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Bethesda Confirms that Oblivion will Utilize Xbox360 Hard Drive
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posted by: Aaron Stanton
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date posted: 01:21 PM Thu Aug 18th, 2005
last revision: 01:24 PM Thu Aug 18th, 2005



Click to read.The makers of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have confirmed to Game Informer Online that their title will utilize the Xbox 360 hard drive, but will still be capable of running when the hard drive is not present. This is good news for those of us without the money to pick up the $400 version of the Xbox 360, which will ship with 20 GB hard drive. Oblivion is likely to be one of the hottest games on Microsoft\'s new system, and confirming that it will be able to run on both versions of the system allows many of us breath a little easier. This is not surprising, since Microsoft has directed that all games on the Xbox 360 should be designed to play regardless of whether not a hard drive is present (with the exception of MMPG). This begs the question though: what will be different for a user playing with a hard drive than a user that does not have a hard drive?

At the same time they confirmed that Oblivion would run without a hard drive, Bethesda confirmed that their new title would in fact make extensive use of the Xbox 360\'s hard drive if present. One can only wonder what that means. The original Xbox used the hard drive to store data for fast and easy retrieval, reducing load times, among other things. Are the differences that we can expect in Oblivion between an Xbox 360 with at hard drive versus no hard drive going to be significant? Will the graphics be better? Load times shorter? Are the changes going to be substantial, or just minor differences in eye candy? $100 dollars is roughly how much it costs to go tangent sky diving for the first time, and if all that $100 will get me in the game world is a shorter load time then it\'s possible I\'d rather drop myself out of an airplane (true story) than skip some 10 second loading screen. If, however, I get something really special for having that Xbox HD when I play Oblivion, it could be the reason for the upgrade.

Which is a lie, because backward compatibility with old Xbox titles is probably reason enough to own the hard drive.

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