Battlefield 3 dev urges hard drive install on 360

Picking up Battlefield 3 for Xbox 360 when it hits store shelves next week? Patrick Bach, the game’s executive producer, urges you to grab a hard drive for the console while at the store, if you don’t have one already, in order to install the high resolution textures found on the second disc. Unless you want to play the “standard def” version, which requires no install but won’t be as graphically powerful.

Bach says installing the Battlefield 3 texture pack to the hard drive allows for the 360 version to have “the same abilities, kind of, as the PC and PS3. You can actually stream information from the hard drive.” The streaming textures are a new concept on the 360, he continues, but not for the industry overall, it’s just that no one has “really tried to do it properly, so us doing it will create question marks.”

With Battlefield 3‘s engine based around streaming textures, terrain, and loads of other content, Bach insists the install will “absolutely” make a difference for the gamer. But the developers couldn’t just force 360 owners to install the textures to make everyone’s experience the same.

“The thing with the 360 is that you need to be able to give consumers a game where you don’t have to install it on a hard drive, because there are 360s without a hard drive. So we need to give you the option of installing it, rather than just demanding it. You could call it a ‘standard-def’ version for the 360 if you don’t have a hard-drive.”