Square: One Blu-ray Might Not Be Sufficient for Next-Gen

If you've seen Square Enix's Agni's Philosophy tech demo, then you might already have an inkling how good next-gen visuals will look. Of course, all that beauty comes with a price. Aside from the much-needed added horsepower, game sizes will once again increas in size.

Yoshihisa Hashimoto, director of Agni's Philosophy and Chief Technical Officer at Square Enix, admits that one Blu-ray might not offer enough capacity for next-gen gaming.

Speaking to RPG Site, Hashimoto reveals that the real-time trailer was built in CGI from the ground up as a target for the tech demo. Surprisingly, the assets from the CGI video could then be carried over to the real-time demo and he thinks this could be the norm when it comes to next-gen development.

For the backgrounds used in this – the mountains, the houses – we are using exactly the same assets as are used in the Visual Works CG version. 

Of course, it's too massive of a data to use in a game as-is, but I think the look and feel will probably remain. If we had time, we could've compressed the data even smaller. We didn't have time to do that, so we just used the same master data – but it can definitely be reduced. 

Hashimoto was then asked if disc space would be an issue even if it's on a Blu-ray disc.

Yeah, that could be a challenge. There's a possibility that just one Blu-ray may not be sufficient. 

For reference, one Blu-ray disc holds 50GB of data. So, does this mean we're going back to switching discs in between chapters? If the future really holds games that are bigger than 50GBs of data, how long will our digital purchases be then, no?

Should Sony and other platform makers look for a better alternative to Blu-ray already or will better compression techniques make this a moot point?