly wipe out a badly equipped or inexperienced party. Chaos could ensue where your party gets separated in dark corridors either from chasing fleeing enemies or running away themselves, dropping items in the process. Related to this, torches dual wielded with weapons would suddenly go out during battles, adding to the confusion in dark spaces. Ultima VII even had KO's before death for all NPCs and monsters, unless you were hit really hard. This was good, because party death would mean literally bringing the member's corpse (which was heavy) to someone who could resurrect him. To be successful in combat, one had to balance one's party between melee front fighters and ranged as well as tailor your strategies depending on the environment (eg. open field with much manueverability vs. indoor battles in constricted corridors).
There were no set character roles, relying on stats to determine what you were good at, thus one could focus on melee stats to increase your damage and amount carryable (based on strength - each item/weapon/armour/corpse had a weight allotment) at the detriment of mana for casting spells or ranged combat. One could determine the stats of each party member to your liking, although each had particular starting statistics that would make it more favourable to have them specialize in certain areas.
It had dynamic music that depended on combat status. Whether it be victoriously chasing after fleeing enemies or having party members cut down left and right, the music changed to fit the overall progress of a real-time battle. Outside of combat, the music changed from city to city (about 12 full-fledged cities), in the wilderness, underground, or based even on the building you were in (eg. tavern).
Ultima VII had about 64 unique spells that all had different effects. One had to purchase the spells off of mages throughout the world and collect reagents used for each spell from either shops or in different areas of the wilderness. Ranging from conjuring food, altering the weather, enchanting ranged ammo, telekinesis, speak with the undead, cause everyone to dance, different projectiles/area of effect spells with status effects or direct damage, or spells to kill everyone in sight, stop time, and literally end all life (all of the 1000's or so NPCs and monsters except for 3 people I think) in the world (a fun game breaker).
Ultima VII: The Black Gate could take someone anywhere between 30-100 hours to beat depending on how many sidequests and how much exploration you did. This is an epic game of huge proportions that has so much character and attention to detail. I'd argue that it's size, scope, and story completely dwarf Oblivion. It begins with a simple murder investigation that you conduct to become a political intrigue involving the spread of a seemingly helpful religious cult to a tale of stopping a world destroyer from entering Britannia. If you read the Wikipedia entry, you would also see the anti-EA references scattered within its plot. Full of intrigue and those elements that make RPGs one of the greatest genres, Ultima VII sets a standard to which any RPG can be measured.
All of this only takes up 30 or so megabytes of disc space. It ran on a 386 processor, recommended 486.
Sure, the animations are frame-based (ie. an animation consisted of non-continuous frames of pictures) and the music is midi but the graphics are pleasing to the eye, the character portraits are detailed enough, the music is great for all of its tin-yness, and the gameplay is deep. For what it lacks in graphics, audio, and CGI, it more than makes up for it in those parts that make games arguably better entertainment than TV, movies, books, and stand-alone music: engaging stories with complex characters, grand musical scores, and worlds in which one can interact with.
You don't need huge storage space to make great games. Some will argue that BluRay allows for BOTH good gameplay and great graphics and atmosphere. I agree that atmosphere is important for games but that does not necessitate realistic graphics. Metroid Prime 1 is a great example of this with its subtle effects on Samus' visor from steam, water, and even her face reflected in the visor from explosions. If you fired Samus' arm canon for a long period of time, shimmering heat waves would emit from the canon for awhile. Effects like these don't require huge disc space. Combining gameplay and realistic graphics would be great except that developing such a game would take a very long time and plenty of resources. Since developers are limited in their resources, they can only spend so much time on a project.
I would rather they came up with astounding and innovative epic games with "last gen" graphics than games that take 5-7 years to develop a graphics engine that needs the space of BluRay. Give us an Ultima VII with an epic story, highly immersive world, and characters with personality.
Give us a game whose main selling point isn't in the screenshots.
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