BioWare Community Manager Chris Priestly is stating that Mass Effect 2 will be split into two discs for both PC and Xbox 360. The rub is for the Xbox 360 owners that will actually have to do a disc swap as the PC will install both discs locally.
“Even though there is a disc swap, it occurs at a carefully planned place in the game (that does not interfere with gameplay) and is done once,” Priestly said. “You do not swap back and forth. One swap and then done.”
All of you new school video game players might have an issue with this but for me two things come to mind. First that this game must be friggin’ huge to have to be shipped on two discs. Second I remember playing Wing Commanderand swapping all over the place and it still was one of the best immersive story lines I have been involved in with a video game. I think we can all handle a single disc swap especially because BioWare has planned for it to not take you out of the loop. I had to actually play video games at an arcade you new school hand held gamers!
A single-layer DVD can hold 4.7GB of data, so this being two means the max size for the 360 version is 9.4GB. This is rather huge, yes, but considering that Dragon Age: Origins was a 20GB install for the PC, ME2 looks small by comparison.
And, also consider that the 360 doesn’t do installs of games. If it did, perhaps it wouldn’t need the disc swap? Or, if it had Blu-Ray, 25GB single-layer would be more than sufficient.
I don’t think it’s all that bad, but the age of the DVD storage format is showing a bit. It’s well-worth it, though, because it’s Mass Effect 2!!!! That’s a small price to pay, and 360 gamers still don’t need to wait 15+ minutes for installs like we PS3 owners do.
Yeah I agree with DVD being long in the tooth, which was a good decision by Sony at the time to do blu-ray. We all know that PC code though is just a big mess of bloated code in comparision to the console because they have to take into consideration all the different configuration types so I tend to keep that in mind when talking PC install sizes.
I was given to understand that the 360′s games all came on dual-layer DVDs.
The 360 has a dual-layer DVD player (12X speed), but I’m sure it’s up to the developers whether or not they use both layers. But, as the hardware stands, it can easily play dual-layer DVDs. So yeah, that would effectively double the capacity I mentioned up to 18.8GB on two discs, max. Still wouldn’t fit Dragon Age: Origins at the full PC version, but as Damon correctly stated, there’s no need to. The PC versions are always fat.
Either way, I’m envious that I can’t play ME2 on my PS3, but I have a PC rig that will play it with ease, so that’s what I’ll do.