XBox 360 Rally

Bizarre Creations has made a news post up debunking a rumor that has spread through the internets, of a problem with them fitting some of their level designs onto a DVD9 disc. It was very easy though to read into what was said by one of the Bizarre staff members, Ben:

“You won’t see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn’t a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD.”

That was posted on the 27th, so with four days of buzz behind this statement on the internet, which is basically equal to a hundred human years, they finally took the time to reply yesterday:

“We’ve never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.”

That is the short answer, but basically he goes into how before creating the game itself, they already know the medium they are working on, thus the game is created with the factor of how big a total file size can be. As I re-read his post over and over and over, it does leave me with the feeling that working with the DVD medium can be a pain, but he never does say anything to that effect, maybe its just me, I suggest reading the full reply after the break (nice big image included that does really get you to appreciate the beauty of this title):

As I’m sure you’ve seen, some of the comments made on our forum have been blown out of all proportion. This has been reported on certain web sites. It seems that a number of fanboys have jumped on the topic… sigh. So it’s time we cleared this one up…

When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games… and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys.

The previous game, PGR3, had five environments. That’s how much we could create given our time and resources for that game. With the longer development cycle we’ve had for PGR4, as well as the advantage of having final hardware, we wanted to create a far bigger and better game by this time including 10 environments, as well as a whole bunch of new gameplay features.

Rather than having two “fixed” times of day, this time around we decided to use our time to create a dynamic weather system, which effectively creates a much more dramatic palette from which to work with. To show you where we’re coming from, have a look at this screenshot crop sheet. This is something we use internally to compare our environments, lighting, and weather effects… but it’s certainly useful for demonstrating the breadth of the game here!

Environments Crop Sheet
Click for larger size… (aprx. 5MB)

We’ve never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.

Each next-gen format has its own merits. We should know, as we’re currently developing games for all of them in one form or another. It’s not a case of one system having less of this, and the other having more of that. As developers we are given a fixed platform, and that’s what we work with. At the end of the day we’re games developers, and we try to create the best we can irrespective of platform. We hope you end up agreeing with our design decisions when you see the game for yourself.

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