Castlevania Revives Xbox 360 Storage Issues

Dave Cox, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Producer at MercurySteam, commented on difficulties fitting the game onto DVDs for the Xbox 360, as opposed to the much larger capacity Blu Ray disks used by the PlayStation 3.

“I think it’s something Microsoft are going to experience more and more – that they need to help developers overcome the storage problem,” Cox said. “I mean, each console has it’s own issues, but you have to work around them.”

The tradeoff here is that DVD drives transfer information much more quickly than Blu Ray drives, so while an entire game can fit on one disk, PlayStation 3 titles often require an up-front install in order to shorten load times. Because of the restrictions on space, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow will ship on two DVDs for the Xbox 360 – even after representatives from Microsoft tried to squeeze it all in.

“Microsoft actually sent their tech guys to the studio to see the game and look at [how we're] compressing it, but they said: ‘Okay, it’s good. You’re doing all you can,’” Cox said.

The game’s size is attributed to lots of original art assets that aren’t reused from location to location. With the involvement of Hideo Kojima in the project, one could speculate that extremely long cutscenes might be the culprit, but Cox assures that isn’t the case.

“They’re pretty short. Our longest one is 14 minutes, which is the end sequence… The game’s around 24 hours long and every level’s different. We have so much variety and we re-use very little assets,” Cox said.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is slated for a 2010 Q4 release, and you can just argue about which console is superior until then.

[via CVG]