Kojima not to blame for two-disc 360 version of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

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Developer says cutscenes are relatively short, laments 360's 'storage problem'

In spite of his involvement with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima – or, at least, his legendary affectation for jaw-droppingly long cutscenes – isn’t the reason for the recent decision to spread the 360 version of the game across two discs, according to a preview in UK mag (and GR sister publication) Xbox World 360.

“Our cutscenes are pretty short,” said the game’s producer, Dave Cox, in the preview. “The longest one is 14 minutes, which is the end sequence. It’s not cutscenes that are taking up the space; the game’s around 24 hours long and every level’s different. We have so much variety and we re-use very few assets.”

The problem, Cox said, is DVDs as a storage medium. “Microsoft actually sent their tech guys to the studio to look at the game and look at (how we’re) compressing it, but they said ‘okay, it’s good, you’re doing all you can.’ I think it’s something Microsoft are going to experience more and more – that they need to help developers overcome the storage problem,” he said.

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While multi-DVD 360 games are becoming increasingly common – Mass Effect 2 and Final Fantasy XIII are a couple ofprominent examples – Lords of Shadow will offer 360 owners the option to install it to their hard drives, enabling them to play the entire game using the second disc and eliminating the need to swap the discs out.

“Each console has its own issues,” Cox added, pointing out that thePS3 – for which Lords of Shadow will ship on a single Blu-ray disc–offers much greater storage, but with slower load times. “But you have to work around them. “

Source:CVG

Aug 2, 2010

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.