Will there ever be games on two Blu-ray discs ?

With both new consoles supporting Blu-ray discs do you think that there could be games that come on two Blu-ray discs, like maybe a fallout or elder scrolls. Personally if it is possible (time and money wise) to develop a game like that I would certinly play it, what about you ?

What's a disc?

@beachthunder:What's a disc?

yes yes very funny. ooo wait no its not

There already is. For example there are more than 2.6 million Uncharted discs ;)

Perhaps not now with the move to downloads as a means to distribute content, along with day-one patches.

@afrofools: Perhaps not now with the move to downloads as a means to distribute content, along with day-one patches.

I will admit that downloads are becoming more popular, but where still A while off from consules being digital only. My resoning behind this is that there are still a large group of people who are ethier parents that don't get it, people who still want a physical copy, or those who don't have the internet for it.

It's possible I guess, but it's such an outside chance. We'd have to hit a point where Blu Rays are cheap enough to manufacture and the game being made (like a GTA or Elder Scrolls) is big enough in both popularity and scope to actually make the investment make sense and get people to hit the store.

Probably. Wikipedia just taught me that a quadruple layered Bluray can hold 128 gigs. We've already got games in the tens of gigs up from what? 64K a few decades ago. At that rate, in a few decades we'll have games that are 268 petabytes, thats' 268'000'000 gigs. Holy jebus! Of course Blurays probably won't be around anymore then.

We will probably move onto Three Layered Disks (100gb Cap) very soon seeing as games were topping 40 something GBs and 2 Layered Blue ray disks max out at 50gb.

Forever is a long time. On current gen systems maybe not. But if you wanted a game made for 4K or 8K monitors then definitely. Almost all textures end up getting compressed before being pressed onto the disc. If you look at something like Rage, that game was over a terabyte uncompressed. At the time it wasn't feasible to release a version more than 25 GB, but they could have made a 100 GB version if they wanted. So long story short, yes, definitely. Maybe not anytime soon but eventually.

There have already been games released that have filled up a full blu-ray so yeah eventually there will be a game that will require two Blu-rays unless they move to a three layered disc soon like bigjeffrey was saying.

well, will games eventually be large enough that they'd require multiple blu-rays? Absolutely.

The real question is, will blu-rays still be the medium for such games to be printed on when games get that large?

Probably dumb question but.. Are these triple or quad layered discs compatible with current Blu ray drives?

remember those loading chapter sequences in Metal Gear Solid 4 where snake is smoking.

That's the game installing off of the blu ray disc, then later they updated the game so you can install that onto the HDD, and it's a great improvement.

By the end of the generation, yeah. I can't wait until crappy compressed video is a thing of the past.

Hard to say, only because Blu-Ray was designed from the very beginning to support a large number of layers per disc. All current Blu-Ray drives should be capable reading at least four layers of data, allowing up to 128GB discs. Some may need firmware updates, but it's been demonstrated in labs that unaltered BR optics can read four layers of data.

Well that is supposing that it will ever be proffitable that amount of work on a game... If at 40GB the game it is already bordering on financially unfeasable, then if they ever reach 100GB+ it probably is insanity as of now.

Forever is a long time, but will we and consoles live long enough reach those extremes? With every variable from digital distribution, to development costs it is hard to say if it will ever happen.

This, pretty much.

By the time we need two Blu-Rays for one game, I'll bet that we'll have something else. It might not even be a disc. It might be, like, a three and a half inch floppy square with magic rainbow particles in it or something.

NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can't compare size to cost quite that linearly. As texture sizes go up, the tools used to create them get better. At some point purely photo realistic super high res textures become the norm, which are no harder to create, they are just huge. Textures are by far the largest contributor to game size in the modern era.

This of course assumes we continue to use textured polygons for rendering, which as of right now seems likely for the foreseeable future, but who knows in ten or fifteen years.

Final Fantasy XV's gonna be great

I don't think it costs that much more to make an extra plastic disc. And no developer sets out to make a game that goes over two or more anyway. AND who on EARTH would say "I love Fallout/Elder Scrolls, but refuse to play it if it's on more than one disc!! REFUSE!!!"

It is possible, but we probably aren't going to be seeing that for another couple years. Currently your typical Blu ray disc disc will hold about 50GB, however they have come out with a new standard as of 2010 that will allow discs to hold up to 128GB however this new standard requires new readers/players to work.

I'm not sure if the new consoles have these new readers for the new standard, but I would guess they would. Until games get to 50GB+ its not a problem, but as these games do more and more and have higher res textures and such, the size of everything will just get bigger and bigger. Considering how modern PC games are going size-wise these days, I don't think the consoles are going to be that far behind.

