MGS4 required a few cuts

PS3 News | Blu-ray not big enough for Snake's latest adventure.

According to an interview with Famitsu, (you can find a partly translated version here) Hideo Kojima has told that even with 50 GB of space at his disposal, there have been many cuts and compression issues with the latest installment of the Metal Gear series.

The Kotaku translated interview states that Hideo told Famitsu "For us, we're not still not satisfied with the quality we can do. You know, there's not capacity space."

When asked to clarify, he also added: "There's not enough space at all...There's not enough space. We always talked about where to cut and what to compress."

This seems to confirm statements made last week on the Kojima Productions podcast where assistant producer Ryan Payton told listeners that the Japanese voice over would not make it onto the American and European copies of the game due to space issues.

Hopefully this doesn't mean anymore setbacks for the hotly-anticipated title as it strives to make a worldwide release this June.

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31 Comments

Toastfarmer

4 years ago

Wow, and I thought Blu-ray was to be the final word on storage issues.

You should've just used two BD discs, Hideo!

genxevo

4 years ago

Hope Pal version doesn't get watered down bonus' or less extra features for all the languages they have to put in to our version

jedi022

4 years ago

I'm sorry but this is stupid. Unless this game is a 10/10 then there is no excuse for cutbacks. You hear that Kojima! No excuses.

Passa

4 years ago

Oh what a load of ****. Back in 2003ish, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was ported to the PC and required 7GB of HDD space for installation. In 2003.

Nowadays, new PC games use no more than 10GB HDD space (typically). Xbox 360 games fit comfortably within 8.5GB DL DVDs. Even PS3 games are only so large because everything is uncompressed and unoptimised (the benefits of doing so seem to be nonexistent since loading times and graphical quality is identical for multiplatform games).

Compress your goddamn game.

bradc1988

4 years ago

Ha! The 360 port will need 5 discs now!

*beats dead horse*

Capoeira

4 years ago

This is crazy talk. They must have some stupidly large uncompressed assets to fill an entire BD. To hear that there isn't enough space on a Blu-Ray this early in the game is simply... mind boggling.

It sounds to me like Kojima and co. are expecting far too much of the technology available to them and are not doing too a good job of managing their assets.

Jim Dash

4 years ago

To fill up 50G isn't that easy, is it? I mean, yeah, multiple languages, ok. Compress it?

Should we be expecting an awesomely long game, alot of content, or what? I guess so.

Plus Metal Gear Online on the same disc, right?

Aftershock

4 years ago

"We've always had issues on what to compress."

Hmm, maybe the game.
That might help.

I think that they have just gone, oh we have 50Gb, SWEET! don't need to compress now! and when they fill it, they go, oh ****.

LeonJ

4 years ago

Game is gonna be massive. I'd expect at least 30 hours of gameplay.

Sinthesys

4 years ago

Wow, Sony sure are a silly bunch sometimes. All this talk of superior disc space and here they are, running out of it.

Then again, this might just be an indication that this MGS will be the best one yet.

fatpizza

4 years ago

psylacine wrote

Wow, Sony sure are a silly bunch sometimes. All this talk of superior disc space and here they are, running out of it.

Yeah, how dare they argue positively about having 41.5 more GB at their disposal, they're crazy.

odzendz

4 years ago

Oct 20, 2007

Quote

According to Payton(Kojima Productions Assistant Producer Ryan Payton), the game is eating up Blu-ray's capacity due to "hours and hours and hours" of cinematics. Hideo Kojima's sound team is also pushing for a real next-gen experience by putting a lot of work in Metal Gear Solid 4's audio that will come pure and uncompressed, Payton added.

http://ps3.qj.net/E-for-All-07-Konami-on-maxing-out-Blu-ray-with-hours-of-cinematics-uncompressed-audio/pg/49/aid/105564

edit: Watch the video, there is some more info in there about the sound and other stuff.

Sin Ogaris

4 years ago

Using uncompressed audio is a waste of disc space, plain and simple, there is no reason why they can't compress it, there are plenty of lossless compression techniques which even the most astute audiophile would never hear the difference in.

