Hope you have a Hard Drive!
Two weeks ago, we announced that the Xbox 360 Version of Battlefield 3 would be released with a “High Def” texture package. A lot of questions were raised, but thanks to
gamerzines interview with Patrick Bach, we now know that the game, when run off the 360 disk, will not look as good as if it were installed on your HDD. What’s this mean? It means that if you do not have enough space on your hard drive (arcade version or >6gigs of space) you’ll be able to play the game, but it will not fulfill its full visual potential as if it were installed.
Here is what Patrick told
GamerZines:
“There’s nothing magic about it,” said Bach. “It’s the same thing we do for PC and PS3, so there’s nothing extra.
“I think the controversy about this is that we actually let you do it on 360 for once. So what it does is it gives you the same abilities, kind of, as the PC and PS3. You can actually stream information from the hard drive.
“That’s new for Xbox 360, but it’s not a new idea for the gaming industry as a whole. No one has really tried to do it properly, so us doing it will create question marks. ”
GamerZine: But does installing the texture pack actually make a noticeable difference to the game? Bach certainly thinks so.
“It does make a difference, yes, absolutely. The whole engine is based around streaming textures, streaming terrain and a lot of other content.
“The thing with the 360 is that you need to be able to give consumers a game where you don’t have to install it on a hard drive, because there are 360s without a hard drive. So we need to give you the option of installing it, rather than just demanding it. You could call it a ‘standard-def’ version for the 360 if you don’t have
GamerZine: According to Bach though, it isn’t the Frostbite 2 engine that demands the use of streaming tech.
“It’s not the engine that demands it, but that it has the ability to create a more detailed experience. We can’t use more memory of the actual machine itself, we need to flush that memory with new information depending on where you are in the game.
“What we let you do is let you have high-res information that gets streamed in and out of memory at all times, and that gives you a more detailed, varied and vivid experience on all platforms. We don’t want to take that away from 360 players.
“We’re really trying to push the limits of what we can do on the consoles and the PC. Our goal is to see how we can utilise as many of the systems that you actually have in your machine that some people haven’t utilised before. Some (developers) just do it like, if it doesn’t fit into memory we just make a lesser game. We don’t do that. For us, it’s about how we can give you the most game ever even though the hardware is over five years old.”
