I'm so psyched for it.. I pre-ordered in like… March. And now it's only 20 days away.
So right now I'm doing some hardcore coding for S4D until they show 45 minutes of never before
seen publicized gameplay at 1:05 EST on Spike (which I only get black and white video of, no audio :P). The way this hardcore coding works is I have a list of tasks that totally need to be done. And I have a timer that is just begging to beep annoyingly at me. So I give myself 30 minutes to run through each task as quick as possible.
I mean, I can still iterate from there, but so far my initial arbitrary magic numbers have been working out great! I've got… 1 task done! And now I'm posting here probably to procrastinate in a situation where I've already tried to keep out procrastination :)
DVDs are certainly much slower than a decent HDD, it's far closer to viable to quickly swap out high-resolution textures for different ones as you move about if it's installed on a HDD. Personally I prefer the longer loading times in games that are trying to be immersive, nothing slaps you in the face with "This is a game" like slow texture streaming.
But with such little memory in the first place I'm surprised that it even makes a difference. Imagine running BF3 on PC with 256mb of RAM and 256mb of VRAM. (pretend other processes magically aren't using RAM)
Obviously that does put a hard cap on how high resolution you can go, but it still doesn't stop you from only loading high resolution textures for very nearby objects (And at, at best, 720p, who's going to notice muddy textures a dozen meters away), so long as you can get the throughput to keep streaming them off your storage. You can do that much faster from a HDD.