John-ShepardThose of you "in the know" have likely heard about Record of Agarest War , but perhaps you didn't know that when it arrives in North America, it will only be available as a digital download off the PSN.
That's hardly earth-shattering news but here's the kicker: according to Siliconera citing an Aksys administrator, this is going to be the single biggest downloadable game to date. And as a direct result, it's going to beg the question: just how far away are we from this seemingly inevitable switch to all-digital in the future? This is what we've heard about the Agarest War download:
"I asked around, and it looks like the final size is going to be somewhere around 8-10 gigs. It sounds like a lot, I know, but I’ve been downloading the debug ROMs at home to take the load off our office internet, and they only take a few hours–I usually start them when I leave for work, and they’re done by lunch. My internet connection is nothing special either–about 500 kb/s on a good day.
So there you have it. 8-10 gigs. We should a more solid number closer to release."
Now, if you still have a 20GB or 40GB machine (or even the old 60GB), this is ridiculously huge download. And the more you really think about it, the more you start to realize that many games could fit the 8-10GB margin…and publishers may want to take advantage sooner than you might think. The question is, are people really willing to wait for such a huge download? Is that something people want to do…? It'll be interesting to find out, that's for sure.
Related Game(s): Record of Agarest War
For real.
Well, it looks like just another generic NON-RPG piece of crap tactics game. Like every other tactics game that hits ps3 and calls itself an RPG. Thank goodness, I thought it was going to be important, but I now see its just impotent.
That's nuts, and shows why that "all digital download future" is FAR from being a realistic option in the near future! At 400kb/s AVERAGE it would take you more than SEVEN hours to download this game if it's 10GB. Considering my DSL speed hasn't even gone up at all in the last 4-5 years…
I downloaded a 7.5 gig movie from psn last night and it took me less then 2 hours, I admit i have U-verse internet with download speed at 18 meg per second which equals abour 2.1 megs loaded. i do feel sorry for those that don't have cable or reg dsl this may take a few hours to download. Fiber optics does have its advantages if its available in your area. I hear those that have verizon vios can get up to 20 some mgps download speeds, its just a matter of time before we all will have twice that speed. If this was about 10 years ago i would have never downloaded anything of a few megs..lol
Last edited by artson1966 on 12/7/2009 4:01:05 PM
Regular DSL tops out at about 3Mbits which in the real world translates to about 2.5Mbits, or 310KB/second (or thereabouts) 10GB would take anything up to 6 hours, assuming that nothing else was competing for bandwidth at the time.
The picture gets worse for folks further away from the CO than me and on cable, congested neighborhoods could lead so longer download times too. The networking technology for better speed is there, but it costs a medium sized fortune to upgrade the entire nation, so it'll take time.
I have a cable connection and I usually top out at just under 700kb/sec. Of course it depends on what I'm downloading and from where.
And this is the reason for me saving up for a 250gb PS3.
and why I'm putting a 500gb hard drive in my ps3
If you can afford a 250, look really hard and see if you can afford a 320. The 320GB 5400rpm drive should be almost the same price as the 250GB 7200rpm drives, and the higher RPM drives don't offer any significant performance advantage.
I'm not feeding that beast. Why encourage this kind of lazy publishing?
I concur.
this might work for like, America n stuf, but im in South Africa. The fastest my net goes is 40kb/s (and thats pretty fast over here). and i hav a 4 gig cap. it would take me months just to download this thing. a shame, since it looks kinda interestin