L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s upcoming 1947 Los Angeles crime thriller, is nothing short of a big game. Then again, being in public knowledge since 2004, one would expect something grand. On Xbox 360, the game fills three discs, and on PlayStation 3, one single-layer 25 gigabyte blu-ray disc.
“L.A. Noire was always going to be a massive game, from the size and detail of the world to the length of the cases, and of course, the sheer amount of MotionScan data required for the faces of over 400 actors in-game,” Rockstar’s Jeronimo Barrera told Kotaku. “To tell the story and make the game we wanted to make, we knew that it was going to take an entire single layer Blu-ray disc and three Xbox discs.”
The game was bigger, before. Apparently, Rockstar had created so many cases that not all of them could fit on the disc(s). According to Jeronimo, it left Rockstar with “quality extra content that we wanted to put out as DLC, that would slot seamlessly into the existing game.”
As for disc-swapping, it shouldn’t come as too much a hassle for Xbox 360 owners. Jeronimo said that players only need to swap discs “twice at natural breaks between cases without interrupting the flow of the game.”
L.A. Noire is out May 17, 2011 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.