not a problem for me and i play rpg,s.It would take me a few weeks to finish one disk anyway so why should i complain.

If you happen to have a game with a couple of disks, it's not as if youve gotta keep swapping every 5 mins. Youd complete a disk and swap to the other one half way through the game. Anything to try and slag off the 360 again. I happen to have both consoles and havent had to swap a disk ever and ive had my 360 from launch.

This is stupid. Floppy disks were fine till that damn Optical disk came along.

XB3 with only a floppy disk drive. Cause the owners can use the exercise.

Is definetly holding down the industry. I believe games like gta4 wouldve been much better if was done on just blue ray they left out an entire borough which I doubt they did on purpose. To those of you saying oh "I didnt mind swaping disc before" there was no other alternative before so ofc your not going to mind as much. You have to be pretty narrow minded if you think swamping disc is no big deal, not only does it affect developers limit on the games they want to make but also is a huge inconvenience on the developer side and the gamer. Please insert disc 5.

Well now that the NXE is being made mandatory I can see installs becomng more apparent and that sucks about Star Ocean but multiple discs don't really bother me, only takes about 20 seconds to change. I'm careful with discs as well, never enocuntered them popping out either and the design of the cases is the same as PC ones have been for years(My GOTY Unreal Tournament's like that).

I think MS is probably never going to charge the JRPG devs for multiple discs because they might lose their support(Except may be Mistwalker and Tri-Ace).

EDIT: I don't believe Blu-Ray is yet optimised for Gaming although the enhanced storage is good.

in 2009 yes its a major problem,ps2 days with multi discs wasn,t the best but that was only the available format.now bluray and hd dvd was around before the 360 and ps3 came to market.i give sony praise for this one they looked ahead and it will be a bigger advantage to them in 2009 and even more come 2010.no one i know given a choice wants to have 3,4,5 discs to play a game.just looking at the ps3 exclusives and how far in front there are already from a graphics point shows what the difference blu ray has made.then theres royalties per disc to account for,blu ray wins again

this is becoming abit of an issue!

off topic: does anyone know when the fifa09 trophies patch comes out?

to disc swapping. Now there is and its called progress. If MGS or KZ came out on the 360 they would have to bundle a toast rack to house all the dvds.

That is all...

when i insert the 3rd disc "making me waste 2 seconds of my life ooo noooss" i feel like i have accomplished something! :)

considering the
1. wii
2. 360
3. ps3

there doesn't seem to be a problem now

the developers are just lazy to produce better games on a better way...

I think the constant swapping of disks would add to the wear and tear on the drive itself.

who here has played more than 2 games with multi-disc this gen?

Who cares about swapping disks, PSONe did this and it didnt fall from grace. PS2 did this too. For a gamer this doesnt mean nothing, this is irrelevant.

Its true Blue ray, hold more space and therefore can accomodate easily varius DVD 9 disk. But when u consider there is no cost difference, there is no advantage, And uf u ask me, disk swapping made PSone popular, with the gameshark and games backups. Sometime i belive these arti cles are wirtten by guys of 16 years old, that their first consoles are a ps3.

And when u think, in RPGs back then, we all grew playing final fantasy 3-4 disks games, so this guy is in crack. And about second audio tra cks, hes wrong, Asian release and other region formats comes with dual audio, so he doesnt know what hes talking. I currently Have Lost Odyssey and Star Ocean i play like 10-12 hours before changing a disk.

Infinite Undiscovery, has also two disks, had played 15 hours on it, no disk change yet. The other is The last Remanant, but this one havent played too much(dont like how the guy walk and runs). ANd i dont care about, much the same any rpg gamer will do.

Frankly speaking ... i dont give a rats a$$ about changin disk or many disks u have to install before u play ... All Im asking Microsoft make some god damn good high resolution games. Release it in 2, 3 or heck 5 disks. I dont care, just make good games and for this Ill even bother to move my ass from time to time to change the disks.

JUST MAKE GOOD HIGH RESOLUTION GAMES ... MICROSOFT. DONT WORRY ABOUT MULTIPLE DISKS. IF IT TAKES 5 DISCS ... JUST RELEASE IT.

How many disks will the next Final Fantasy b on?

Edit. Hold on i thought u could install your games on your 360, surely that would eliminate the need 4 disk swapping

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, back in the days of the PS1, disc swapping was all good cause it meant that the game was usually to good and to big to fit on a single cd disc.
But folks, remember that, that technology was impressive ages ago! and honestly, now that we have evolved to Blu-ray, Disc swapping seems to be pretty primitive now.
Do you really want the hassle of swapping disc still 5 years from now?!?!
Damn PS3! its made us all lazy and sh1t....Lol..

