Remember floppy discs? For a time, 8-inch floppy discs could only hold 79 KB of data. That is absurd when compared to today's standards. We live in an age where files are no longer measured in megabytes, but GIGABYTES. See how gigabytes are bigger even when you type them?
Honestly, that's why I'm not surprised by the revelation that L.A. Noire, a game Rockstar and Team Bondi have been developing for years, is shipping on three Xbox 360 DVDs.
I'm not trying to start a console war and you shouldn't either because it's really, really stupid when you have to resort to disc format to inflate your console-specific ego. Still, it goes without saying that L.A. Noire only requires one Blu-ray disc. The breadth of content created for L.A. Noire apparently goes further and spills into downloadable content as well:
L.A. Noire was always going to be a massive game, from the size and detail of the world to the length of the cases, and of course, the sheer amount of MotionScan data required for the faces of over 400 actors in-game." To tell the story and make the game we wanted to make, we knew that it was going to take an entire single-layer Blu-ray disc and three Xbox discs.
That's Jeronimo Barrera from Rockstar speaking about the media requirements of L.A. Noire. If you played Mass Effect 2 on Xbox 360, you had to switch the games discs twice.
Since the game is built around the concept of progressing through individual cases from desk to desk, players on Xbox will find disc-swapping is hassle-free. In fact, players will only need to swap discs twice at natural breaks between cases without interrupting the flow of the game.
Throughout development, we created lots of great cases, the bulk of which were central to the main story of Cole Phelps and his rise through the ranks of the LAPD, alongside other cases that felt more like strong stand-alone episodes. This gave us a powerful main story, and left us with quality extra content that we wanted to put out as DLC, that would slot seamlessly into the existing game.
I'll be playing the game on PS3, but I have to say that I don't mind games being stretched across multiple discs. Final Fantasy VII always seemed like some epic tome that couldn't possibly have be truncated into a smaller size. I like it when the box I pick up at the store feels heavier, like I'm getting more for my money.
[Source]
