I need scissors! 61!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
[Warning, rampant speculation ahead.]

 

Straight on the heels of an announced June 12th release date, we hear this snippet of an interview with Hideo Kojima in Famitsu:

 

Kojima: For us, we’re not still not satisfied with the quality we can do. You know, there’s not capacity space.

Interviewer: Wait, wait a sec. Saying there’s not enough capacity, are you talking about Blu-ray?

Kojima: That’s correct. There’s not enough space at all.
(laughs) …There’s not enough space. We always talked about where to
cut and what to compress.

 

Filled a Blu-ray disc?  Didn’t think we’d be hearing that one for awhile.  Dammit Hideo, we just ended the format war, and our now-standard Blu-ray is supposed
to make DVD look like a pill bottle next to an oil tanker.  So what gives?  Is it eight dimensional? Does it include a hologram of Kojima himself?

 

Thus, the burning question: What the fuck is taking up so much space?  It’s not Metal Gear Online, we know that’s a separate game.  Could be lazy programming, or just Kojima filling up the available space.  The fact is, no one but Kojima and his team know for sure what’s in MGS4 that needs so much headroom.  But that won’t stop us from guessing, and general wisdom points to an obvious answer: Uncompressed audio.  Fans of the series will know why.

We know MGS4 has 7.1 surround sound, and we know from past MGS experiences that there’s bound to be hours and hours of – mostly skipped over – voice acted Codec conversations.  The ‘uncompressed’ part is important, because not only are there gobs of Codec conversations, but they’re usually mid-mission, and zero compression cuts down on load times.  Slick.

Now, if you read that comment from Kojima and said to yourself, “Wow, an entire disc!  This must be one hell of a game!”, shut up and think.  Since when have we based our opinions of games based on file size?  Break and I don’t love Lost Odyssey because it could only fit on four discs – we love it because it’s a great game.  Sure, big files suggest rich textures and aural pleasure.  But those don’t guarantee a good game.  Unless you’re Vamp.

 

Another burning question: What does this mean for an Xbox 360 port?  Assuming a dual layer (50 gigabytes) disc, straight division says it’d take at least six 360 discs to contain what Kojima is putting on one Blu-ray.  Looks like Fission Mailed to me. 

 

Maybe, with some clever compression and graphics tweaks, it could make it down to a few discs.  But regardless of it’s chances, I’ve never been a passenger on the ‘MGS4 to 360’ dreamtrain, and neither should you.  If you want MGS4, man up and play it on PS3.

 

See you in the game.