The gaming consumer could absolutely care less about how many discs a game comes with. It is a storage medium..nothing more nothing less. People act like DVD 9 is NOT beta max in or VHS in comparison to Blu Ray. Lost Odyssey had the most discs I've seen this generation. But' WOW, did I get an immense amout of game time from each of those discs.

Ask a the consumer if they'd rather have multiple discs (Xbox 360) for .01% of your games, with immediate loading of the game. Or would you have just one disc for every game, but have to wait 15 mintutes to play your game when you buy it, because you have to load to it to the hard drive before you intially play it for 99.99% of the games (PS3).

I'll gladly keep what we have. It is rare that we have multiple discs and when we do, the game pauses, you insert the new disc and you keep playing. If that is going to stop you from buying an Xbox 360 then you shouldnt even be gaming.

will never be good on the PS3. It's because we got developers taking only code that allows to be fit in that DVD9 file size. Developers obviously wont make multiple disks, and for that, PS3 owners suffer by games that potentially could have had a ton more content.

it might have larger storage, but it often requires huge mandantory installs.

HD-DVD has perfect. it had the size of blu-ray, and the speed of DVD9.

I agree that disc-swapping is something only a lazy b!tch would whine about, considering that in the PS1 days, a multi-disc game for a JRPG was the standard.

As much as I'd love to see Star Ocean on PS3, I'm not gonna insult the 360 JRPG's for being multi-disc. We all had to do it as kids and teenagers, so don't whine about it now.

yes. swapping disks is a problem. when you get to a point that releasing good games will take up multiple disks it is a problem. no matter how much you want to love your 360, you can't be undecided about this. if 360 only supported SDTV you would write an article about how there is no advantage to hdtv and that's it's no problem. If my game stops and I have to get up to go change a dvd, i'm not happy and i don't want to do that. Unfortunately that's what is going to be going on with the 360. A lot of disc changes.

I have stated all along, BR will show its muscle as time goes on.
Sony really made a next gen machine future proof for a good many years.
Whereas in addition to the faulty 360 hardware (I am on my 3rd), the disk drive is annoying loud and is so gimped its silly

But my opinion is: I don't really care if X360 games comes with 2-4 disc and for example if they have the need to bring Forza3 on 2 disc 1 for Campaign and the other for multiplayer Super cool that way when i finish my campaign i just put my Campaign copy inside the case where its more safe. Now for other games i don't really gives a F#ck about it bring me good gameplay and good online experience. On a 120gb HDD i don't care if they make us install 2-3 disc on it just like on PC Great Gameplay + Online Experience? i say bring it!

I don't understand.

The games that do have multiple discs on the 360 are substantially longer than any game that fully utilizes a 50GB Blu Ray.

While games on 1 DVD9 are no longer or shorter than any game built specifically for Blu Ray.

So what??

What length pounding factor has Blu Ray done?

I've played Resident Evil 5 and my opinion it is the best looking game out there and runs perfectly FINE on a DVD9.

Blu Ray is overrated time and time again more like a disc full of dupes.

Another note lets not forget that for every Act on MGS4 there is an install for every time you want to go back and play it.

Meaning that there is NO 1 time install but countless installs determined on how much you play it. Act1 install is pretty long. The rest go for around 3minutes.

Now how is that more convenient than popping in a disc.

Something that annoys me greatly is when someone says that Blu ray has no advantage over DVD it makes me laugh.

One of the bigger complaints on the Xbox 360 for J-RPG's and what not are that they never include the Japanese language track. While a Few games have such as Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata the majority don.t

Take the Recent Star Ocean for example. The game only has English. The game is also already on multiple disc's. So if they had included more languages the game would have likely been on more discs. While the same game on Blu Ray would be on a single disc and have many different languages. That my friends is a advantage and Only a small example of the common things you can do with more space.

this is another one of those things I heard about before getting a 360 that made me not want to buy one.

Then I went to my friends house who has a PS3 and watched him play MGS4, WTF!!! I would rather switch disks every 8 hours than have long frequent load times, or mandatory installs.

And why hasn't anyone answered the question of rather we can install Star Ocean on the 360 Hard drive, wouldn't that make this a non issue?