Yeah, but haven't costs been rising with the high tech graphics? Tools can minimize the increased financial effort, but can't reverse it. Costs in AAA from sd to hdtv have rising quite significantly despite the increasingly better tools.

But in your argument you have forgotten that the textures are designed by people that have to be paid, and the resolution improves so does the work slow down, as well as as much more textures are employed as much more people and/or time are needed to design those said textures. Tools can slow down the financial climb, but that's that.

I can't see costs diminuishing, as someone has to design every facet of the increasingly complicated game.

Most of the expense of modern video games is actually in the mo-cap, animation and voice arenas. That's where your huge costs are coming from. People are very, very good at making textures these days, and do so mostly from photos which are then down scaled and touched up. The less down scaling and touching up that needs to be done, the better. Only with very specific art styles are textures hand drawn anymore.

This is why I'm saying you can't make that linear of a correlation between size of the game and cost.

e: Case in point, as mediocre of a game as Rage was, it was HUGE uncompressed, and not nearly as expensive as GTA5, which is much smaller in uncompressed form than Rage was.

@brainling: Yeah, but the game would have to use the 100GB+ of data on something, compressed, if ever a company would think of using two blurays for a game, no?

How much it would cost to develop a game with that kind of size, considering today's standards?

@brainling is correct. Textures are currently scaled down from their original quality. Since many textures are based on photographs you can have incredibly high quality base images for your textures. The top cameras these days can take photos at like 16k resolutions. Making a texture have more detail costs a bit more but not in a linear manner at all, especially considering that most textures are made in much higher resolutions than will ever be displayed in the game. The cost of a game doesn't directly rise along with scale. Plus the scale of an in game world doesn't correlate at all to its total size on the disc. Skyrim takes up far less space on a disc than Uncharted 2 or 3 do for example. Most games use a process called instancing to create their levels. What that means is you have a single asset, say a table, and every time you need that table to appear in the game you tell the game to find that table on the disc and then put it in the game world. The table only has to be on the disc a single time even if it is used 100's of times throughout the game. Skyrim and other open world games tend to use this technique to an extreme degree. If you look in Skyrim the number of unique textures is actually probably not as great as some linear games as in those games each level may contain an entirely unique set of objects. There are dozens of dungeons in Skyrim but only a handful of different graphical styles among them. Meanwhile, again to use Uncharted as an example, virtually every level in an Uncharted game uses almost entirely unique assets. Plus, Naughty Dog uses an interesting technique in which they store the same assets multiple times on the disc so that they are always close by when needed. That's how they manage to avoid lengthy installations and manage to stream in new content like they do. GTA5 actually streams content from both the hard drive and the disc at the same time which let's them get the assets into the RAM as quickly as possible. This, again, means that content is sometimes repeated on the disc.

Last point is that in the previous generation (meaning 360 and PS3) quite often the most space on the disc was actually reserved for cutscenes. Bink videos used in a large number of games take up a huge amount of space on the disc but are used because they allow you to stream in the next level in the background. In the last Castlevania game which took up two DVD's the entire game outside of the cutscenes fit easily onto a single DVD. But the cutscenes actually doubled the size of the game. With required installs and massive amounts of RAM this generation we won't have the same sort of bandwidth issues so I would hope Bink videos are used less.

Don't worry, Persona 5 should be out this time next year.

Interesting post, but do you think it is financially viable to make a two bluray disk game with 100GB+?

@themanunknown: In English?

No. I could see some games making use of BDXL (which has a capacity of 128GB), but not 2 discs.

Remember, 20 years ago nobody thought we would even get into gigabytes of storage personally. Now we're bordering petabytes for the more hardcore users. I have about 7TB in my house of storage (and I just cleaned a lot of it up) on computers only. Media and games, doesn't unclude my physical media.

You are not too far off. About the same time that Blu-Ray was coming out, companies were showing off Holographic Versatile Disks. Each disk stores several terabytes of data.

Weird thing is, one of the companies that makes these disks holds a joint patent for the technology with Nintendo. Maybe the Wii-U successor will have disks that destroy Blu-Ray for capacity.

@jeust: I don't see why not. The cost of the disc itself is not that high anymore and as I said, the size of the game on the disc and the scale of the in game world are not proportional in any way so what would make it cost prohibitive? Like I said originally, Rage could easily release a 100 GB HD version if they wished. Many PC games include additional HD texture packs for those with the bandwidth and hard drive space to use them. Another aspect that could take up more space is audio. A lot of audio is super compressed in games, but more and more games are including HD audio for those with the hardware to make use of it. HD audio can take up massive amounts of space and it costs no more to include HD audio over compressed audio. The audio starts at the highest quality and is lowered down to fit onto the disc. If a game were to include 7.1 24 Bit FLAC audio then it could take up 100 GB's easily.