Project Gotham Racing 4 scaled back due to DVD limitations
Project Gotham Racing developer, Bizarre Creations, has revealed that the development of it upcoming fourth iteration has been scaled back slightly due to limitations in DVD disc capacities. In response to a question on the official forum, a Bizarre staff member explains “You won't see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD.”
It’s not really the end of the world : Bizarre has created a work around using different lighting models to turn even a once brightly lit day time track into a dark and foreboding storm-swept circuit at other times. However, this seems a clear indicator that we’re reaching the limits of DVD’s ability to adequately provide for modern, next-gen games.
Sony fans will no doubt be gleefully rubbing hands right about now and the PS3 has the other advantage of a built-in hard drive as standard in every model which further adds to the system’s memory resources on top of the already monstrous Blu-ray discs capacities.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of solutions to the problem and it may get worse – as developers get better and better at creating games that make the most of the system’s architecture, so the size of the games seems likely to increase.
On the other hand, so what? I know it’s not exactly the most next-gen of gaming experiences, but that hardly makes getting up and putting in a new disc much of a trial. I’m guessing then that we may soon see the first titles to come on multiple discs – but it will probably be the large narrative driven single-player games that suffer first and luckily that’s not something we’ve not already had to put up with in the name of quality gaming. Take Final Fantasy VII (PS2) for example, or Resident Evil 4 (GC).
Source
CVG
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