14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main elements included in the New Xbox Experience, which has just launched for all the users of the Xbox 360 gaming console from Microsoft, is the ability to install parts of a game on the hard drive of the device, if you have one of the two models with an internal storage solution. The idea was to reduce load times for players and limit the disk access which leads some of the Xbox 360 consoles to sound like aircraft ready to take off.
Even if it sounds good, there's at least one game which you should not install on your hard drive. That title is Halo 3, the best selling first person shooter from Bungie, exclusive to the Microsoft platform. Engineer Mat Noguchi made a post on the Bungie forums, spotted by Joystiq, in which he basically said that the game could be loading significantly slower if a hard drive install was performed. The problem is that Halo 3 was created so that “if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition on the HDD” so “even if Halo 3 is already installed on the HDD, it will still copy maps to the utility partition”, which could result in a lot of hard drive activity slowing down the console.
Noguchi says that a patch might be released to make the game use the hard drive better but it would mean a “significant undertaking to try and retroactively patch Halo 3”. In other words, Bungie is not ready to invest the manpower and resources needed to do it. It seems that Halo 3: Recon could also have the same issue and will not be installed on the hard drive of the Xbox 360.
The expansion for Halo 3, which is supposed to arrive in 2009, will offer players a fresh perspective on the universe of the franchise.