Rock_Starman
02-05-2008, 12:33 AM
"It was bound to happen sooner or later, but Burnout Paradise has the distinction of being the first high profile (non-MMO) Xbox 360 release to have significant portions of the game unavailable to those without HDD-equipped consoles. Specifically, Burnout Paradise's seamlessly integrated online mode -- one of the game's big selling points -- is completely off-limits unless you're playing with a hard drive.
The back of the box may indicate the requirement, but judging by how many people were only recently surprised to find this out, you could argue that Criterion was quiet about the decision in the build up to the game's release. In the interest of full disclosure, the Burnout team today released a statement explaining the decision. The crux of the matter revolves around the storage space needed for every player to be able to eventually show off new downloadable content:
It's important for us that all online players could show off new content when they go online and unfortunately it wasn't going to be possible to do this by supporting the lowest common storage denominator, the 64Mb Memory Unit, either in size or data read speeds. Crucially we also didn't want to split the playing community between those that have updated data and those that don't. We saw this as vital in maintaining simplicity to all online users; different players having different content packages wouldn't be able to play online with each other.
We opened a dialogue with Microsoft to attempt to discover a possible solution and all possible technical options were investigated to retain the seamless freedom of Burnout without requiring the HDD. Unfortunately a solution was not available and we decided together that it would be in the best interests of the Burnout community if we require the HDD for full online play.
If this problem sounds vaguely familiar to you, perhaps you'll recall that Sega recently answered a few frequently asked questions about Virtua Fighter 5 on the Xbox 360, with one of the questions touching on a similar issue: how do they allow all players to see downloadable content on someone else's character, even if they haven't purchased the same DLC pack themselves? Sega's controversial method was to include all the planned DLC on the disc itself, and have players simply unlock the items with their "purchases." This way, every copy of VF5 still has that data on the disc to show the downloadable clothing items for every character, even if every player didn't purchase the right to wear them."
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3165885
This will be even more intresting if it turns out it IS on the disc already and just another MS scam trying to get people to upgrade.
The back of the box may indicate the requirement, but judging by how many people were only recently surprised to find this out, you could argue that Criterion was quiet about the decision in the build up to the game's release. In the interest of full disclosure, the Burnout team today released a statement explaining the decision. The crux of the matter revolves around the storage space needed for every player to be able to eventually show off new downloadable content:
It's important for us that all online players could show off new content when they go online and unfortunately it wasn't going to be possible to do this by supporting the lowest common storage denominator, the 64Mb Memory Unit, either in size or data read speeds. Crucially we also didn't want to split the playing community between those that have updated data and those that don't. We saw this as vital in maintaining simplicity to all online users; different players having different content packages wouldn't be able to play online with each other.
We opened a dialogue with Microsoft to attempt to discover a possible solution and all possible technical options were investigated to retain the seamless freedom of Burnout without requiring the HDD. Unfortunately a solution was not available and we decided together that it would be in the best interests of the Burnout community if we require the HDD for full online play.
If this problem sounds vaguely familiar to you, perhaps you'll recall that Sega recently answered a few frequently asked questions about Virtua Fighter 5 on the Xbox 360, with one of the questions touching on a similar issue: how do they allow all players to see downloadable content on someone else's character, even if they haven't purchased the same DLC pack themselves? Sega's controversial method was to include all the planned DLC on the disc itself, and have players simply unlock the items with their "purchases." This way, every copy of VF5 still has that data on the disc to show the downloadable clothing items for every character, even if every player didn't purchase the right to wear them."
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3165885
This will be even more intresting if it turns out it IS on the disc already and just another MS scam trying to get people to upgrade.