Cinematics don't even make sense as again, there are some great compression utilities for HD video. Although there's probably about 50 hours of movies to the five hours of game so Kojima probably has a sound argument on that front.

Itachi

4 years ago

Passa wrote

Oh what a load of Bulls***. Back in 2003ish, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was ported to the PC and required 7GB of HDD space for installation. In 2003.

Nowadays, new PC games use no more than 10GB HDD space (typically). Xbox 360 games fit comfortably within 8.5GB DL DVDs. Even PS3 games are only so large because everything is uncompressed and unoptimised (the benefits of doing so seem to be nonexistent since loading times and graphical quality is identical for multiplatform games).

Compress your goddamn game.

Roflmao hhahaa that is so true. I decided to purchase Mortal Kombat 2 on the PSN. Guess how bloody big it was, 250MB hahah i don't think they have heard of compression tbh.

Marka

4 years ago

These sound like excuses. I find this very hard to belive when there are PC game out there with uncompressed audio that take less than 10 Gig of HDD space.

donovan515

4 years ago

The cinematics better be awesome if it's taking up this much space. Hopefully it'll take over at LEAST 20 hours if you rush through it.

Seeing as were having 4 locales at that.

cdkane

4 years ago

Bah I think it will be fine.
I remember when they were making MGS2 and they complained that the PS2 was not nearly powerful enough but they still squeezed s*itloads into that.

Im sure he could cut out a 20 minutes cut scene here or there of snake tying up his shoelace in some symbolic fashion.

pdaddy

4 years ago

Metal Gear Solid games always have 75 hours of cutscenes and so much speech the actors have probably been locked in the recording studios for so long they've turned pale..

The game will be awesome I'm guessing, but I'm just hoping it is a good GAME and not some overblown cutscene. Think about how much of the footage we've seen of it is cutscenes and how much is actual gameplay?

fatpizza

4 years ago

pdaddy wrote

There is a video on the PSN which shows someone playing through 15 minutes of the game. I really recommend watching it.

Sinthesys

4 years ago

fatpizza wrote

psylacine wrote

Wow, Sony sure are a silly bunch sometimes. All this talk of superior disc space and here they are, running out of it.

Yeah, how dare they argue positively about having 41.5 more GB at their disposal, they're crazy.

That's what I said!

All sarcasm aside, my point is that why bother arguing the merits of a format when you can't even use it properly? Sure it has more space, but if you can't effectively use space, you will run into troubles like Sony are now, no matter how much data they can put on a disc.

By the sounds of things, compression won't have a drastic effect on load times or sound quality, so to rely on a medium that can hold large amounts of data, instead of exploring better compression techniques and practices is pretty shoddy game developing.

Karai Pantsu

4 years ago

Yes, but it isn't really the fault of Sony if devs don't utilize the format in the most economical way now is it?

Sinthesys

4 years ago

Well, I think by using such large discs as a focal point, they are encouraging/facilitating these sorts of practices. I mean from a developer's point of view, why spend a bunch of money getting people to sort through files and compress them if you have huge discs?

Karai Pantsu

4 years ago

I think you're certainly right about the disc size encouraging some lax practices, but if the game size isn't in excess of the disc capacity then why would compression be necessary?

Sure, it might make load times shorter - but if a dev is happy to submit their game with unoptimized load times and/or streaming (and Sony are happy to pass that game) then thats their call. Consumers can, as always, vote with their wallets if they think a product isn't worthy of their money.

Sinthesys

4 years ago

Karai Pantsu wrote

but if the game size isn't in excess of the disc capacity then why would compression be necessary?

It wouldn't normally be necessary, however you have cases like this MGS one that highlight the problem with letting the devs skip out on compression with the small games: You set a precedent of anti-compression, with the devs seeing it as accepted practice to not compress Sony games.

Karai Pantsu wrote

Consumers can, as always, vote with their wallets if they think a product isn't worthy of their money.

This is true, however with a big name franchise like MGS, there was never any question of people not buying the latest game, just how good they can make it.

Everyone bought Halo 2, and we all know how that game was...

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Australian Release Date:
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