This morning i was reading a interview with the creators of L.A. Noire, and as it turns out L.A. Noire will be released on 3 discs for the xbox 360! I think we all can assume that Skyrim will be big in many ways, but also in terms of disc space. Todd H. earlier stated that they had issues fitting oblivion on to the xbox 360 disc. Further more he claimed that the reason they had so few voice-actors was due to the limits of disc space.

Do you think Skyrim will be released on multiple dics? Will it be a dealbreaker for xbox owners if you at some point have to change the game disc?

Before you answer I want you to keep in mind that Todd claimed they now better compression methods!
Microsoft is currently testing a new xbox 360 disc that will allow for one more gigabyte of free space.

As a xbox gamer myself i would really hate to see Skyrim on more than one disc.

Edit: according to Dovahkiin and Pete's twitter, Pete confirmed that there will be one disk. :thumbsup:

(I'm sorry if there allready is a thread like this one).

I played Baldur's Gate on 5 CD-ROMs. I played every Playstation 1 Final Fantasy game on 4 discs. The Longest Journey (best underrated game ever) was also on 4 discs.

Not only would several discs NOT be a dealbreaker, it's something I actually miss.

Having to change a disc in a game gave me a sense of accomplishment, like, "okay, I've completed one disc! Only three quarters of the game to go!". I miss those kinds of milestones.

LA Noire is linear. It is effectively not possible to split an open world with distant land onto multiple discs. Between heavy prop re-use, heavy dialogue repetition, so on, the only thing you *could* split even in theory is the level definitions themselves, and they're tiny - and if you did that, people would hate you because you'd stare out across the land and be greeted by an "Insert disc 2 so we can continue loading distant land".

Utterly unworkable, I'm afraid!

Of course, if you could require an installation it could be done; Microsoft do not allow mandatory installations.

Baldur's Gate did it. With 5 discs, no less.

Its world was just as wide-open as any Elder Scrolls title, even if the main quest itself was fairly linear.

There's these little things called "hard drives".

Check Pete's twitter, he confirmed that there will be one disk.

And there's that little thing called "Microsoft once released a console without a hard drive". I don't feel that consoles are holding us back for no reason, you know

Unlike the Elder Scrolls games, Baldur's Gate was not an open world. It was zoned. When you hit the border of a zone, a map popped up and you chose where you wanted to go to. Each disk had 3-4 different zones in them.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I play pretty much everything except an Xbox), but can't you buy a hard drive for your 360 seperately?

@Morwil: You're right, I completely forgot about that.
It's been a couple years since I fired up that game, so my memory's a little rusty. Still, I see no reason why disc 1 of Skyrim couldn't have all the important stuff like worldspaces, LODs, meshes, textures, generic dialogue etc, while the other discs could have stuff specific to certain points in the main quest.

You can, if you're willing to pay through the nose. Does not, however, mean microsoft allow developers to require installation - they don't.
As for the second part, because what's the point? You'd still have to mirror almost all the props anyway, you wouldn't really be able to fit much extra in.

Baldur's Gate was a chore to play because it was an open world game with 5 discs. I remember that I constantly had to change discs while playing when entering a new zone. This was relatively normal back then, but I wouldn't want that back. On PC it's no problem nowadays due to massive hard drives of course, I could spare a terrabyte for Skyrim if there is a need for it. So again the consoles are to blame if there is a lack of dialogue or other content.



In that case disc 1 would make use of every single byte available on the disc while disc 2 would have maybe 100 mb of stuff (if at all). Wouldn't make that much of a difference.

1. TES never has been drowned with cutscenes and videos
2. The amount of Disk space a games use have been cut down severely by compressing.
3. It will only effect 360 PS3 has dual layered due to blue ray largest game on PS3 is Killzone 3 at 41.5GB (due to 3D mostly)
4. Doesn't effect me I have a PC and a 1TB HD so ya. I am set for 50 copies of Skyrim and still have half

The most likely result will be them cutting back on certain things for everyone because of the 360. A little bit cut back here, a little bit over compressed there. To be honest it's a fairly common thing now a days. Sometimes pc players get lucky and the developers will release a better high res texture pack for download or with the release of the game. Most of the time though just have to learn to deal with such things. I don't mean that comment to be an insult toward console players either. It's just common thing. When things are designed around a console to sell, they have to go with what limits are presented.

Yea, a couple days ago someone asked Pete on twitter and he said one disc.

If nothing else, this proves we need new consoles.

I really don`t miss those days of 4-5 discs to swap around. Games like Nomad Soul, BG etc. were just a pain in the ass for swapping cd-roms. Ugh.

I actually bought most of my Xbox games like Oblivion, FO3, RDR etc. from Live, when they were reduced, as I don`t need to bother with discs at all.

Only the 360 version of LA Noire is on multiple discs.

L.A Noire is open world.

There will only be one disk, but i wouldn't mind if there was 5... It doesn't bother me in that respect. ME2 is two disks with just one disk change all the way through. The game boots off disk two after the disk change which i think is good work on their behalf.

How does that work on multiple discs? o.O

Just going along then FREEZE, "Please insert Disc X."?

And whenever you come back to that area it'll do it again?

That would be awfully annoying.

It's not like that, there are two parts in the story that ask you to switch disks, not because of the world but because of the 400 actors, with expressions and 2000 pages of text.

That still sounds annoying. Can you install the discs to the 360's HDD to not have to do that?

The only way that Skyrim could be on 2 discs is for the second one to be a DLC like .esp file ( something like what they did with the shivering isles )
But that requires you to buy a HDD if you don't have one. There are a lot people without HDD and bethesda like most other companies wants their games to be available to as many as they can.
So having Skyrim on 2 DL discs is highly unprobable.
But the good news is that by the time skyrim comes out, microsoft will have implemented their new disc format system, that allows games to be 1 GB larger than before (from 6.8GB to 7.8GB) on Xbox360

Fallout New Vegas was one disk and that game is huge, same goes for Fallout 3. Skyrim should be no different and I fully expect them to get it on one disk.

LMAO?

Seriously?

People expect companies to cater to them without even having a SMALL HDD? I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.

Install disc play disc would work well