IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Xbox 360's Limited Disc Storage Is A Problem for Mercury Steam

Posted August 5, 2010 by M.H. Williams

While the PlayStation 3 version of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is coming on spacious Blu-ray, the Xbox 360 version will instead ship on two discs. Dave Cox, head of LOS developer Mercury Steam, told CVG sister magazine Xbox World 360 that being unable to compress games to fit on a single disc is becoming a growing problem for Microsoft’s console.

"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.' I think it's something Microsoft are going to experience more and more - that they need to help developers overcome the storage problem,” he told the magazine.

"I mean, each console has its own issues [360's smaller disc capacity and PS3's slower loading times], but you have to work around them."

Despite the involvement of Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, Cox said that Lords of Shadow’s cutscenes were not the problem. "They're pretty short," he said. "Our longest one is 14 minutes, which is the end sequence... The game's around 24 hours long and every level's different. We have so much variety and we re-use very little assets."

While the disc media for the 360 will remain static, hard drives have grown. As a workaround, Lords of Shadow’s first disc for the Xbox 360 version will include the option to install to the hard drive, allowing players to use only the second disc for gameplay.

M.H. Williams has been writing in some form or another for ten years and has been a hardcore gamer since the NES first graced American shores.  You can catch him on Twitter as @AutomaticZen, Google+ as himself, or on his personal Facebook page.