Speaking at this year’s Edinburgh Interactive Festival, VP of Epic Games Mark Rein indicated that Unreal Tournament III for the Xbox 360 might have to get cut down in order to cope with the limitations of the console's hardware. Answering a question from the crowd about whether disc size would be a problem with an Xbox 360 port, he stated that “We’ll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version...Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom. And what's really cool is if you think forward and think about what we've done in the past with UT. We had UT 2003 and then we had UT 2004, which was everything in UT 2003 plus a whole bunch of great mod stuff that we went out and purchased from mod makers.”
"If you think down the road, well maybe the next UT beyond this one, on Blu-Ray disc, we might fill the whole damn disc with all the cool stuff the mod makers make."
If the DVD format is already showing its age, it's bad news for Microsoft. Sony's decision to include Blu-Ray has had its detractors, but if multiplatform titles are going to be bigger and better on the PS3, then Sony’s going to be able to start justifying the cost of its more expensive hardware. This will doubly be the case if it's a big franchise like Unreal Tournament from Epic. It's especially worrying given that these are still fairly early days in this console cycle. If it's a problem over the next year, what's it going to be like four or five years down the line?
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