Yes, a 250GB drive should be fine, I'm talking about first generation consoles with 128mb of internal memory. Good luck installing games on /that/.

watch xbox 360 games jump 10-20 dollars in price

Yeah, what's he talking about? I have nineteen full games on mine, and still have a little more than half of the overall space.

Edit: Okay, he was talking about older generation xboxes.

Have the Cities on one disc, outside cities on another... if you fast travel between cities you do not need to swap discs. There could be campsites or very small villages with outdoor vendors to unload loot and repair so you won't need to enter city cells often. Although, there might be a lot of swapping if you are only doing 1 quest chain and nothing else.

Something like that might work since the cities, in Oblivion at least, had such a high concentration of detail compared to the rural areas.

The problem then becomes deciding what to split? Okay, quest specific dialogue, that's sure to be not insignificant, and there are a few meshes and textures that don't get reused, but other than that the game will see heavy asset reuse for generic items, meaning that even with such a split... what are you splitting? You still almost need the entire game on each disc. You can split out the level definitions, sure, but they're comparatively tiny.

Oh god no. No. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! :flamethrower:

Anyways... Should Skyrim make use of the new disc.

If Beth deems it necessary.

My Xbox 360 just has internal 4GB. I can't install games on it. That's why they can't require installing, because they sold 360's that can't handle it.

ME2 is a linear game that allows for 2 discs. Skyrim is 100% open ended as you can complete a majority of the game without even touching the main story making it impossible to have it on two discs without install. I'm not sure why you are saying you need a HDD to save? You can use a Memory card to save.

Uh buy a hard drive...

I don't like the idea of game companies having to condense (adds load time) and cut content, because some people can't buy a hard drive. What are they $50?

You don't happen to have the kinect xbox 360 do you? The black one with motion detecting power button + disc tray button? If so, you can upgrade the hard drive to 250 gb for around $100 allowing you to do so.

I hardly think forcing people to buy hilariously overpriced hard drives is the answer, here. By your logic, I could say I don't like the idea of game companies having to cut content because some peopel can't buy a decent PC.

Because most people aren't willing to spend an extra $75 to play a $60 game. They would lose so much much business.

Damn it, is that why most games are being pushed to holiday.

For those of you who are looking to upgrade, there are quite a few 250gb HD's on ebay going for less than half of the retail price ($129 I think). I got a chinese knock-off back in December for only $42 and I can't tell the difference... well except for a few chinese characters here and there.

My bad.......I figured anyone who plans on playing a TES game will have a HDD. :rolleyes: Internal memory on the 360 or original Xbox was never relevant, from the very beginning. Anyone crazy/stupid enough to not have one and/or try to use pathetic memory card storage is going to have a bad experience no matter what.
Those people are irrelevant when it concerns TES, imo. If I didn't have a hard drive, and for some reason couldn't buy one, I'd play Skyrim on my PC.

So, now that the obvious has been stated so many times here....hopefully you guys will discuss the new Xbox disc possibilities. :thumbsup:

A couple years ago I bought a 1 TB drive for my PC for $75... ya proprietary hardware is always ludicrously expensive.

It's an antipiracy thing, not a new format per se... at least that what I heard

Why are they? Because they bought their 360 early, back when console gaming was still free of complexities like installing or huge patches, and when that changed they took one look at the insane hard drive prices and decided not to bother? Why does that make them less worthy of playing skyrim?

And, perhaps more importantly, pretty much all consoles have going for them now is that you buy a console game, it works on your console. You start introducing additional requirements and you kill that advantage. Microsoft are dikes, not idiots.

You're assuming all fans have a decent amount of disposable income, it's quite ignorant of you, especially in these economic times. They may not be able to spend $120+ (HDD and game) at the moment just to play 1 game.

Agreed.

When the 360 first came out, it's major advantage was the 20GB HDD. Getting the "arcade" version they introduced is not practical for someone who plans on doing more than "arcade" gaming. Hence why they created 2 different packages. That's all I mean, it's not more complex than that. It's just about someone being practical and/or planning ahead, not being "less worthy" or anything like that. I'm saying that if someone plans to play Skyrim or any other major game coming out in the future for the 360, they'll probably need a HDD.

I know very well what Microsoft's hardware preferences are....and that has nothing to do with the new disc format.

Whew....man, why do you like talking about this same stuff so much?

My main problem with it is that it's *not* proprietary. Any old drive will fit, it just has to be specially formatted for it - and the drives aren't even particularly high quality. It's just charging money because they can.

@Deity; Because that one element is absolutely vital to the multi-disc problem? It's a deal breaker, right off. With that one fact in your hand, you can discard all others in the knowledge that it's not happening.

There really was no reason to assume a HDD would be neccesary to play games, the draw was downloadable titles. Indeed, you *couldn't* install a game at launch, and for some games, like Halo 3, installing actually hurt performance because it already used the disk as cache where it could. If MS' first party developers didn't know they were going to allow install, I doubt anybody knew. And if nobody knew, it becomes very easy to justify buying a cheaper model at the expensive of finding it harder to play downloadable titles and having less room for game saves.

Hell, at the 360's launch, DLC wasn't even a major thing.

Really? What is it with you guys? Bad day?

I'm assuming anyone who plays on Xbox 360 would like to have enough memory to save their game information....and that if they don't want to have a hard drive, then they won't save as much game data.....why is that hard to understand? That's just logic and practicality.

If someone doesn't have enough money to buy a HDD, then they won't. And whether they do or not has nothing to do with what is more practical. :mellow:

Please let this be the last post I have to make explaining something so simple :banghead:

Edit: @PhYoshi. I KNOW Microsoft won't allow mandatory installs. I wish it was possible, but it's not. My mentioning of multiple disc games is referencing the issue of the size of 360 DVDs. It will not be as much of an issue with the new disc format, hopefully. That is all...sheesh.

The 360 has enough internal memory to store game saves, that is not an issue.

None of us here made MS' policies - but they clearly spell out the situation. No mandatory installs.