The massive game that is Mass Effect 2 is so big it's going to take two discs. No, not like Forza 3's two discs where you only need two to install the game, this time around with ME2 you'll actually be swapping discs while playing. Word is that the swap will only be once for a "regular game" but that means for some people there might in fact be multiple swaps depending on how you play the game.

I railed about the Xbox's lack of a larger capacity optical drive like Blu-ray before and can only think this is the beginning of us seeing a lot more disc swapping coming our way in the future. In fact, Final Fantasy XIII looks like it's shaping up to be three DVDs so clearly for larger RPGs the DVD just doesn't provide nearly enough room anymore.



When complaining about the Xbox's lack of a better, bigger drive, people will always come to it's rescue screaming about how digital downloads make the optical drive irrelevant anyway. Clearly digital distribution is already big for PCs and gaining for consoles but it just isn't enough. It's not offered enough and it's not fast enough; hence the need to once again talk about MS adding Blu-ray to the Xbox 360.

The second retort, aside from being called a PS3 fanboy, will be that the Blu-ray drive just doesn't have fast enough read times. My answer to this is even though the traditional DVD has faster reads, a Blu-ray disk is a lot faster than your Internet connection.

One final point, yes this would fracture the Xbox 360 market a little bit but publishers would offer Blu-ray or standard DVD just like movie studios do so it would not be as bad as some think. So, when is Microsoft going to offer Blu-ray drives on the Xbox 360?

Mass Effect 2 will be released on January 26, 2010. Pre-order from Amazon through this link and get free in-game bonus armor.

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