If you’re one of the handful of Xbox 360 gamers still without a hard-drive, you might want to pick one up, or give Battlefield 3 a skip entirely. According to Battlefield series producer Patrick Bach, the 360 version of the game without installing the “high res texture pack” that’s included on the second disc is essentially “standard def.”
“The thing with the 360 is that you need to be able to give consumers a game where you don’t have to install it on a hard drive, because there are 360s without a hard drive,” Bach said to Gamerzines.“So we need to give you the option of installing it, rather than just demanding it. You could call it a ‘standard-def’ version for the 360 if you don’t have a hard-drive.” Xbox fanboys gamers hoping the texture pack might give the 360 version a boost over the competition might be in for a spot of disappointment.
"There’s nothing magic about it," said Bach. "It’s the same thing we do for PC and PS3, so there’s nothing extra. I think the controversy about this is that we actually let you do it on 360 for once. So what it does is it gives you the same abilities, kind of, as the PC and PS3. You can actually stream information from the hard drive. That’s new for Xbox 360, but it’s not a new idea for the gaming industry as a whole. No one has really tried to do it properly, so us doing it will create question marks." I think it’s safe to expect a mandatory installation for the PS3 version.
Does the texture pack really make that much of a difference? Apparently so.
“It does make a difference, yes, absolutely. The whole engine is based around streaming textures, streaming terrain and a lot of other content,” he said.
"What we let you do is let you have high-res information that gets streamed in and out of memory at all times, and that gives you a more detailed, varied and vivid experience on all platforms. We don’t want to take that away from 360 players. We’re really trying to push the limits of what we can do on the consoles and the PC. Our goal is to see how we can utilise as many of the systems that you actually have in your machine that some people haven’t utilised before. Some (developers) just do it like, if it doesn’t fit into memory we just make a lesser game. We don’t do that. For us, it’s about how we can give you the most game ever even though the hardware is over five years old."
Any of you still running 360’s without HDD’s? You could probably get away with installing to a flash drive – but it would have to be a really fast one to keep the textures streaming properly.
Last Updated: October 20, 2011
