Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots can't be contained by Blu-ray

by Daniel Nasserian - Mar 4 2008, 15:27

When Sony announced that they would be using Blu-ray technology for PlayStation 3 games, people questioned if that much storage space was necessary.  It turns out developers have not only found a way to fill a Blu-ray disc with game data but that it might not be enough.

In a recent interview with Famitsu, Hideo Kojima, creator and director of the "Metal Gear Solid" series, noted that the upcoming title "Metal Ger Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots" was too large for a dual-layered Blu-ray disc. Kojima stated, "There's not enough space. We always talked about where to cut and what to compress."

A dual-layered Blu-ray disc can contain roughly 50gb of data compared to the DVD-9, used in Microsoft's Xbox 360, which can only house roughly 8.5gb of data. When the Xbox 360 was first launched, developers felt that DVD-9 would provide more than enough storage space for next-gen games. Now that the PlayStation 3 has been out long enough for developers to get used to the Blu-ray format, it seems that even 50gb can prove to be too little to work with.

Hideo Kojima has already admitted that "Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots" will be very heavy in dialogue and the space used on the Blu-ray disc wasn't being filled by graphics alone. In order to make the data fit on the disc, Ryan Payton, assistant producer for the game, said that Japanese dialogue would not be on the American or European versions.

"Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots" is one of the most anticipated titles for 2008 and is expected to heavily boost sales for the PlayStation 3. It was recently given a June 12 release date in the U.S.

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