Let me clear something up. Game consoles just recently started getting hardrives. Before, in the Playstation 1 days, to keep the console cheap it would load everything from disc to memory.
Hardrives are much faster than cdroms/dvdroms. Hardrives have gotten a lot cheaper. Games have gotten a lot bigger, so if it were to load everything from disc it would take 3+ minutes. Too much waiting time. So now the most used parts of the game are loaded on to the hardrive.
In conclusion, it was the time versus cost. In the beginning games were smaller, hardrives were expensive, and load times weren't very high. Now games are lot larger, hardrives are cheaper, and load times would be high if it all loaded from disc. |