At Quake Con, John Carmack talked for 90 minutes straight without taking a breath, but also revealed a lot of information about Rage. One of the more glaring ones is the fact that, when installed, Rage will take over 20 gigabytes on your hard drive. Yes, 20 gigabytes. No typo. Video is at the bottom of the article if you want to see it for yourself.
Because consoles now have harddrives as standard, developers have had more leeway in how they can use technology. Traditionally, all console games are run directly from the disk, which works just dandy except for loading times and other minor issues. When a game is installed, loading times drop sharply or are completely eliminated. A few games such as FFXIII have had high requirements of disk space on the hard drives of consoles.
Carmack had also said that the Blu Ray’s latency was worse than the DVD format on the PS3, and said “It’ll be nice when we don’t have that physical element we don’t have to be working around or scheduling around.”
No word on whenever the install is mandatory or not, which is something most developers should avoid due to the large library of games available for the XBox and PS3, both of which have built-in hard drives of varying sizes. Because of this and some games needing a mandatory install, some gamers can possibly miss out on certain features since there are no official limits from the developers how much a mandatory install can take up as far as I’m aware.
If you want to hear Carmack’s ridiculously long keynote, click the video below and make sure you’ve got an hour and a half set aside. Enjoy.
Chris Hernandez
I wonder when Microsoft is going to release a 1TB drive for the Xbox. That would solve this issue. At least you can manually upgrade your HDD on the PS3.
Rian Quenlin
Probably never, even now terabyte hard drives aren’t standard, but they will be within a few years. Considering the space on console HDs however it might be just around the corner.