3rd parties are not making games that would have to use multiple discs because the 360 has too many potential customers, and it would cost publishers more to use multiple discs. I'll try to make this short - basically if the 360 was never made and it was just the Wii and PS3, I'm going to say it would be a pretty safe bet that HD games would be a lot better because all 3rd party games would be putting more than a DVD worth of content on the disc. I'm sure you have heard somebody say Sony made games on PS3 just look better than other HD games out, but Sony's first and second party devs are really not better than the best 3rd party devs. So it sucks because we will never know what a great 3rd party developer could really do if they tried to take advantage of what bluray and the PS3 has to offer. I even bet Final Fantasy XIII would have been 2 discs on Bluray had they only had to deal with 2 discs.

Blu-ray simply lets you store more. That's it. It's a simple upgrade from 7GB (Xbox 360) to 48GB (PS3), and allows for more content and higher quality content.

Instead of being limited to 8 MB worth of textures per in-game character, you can expand that to 40 MB (like with Uncharted). Instead of having only 6 levels, you can have 10 levels. And the content within those levels can be more detailed and use higher resolution textures. Even the audio can get a big upgrade.

The Xbox 360 will be fine with DVD, but it's important to realize the benefits that Blu-ray has brought to the PS3.

makes multiplat games cr Appier for the PS3
because they had to scale back and they would cop some grief
from xbots if ps3 version had more

People, stop fooling yourselves. We all know the REAL reason the PS3 has a BR drive; because Sony is using the PS3 to push its own format. Also, so they dont have to pay royalty fees to the DVD forum to produce its games.

If anything, most devs view the BR as a problem, because now you have to introduce redundant data and HDD installs to help combat the slow read speeds of BR. You dont think so? Why do you think RE5 requires a 4.8GB mandatory install on PS3?

There are few games on 360 that are multi-disk, and the ones that are havent been a deterrent enough to stop people from buying them. And like some have deftly pointed out, its the cutscenes that eat up so much space, especially because they have to be rendered in HD now.

The game data itself has no prob fitting on DVD. The only PS3 game that has released so far that has definitely taken advantage of all that space is MGS4. Why? Cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes. And even then you have to load up every act.

Back in the day, most games were shorter. I would spend 60.00 on a game with 8 levels and pass it within hours. This was common on the Genesis/SNES era when cartridges were used. I was disappointed that the games were too short for the money. It was a big problem.

One thing I started to do was buy RPGs and strategy games. These games lasted much longer for the money. RPGs took 80-100 hours while strategy games kept your mind thinking adding hours of replay value. I was able to do this on cartridges of the same size.

On the Playstation 1, I already knew that RPGs had more value. When Video cutscenes came in, I liked that too. Both of these qualities were found on games with multiple disks. Games were still short and I still chose RPGs. So finding a game with multiple CD disks meant quality back then.

DVD's on the PS2/XBox changed all that. They could put everything on one disk. A DVD used the same percentage of space at the PS2/Xbox lauch as Blu-Ray did at the PS3 launch. No one questioned DVD though. They saw their RPGs and videos fitting on one disk, thinking that it was filling it up. When in reality it wasn't. DVDs were a major space upgrade from CDs. It was big enough not to notice the ever growing space demands throughout the PS2/Xbox lifecycle. It changed people's perception that DVDs would always be good enough. That's why Blu-Ray was slammed by the public when the PS3 was released.

Unlike CDs and DVDs, Blu-Ray required new HDTVs and HD receivers. That's why Blu-Ray took longer to adapt. The whole purpose of High Definition is to eliminate loss of quality. In order to do that, they had to stop compressing data on disks. Compression leads to quality loss. It was useful for DVD's because it didn't effect picture quality on standard TVs and it allowed them to save space.

Now that High Definition is here, compression is the enemy. Blu-Ray solves it. It will also have enough space for increasing game sizes. High definition audio isn't even here yet but when it arrives it will complete the High definition revolution. It will also take up the space of an entire DVD if they compressed it 50%. The audio alone will end the DVD format.

dont think blu ray will make much impact this gen.the ps3 is to weak too take any true advantage.next gen though microsoft will have to get the extra space somehow unless there going for the next wii.remember 90% of games only just make 720p

It becomes an issue when you scratch a disc to the point where it can't be read.

As far as having to swap discs I don't think it's a huge issue. If having to use multiple discs causes problems in the game itself, then it is a problem.

at least not for me unless your are the fat lazy type that doesn't want to take 2 steps to change the disk.

i see this all the time and not just in gaming news. Posing a question like this as a lead in to an unbiased article is bullspit. Dont hide your bias behind crap writing.

I loved MGS4 but it was a nightmare on the blu-ray format. Come on, installs at every chapter? That's a fail in my book. I have always enjoyed saving multiple games so I can return to pivotal parts in a game to show friends. MGS4 made that a pain in the ass too...having to uninstall the current chapter just to install an earlier one.

