Installing, please wait...
As consoles become more and more like PCs, do we risk games taking on some of the less desirable aspects of their desktop-based counterparts?
{ Thu 17th April 2008 }
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue for my PlayStation 3 (yes, a release we got in Europe before the US, it does happen once in a blue moon). I've always enjoyed the Gran Turismo series and Prologue seemed like a good sampler for the future GT5, especially for the bargain price of £15 (got to love them money off vouchers on the Internet).
One element I wasn't quite bargaining for is the required install necessary to be able to play the game. I'm not sure how this failed to get mentioned anywhere, or maybe I just managed to miss the information entirely, but in order to play the game you have to sit through an install process that took about 40 minutes for me and - more importantly, I'd argue — left me with 6Gb of install data on my PlayStation 3. What the hell?!
Bear in mind that my PlayStation 3 is a 40Gb model, 10Gb of which you can write off to firmware and other nonsense. That leaves me with 30Gb to play with in total, which is currently sitting at around the 22Gb free mark. If other games follow a similar approach that means I'll only be able play three more games before I have to start uninstalling and installing games in order to play them.
To me this goes against the nature of consoles completely. The first time I put Prologue in I was hoping to show it off to a friend of mine who hadn't yet seen a PS3 in action; needless to say he wasn't entirely impressed, though he did like my 360, which we ended up playing whilst we waited for the install (and even then we had to leave before the install finished).
It wouldn't necessarily be so bad if it was a quick install, but at 40-odd minutes that just wasn't on. Equally so, if the PS3 had a ridiculously large hard-drive then the problem would be mitigated to a reasonable extent, but with just 30Gb to play with — ignoring save files and any media/demos you download — it's not going to take long before you're just not bothering with games because you don't want the hassle. I can certainly see myself not returning to games because of that issue.
The real aspect of this that pisses me off is that from what's been found out so far, the driving force behind these required installs is laziness on the developer's part; some sort of oddity in the Blu-ray format and reading speeds. I couldn't really care less what the issue is, unless there's no other choice I don't want massive install files on my console.
The argument the games companies are putting forwards is that by installing files on the hard-drive you get faster load times. OK, sure, I will admit that Gran Turismo 5 Prologue loads in a nice and quick manner. However, I would have much preferred to have the option so that I didn't have to use up time and hard-drive space before I could have a quick race. As it turns out and update and download issues meant it took me 4 days before I actually had my quick race, but still, the install wasn't a good start.
It seems some other devs are taking the right approach and offering the installation as an option, rather than making it a requirement. I sincerely hope that this is how things continue to go, because knowing a game will require installation and another large chunk of my hard-drive space will make me think long and hard about how much I want the game after all. Ultimately this becomes another reason for me to pick up any cross-platform titles on my 360, so I would like to think it's an issue Sony will react to sooner rather than later; though this is Sony, so who knows.
