According to DevelopMag, Sony's up-coming PS3 game, Heavenly Sword, uses 10GB of the Blu-ray disc purely for the game's audio data. Amazingly, the game has three and a half hours of music, 4,500 lines of dialog (I'd be interested to know how that stacks up to Shenmue's number), which is recorded in eleven different languages.


Tom Colvin from Ninja Theory (the game's developer) explains: “For me, sound is very ‘immediate’ to the player. Music has a well-established cultural language; sound is much less clearly delineated – but you can get straight to someone’s emotional responses with it – there’s little time for the brain to analyse. Sound is key in making this awesome weapon – the Heavenly Sword – come to life so you can sense its brooding power and almost hear it feeding off each kill.”

Interesting. I wonder how this will wash with the 'normal DVDs are more than adequate' crowd. It should be noted that the comments from the developer should probably be taken with a grain of salt. They are making a PS3-exclusive game being published by Sony, and as is often the way with these things, they may be embellishing the truth somewhat. I remember a bit of a scandal involving Sony's Resistance: Fall of Man. Sony claimed the game used the whole 25GB of the Blu-ray disc, when in fact, hackers discovered that the game could easily have fit on a DVD, and the disc was merely 'padded-out' with dummy-data to make it seem full.

Have a gander at the full DevelopMag feature for a more in-depth low-down.