I am just fine with getting up, ejecting a disc and tossing in another one. 45 seconds max and I am off playing again.

Mandatory installs for PS3 games is something that can be overcome with good programming. Look at games like deadspace that only has a small 600kb file for trophies and Uncharted that has no load times.

DVD's are a limit, for game companies, MS only allows 2 disc before charging a fee for each additional disc. That information came from John Carmack of Id gaming that's making Rage, a known pro-360/anti-PS3 game producer.

Dvd has/will put a limitation on what can be done for certain multi-platform games. Look into the game Rage for Id, that got it's ideal environment changed from 5-7 smaller sandlands in the game to 2 larger ones b/c of the partitioning necessary for the 360 version. That's already gimped the PC/PS3 version while making it necessary for 360 users to switch disc if they have to go back to an area on the 1st disc. Sam House of Rockstar gave MS a warning right after GTA4 came out that the dvd small capacity would be a serious limitation for what they want to do for GTA5.

Using dvd this gen may be okay up until the next game systems make their way to market, but anything less than Blu-ray for any new home consoles from this point on, would be unacceptable, especially if we're to make way for HD gaming.

I see no harm in people getting exercise. Hell, bring on the 10 disk monsters for all I care.

You people do realize that Microsoft charges developers for every disk after the second one though don't you?
That's why games get cut down. Dev's don't want all the extra cost involved with multiple disks so cramming to the fewest disks possible makes for larger profits.

yes your right HD DVD is better and that's why the bulray have won the format war cause it sucks right??

When we made the switch from CD to Dvd...many people were saying that DvDs saved us from the plague of having to switch discs for installs, or for games that cant fit on 1 disc...

Now we're crossing that bridge once again...

Some can accept that Blu-Ray is here to stay and push us into the next generation of technology...

and others dont care if the technology stays the same and we refuse to evolve.

I for one, am FOR evolving...

There's a lot the government doesnt let us have that we've invented because it would make things too convenient and no one could spend money on lets say ENERGY bills...(solar power technology)

But at least let us evolve in the few areas that we can...Jeez. Accept blu ray for what it is...the next medium...and thats it.

this is true. it's really a thing of the past and sometimes a pain in the neck.

Hmm a great article if I wanted some nobodies opinion on Disc Storage...

I like how in order to find real "news" on this site, I have to sift through mounds of blogs, and opinion articles before I can find out If they released a new trailer for an upcoming game.

God knows the temperature gauges are about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign.

... And it lost.

Thats life. The Xbox was better than the PS2 and it lost. The PS3 is better than the 360 and its losing. the psp is better than the DS and its losing...

whats your point big boy?

Like nintendo did with the Gamecube, and sega before them with the dreamcast.

Essentially it will be HD-DVD but with a different name...
Ormanybe Toshiba will launch a new format around the same time and M$ might fully support them this time...

Id M$ had offered HD-DVD in the ELITE sku things would have been very different. People don't like Add-ons...

Sega showed that with the 32X/ mega-CD etc...

don't depend on it so much and who said that the old xbox is better than the PS2 in hardware yes but in games NO WAY the best games was always in the PS2 so don't forget it and as per of the DS and the PSP both of them are doing good and i will not call 50M PSP sold is losing it's actually a win while the 360 have only the Price cut (witch is by the way is losing it's effect ) and nothing more and as per of the PS3 it's 2x price of the 360 and yet doing good everyone want's a PS3 put not anyone can afford it and once it has a price cut the 360 is a goner

No its not.

I've not seen a game personally in my collection that has more then one DVD

Heck, the games having multiple DVD's are JRPG's, the only two I know are Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. Those games Sony fanboys say aren't worth playing.

99.9% of all games fit on DVD and it'll not change a lot in the coming few years.

Yes, even PS3 games mostly fit on one DVD, although for example on Uncharted they copied the same data a couple of times on the BluRay and have a special loading sequence because of access time problems on the BluRay drive

multi disks are old school , ms is old school

I'm sure yall know but don't forget they got every star ocean game on there to except 2 which just released the remake a few weeks ago.

To be honest, it's not really that big a surprise I think Sony recognizes that a majority of their players over the years have come to appreciate the RPG genre just in general, even as far back as before people start dubbing certain ones as JRPG's after the SNES period most of my RPG experiences have been on the Playstation.

i remember buying star ocean the second story on ebay when i was a kid and the case being empty

omg Star Ocean.
i never quite understood the Battle System lool. Till the end of time was alright but... you know. its one of those franchises where you have to be a superfan to really enjoy it properly.