God of War 3 won't sacrifice your time with HDD install

by Randy Nelson on Feb 23rd 2010 7:00PM

We can only imagine that if Kratos were a real person (wait -- he's not?), the idea of having to wait for God of War 3 to install a portion of itself onto the PS3's hard disk wouldn't sit too well with the rage-filled Spartan. Heck, even we don't dig mandatory installs. It's a good thing, then, that God of War 3 won't have one -- this according to Sony Santa Monica director of technology, Christer Ericson.

Ericson stated via Twitter that, "God of War 3 does NOT do a HD install. The 5MB listed on box back is for save game only." This is in stark contrast to other games (yes, we're talking about you, Devil May Cry 4) that require -- nay, demand! -- multi-gigabyte mandatory installations. Of course, for some, the ability to install an entire game to the PS3 hard disk, potentially cutting down on loading time is a welcome option -- but it won't be for GOW3. "No there is no HD install option," Ericson replied when asked if the game will allow for it.

Given that the final back cover of the God of War 3's box only lists the 5MB space requirement, this pretty much rules out the game secretly carving out HDD space for caching data -- data that would eventually translate into images of Kratos carving up enemies on-screen.

[Via Eurogamer]

Source -- Twitter
Source -- Twitter

Tags: god-of-war, god-of-war-iii, hdd, mandatory-install, SONY, sony-santa-monica

Reader Comments (57)

LOL, Dante's Inferno and God of War pics are rife for parody. Thank you Joystiq :)

Kratos will rage from HDD also but in hidden manner than..
Hope the disk can take its Rage, hahahaaa

Cooooool, I'm assuming the in-game loading will remain as swift as in previous versions.

Uncharted 2 didn't mask loading with cutscenes. You can skip all the cutscenes and jump straight into the next level straight away, even if it's a completely different location, even with your character wearing different clothes, with no loading or texture pop-in at all.

I don't expect GoWIII's streaming to be quite as impressive as that, though. Uncharted 2 is something special.

Sonys Studios often share a lot of tech so I bet Uncharted 2 and GoW3 have a lot of similar things going on in the back end.

That's not true Hyams. Take it from someone who has beat both Uncharteds at least 3 times each.

i heard they have these hallways with enemies in it and the game loads while u fight them.

Yeah, I'm with whitenoise. You can skip any in-engine cut-scene usually. But if it's pre-rendered it is loading up geometry in the background, and you won't be able to skip the whole thing. The load time (which is hidden) can be pretty quick though, perhaps 10-15 seconds in some cases.

Actually, to my knowledge Uncharted 2 preloads all the important junk during boot (hence the somewhat lengthy initial load and savedata load times), and then loads everything else while you play. Most game developers are starting to use this tactic now to reduce or "entirely remove" load times, as freeing up RAM is becoming easier.

Whether UC2 was masking the load screens with in-engine cutscenes or not doesn't really matter to me, since all that I care about is that I never saw a loading screen after the initial one.

If other games can pull it off, the more the merrier.

If you selected a mission through the chapter selection in UC2, you will go through a loading screen

i cant wait.

I need this game.

Take that BioShock 2 (9min to install)!

Or take that crappy developers!

yeah, no install and the game looks like a painting come to life with a piece of awesome pie in hand to feed you fantasticness.

I just got a 500 GB HDD aw

Meh, more room for music and porn.

YAY for more porn!!

Thank God. My life is far too important to sacrifice 10 minutes for installation time.

:flies off to help baby seals in need:

By the time you wrote that last sentence you could have saved several children in Africa!

Geez captain planet, you can't let the interwebs catch you off guard!

saving children in africa? he's captain planet, not doctors without borders.

I ususally don't mind game installs too much (still annoying) but the worst game for them was MGS4. Spending 5 minutes after every chapter to install install data, but when you wanted to replay that chapater it would have to install AGAIN?!

Definitely, the installing and de-installing of each chapter was a flow killer. At that point I wouldn't have minded playing the game on 5-6 Dvds or 2 bluray discs. And to add insult to injury, you re-install them if you replay the game.

Indeed, I would have rather just taken the 5 seconds to swap discs.

I'd rather install on my mongo big HD and cut load times once than having disc load times be a factor. That is what makes Kratos mad!!!

Who shops all these pics for joystiq? This one is especially funny. Game will probably be good too but alas, don't own a console.

Haha, Nice image joystiq.

Kratos kills everything he touches.........including your PS3 if you dared contain him inside of it

Final Fantasy XIII doesn't have to install on the hard drive, either. I like how proficient devs are becoming with the the PS3!

" I AM THE GOD OF WAR!" . . . Oh....? That was God of War 2?. . . So what the hell is he now?. . .

The goddess of war.

Spoiler: the twist at the end of the trilogy is that Kratos is like Gaga, he/she/it has both parts.

I cannot wait on God of War 3. I remember reading some article a while back that said Sony wasn't quite finished with the franchise. I think it would be cool if the following game(s) followed Athena's story. Unless she's killed off in the third game, I think the franchise moving from Kratos to Athena would make a lot of sense.

Was she not killed off at the end of the second game?

Kratos totally killed Athena by mistake at the end of God of War 2, when he tries to deliver the finishing blow on Zeus. My memory may be fooling me though.

Ah, why can't I get over him saying "wont have a HD install" it's HDD!! :(

It's like RAS Syndrome in reverse.

nobody says "hard disk drive"

I know, but it's accepted that you say "HDD" no "HD", HD is for high definition. Joystiq put HDD too.

I dont see what the big deal is about having to install some games. In all honestly, I dont care or mind. Though mgs 4 is the king of installs, I didnt mind either. Sometimes you need a break or something before moving along.

Besides even if it did require an installation it would have only been once.

It's not as big a deal if you are fortunate enough to have a large hard drive. Some of those installs were getting to be a gig or two and that could burn up a 60gb HDD pretty fast.

Thankfully Sony made it easy and practical to upgrade your hard drives and devs (at least first party) are getting better at developing for it.

why would you not want to install games on your SSD?

Because their still expensive as hell? : )

worth every penny

I cannot wait

Uh...some of us actually like having an install option. Games like Street Fighter 4 and Unreal Tournament 3 did this best by making it an option in the game's settings. I don't mind having to sacrifice about ten minutes of my time so that the entire game can become more streamlined.

Something tells me though, that the people who whine incessantly about it have never had to work a job standing on your feet in the same spot for about 4 hours.

Please don't flame me, as this is a genuine comment, but this is why Sony needs to control these things on their end. They leave too much up to the developers, and most developers are lazy.

As lame as closed systems can be, it's nice that we have the option to install every 360 game, and invites to every 360 game work exactly the same, etc because none of it is left up to the (often lazy) developers.

That's the one area that I'd really like to see Sony improve on, they've fixed pretty much every other complaint.

I'm actually wondering why it takes 5mb to save a game these days. I know that doesn't seem to represent very much space these days, but it's an example of how little effort is made to reduce bloated filesizes these days just because "extra storage is cheap". The old ps1 memory cards were 1mb and could save several games. How much space can it take to record some position and progress numbers?

it's insane my FALLOUT 3 save files came close to 12 MB after the DLC.

I remember my old PS2 cards were just 8MB total!

If it's anything like other save files, the fancy background, icon, and music that plays while you look at the file in the save data manager probably takes up 1/2-3/4 of that space. Just saying.

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God of War 3 won't sacrifice your time with HDD install

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