Square Enix’s chief technical officer, Yoshihisa Hashimoto, believes that Blu-Ray discs may not be enough to house next-gen games on their own.
Nintendo may have unveiled their next generation home console, the Wii U, but all eyes remain fixed on Microsoft and Sony as neither of the platform developers has even whispered anything regarding their consoles apart from the fact that they are in development.
However, since then a number of reports and information regarding both consoles have been leaked including news that the Xbox 720 may use both virtual and augmented reality in their next-gen console as well as Blu-Ray discs.
A plethora of details regarding Microsoft’s console was found online after an entire presentation, complete with slides, relating to the Xbox 720 surfaced on the internet including the price point at which the console will launch.
Sony on the other hand have only had reports of the graphic card being fitted in their PlayStation 4 leak on the internet with the codename, ‘Liverpool’. Sony also introduced the Blu-Ray disc into the market for gaming but it seems that the format itself will not be able to support the next-gen
At least, that is what Square Enix’s chief technical officer, Yoshihisa Hashimoto, believes as he explained the studio and many other developers wanted to merge CGI and real-time in a way similar to the Uncharted series and the current storage of the Blu-Ray would not support it at the scale the studio wanted.
He said, “That’s what we’re expecting to do for the backgrounds used in this – the mountains, the houses – we are using exactly the same assets as are used in the Visual Works CG version.” Before continuing, “Of course, it’s too massive of a data to use in a game as-is, but I think the look and feel will probably remain. If we had time, we could’ve compressed the data even smaller. We didn’t have time to do that, so we just used the same master data – but it can definitely be reduced.”
When asked if it would be difficult to fit all the data on a single disc, Hashimoto conceded that it would pose a problem. He said, “Yeah, that could be a challenge. There’s a possibility that just one Blu-ray may not be sufficient.”
Who knows maybe the move will push Sony and Toshiba to release a second generation of Blu-Ray discs or whether there will be combination of on-disc content coupled with downloadable data as well. Nothing is for certain at this point but one can expect that to change when both Sony and Microsoft finally unveil their next generation consoles and their respective specifications as well.
However, there is still time for that yet and gamers will have to be patient before they can find out all that they need to know about the consoles.
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