Final Fantasy XII / FF12 revealed [!=56K]

[passerby]

...uses half the number of polygons with an increased focus on textures and lighting. Which is not to say they didn't beef up the polygon count where it mattered: to help in the new, improved animation system, Ashe's face has 1479 polygons and Vaan's has 1487... inclusion of a first-person look-around mode...

Comments from any dev regarding this? Like will in what aspects it may turn out to be better, worse, or "just a change of feel". Regarding the comment about 1st-person view, I assume that means certain locations are realtime-rendered instead of pre-rendered?

Which is why I was hoping that someone can provide feedback to this earlier post. But so far nope. But then, I feel that SE isn't exactly a graphics ace for this generation of consoles. Drag-on-Dragoon and SO3 look so-so, and so does the upcoming Front Mission 4.

 

[rabidrabbit]

IMO square has never been much of a graphics ace, apart from great art and FMV's.
Their game graphics engines had until FFX been just good looking 2d backgrounds, and from FFVII onwards 3D polygon characters and great 3d summon effects.
Not exactly stretching the consoles technically.

 

[maskrider]

For games from Square-Enix, Drag On Dragon is pretty good in terms of graphics.

 

[London Geezer]

I'm absolutely certain that Square's art united with Naughty Dog's technology would make the best game this generation. By far.
A hibrid between Square's RPG experience (not necesserely FF) and Naughty Dog's humour/fun factor/direction would absolutely rock... That is, keep the epic feel but swap the romantic/cheesy/cringe-making subplots with ND humour based epic elements...

 

[rabidrabbit]

I'm absolutely certain that Square's art united with Naughty Dog's technology would make the best game this generation. By far.
A hibrid between Square's RPG experience (not necesserely FF) and Naughty Dog's humour/fun factor/direction would absolutely rock... That is, keep the epic feel but swap the romantic/cheesy/cringe-making subplots with ND humour based epic elements...

A romantic-comedy rpg

An equivalent in movies for funny Naughty Dog + epic romantic FF/Square would be some 'romantic-comedy' film starring Jennifer Lopez and...hmmm...Jim Carrey?

Edit: Oh, I just read your suggestion for ND-SE rpg again, and noticed the imortant word 'swap', sorry.

 

[London Geezer]

An equivalent in movies for funny Naughty Dog + epic romantic FF/Square would be some 'romantic-comedy' film starring Jennifer Lopez and...hmmm...Jim Carrey?

Edit: Oh, I just read your suggestion for ND-SE rpg again, and noticed the imortant word 'swap', sorry.

Jlo+Jim Carey romantic comedy... that would be a SURVIVAL HORROR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[rabidrabbit]

An equivalent in movies for funny Naughty Dog + epic romantic FF/Square would be some 'romantic-comedy' film starring Jennifer Lopez and...hmmm...Jim Carrey?

Edit: Oh, I just read your suggestion for ND-SE rpg again, and noticed the imortant word 'swap', sorry.

Jlo+Jim Carey romantic comedy... that would be a SURVIVAL HORROR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[London Geezer]

hehehe i'm so funny.....

anyway, can u imagine a beautiful world like Jak2, the amount of detail in the game, with Square Art/RPG elements.... *droooooool*...

I think we might as well wait for ND to make a PRG, cause i don't see Square changing thir ways anytime soon, ND seem a lot more "open to new idea" than Square...

 

[rabidrabbit]

Hey, is there even any confirmation that FFXII would come for PS2?
What if it is coming for PSP?
Is PSP architecture (what little is known) more weighted towards more textures and less polygons?

 

[maskrider]

Hey, is there even any confirmation that FFXII would come for PS2?
What if it is coming for PSP?
Is PSP architecture (what little is known) more weighted towards more textures and less polygons?

But I've read somewhere that the development is already 70% completed, which will imply it should be PS2.

 

[passerby]

On the topic of romance/comedy, I'm still waiting for someone to do something along the lines of Rumiko Takahashi's work. Although she specializes in romance/comedy, I actually find FF's romance attempts to be very adolescent compared to her work. (Actually her portrayal of romance can be quite mature/realistic - just that she does romantic comedies.)

On the topic of visuals, limiting to RPGs I think Level-7 currently holds the graphics crown for their work on Dark Chronicles. Of course, they are now working on the next Dragon Quest. Media Vision bears some watching as well - their work on Wild Arms: Alter Code F looks quite impressive.

However all these follow the anime graphical style. For "realistic" style, FF is still ahead of everyone(unless I missed something). Not very reassuring for a dev where "D-Dragoon" is already considered to be pretty good standard. Wonder how Xenosaga2 is shaping up.

Or maybe SE can surprise me the way Banpreto did. Super Robot Taisen Alpha 2 is a 2D, low-resolution game where you can actually spot individual pixels if you tried. But it's also one of the most beautiful games I've seen. They did it with incredible art and unbelievably cool-looking animation and attacks.

 

[London Geezer]

Hey, is there even any confirmation that FFXII would come for PS2?
What if it is coming for PSP?
Is PSP architecture (what little is known) more weighted towards more textures and less polygons?

But I've read somewhere that the development is already 70% completed, which will imply it should be PS2.

Storage space could be a problem for a full-blown FF game on PSP....
Again, the main issue PS2 has with textures is the amount of memory available. And PSP wont have more memory than PS2, so i guess that means, even less space for textures, as well as smaller UMD format to put those textures on compared to DVD...

 

[Phil]

Not saying that I think a PSP version is likely, but simply on the texture issue, it needs to be said that PSP has a smaller resolution which could already reduce the memory for textures greatly. Taking latest algorithems to compress movies and you might be able to reduce the size again (or just go with real time sequences from the beginning).

EDIT: london-boy: sorry, wrong emoticon. A bit stressed out at work.

 

[London Geezer]

Not saying that I think a PSP version is likely, but simply on the texture issue, it needs to be said that PSP has a smaller resolution which could already reduce the memory for textures greatly. Taking latest algorithems to compress movies and you might be able to reduce the size again (or just go with real time sequences from the beginning).

Why the rolleys? I was just saying they might be tight on space, thats all... jeeez..

 

[rabidrabbit]

"70% less polygons than FFX engine, consentrating instead of textures and lighting"
That would suit a small screen like PSP's better than if it used a lot of polygons, which would be even hard, if not impossible to see on 4" screen.
Textures and good lighting on the other hand would make the game look as good or even better on small screen.

Edit: The official FF12 page does say it is for PS2, so it is more or less confirmed then.

 

[ShinHoshi]

It's curious all this polygon thing...What's the problem ?
All the polygon data is stored on the main RAM. Then it is processed through VU 1 and you construct the framebuffers on VRAM...But you don't use the 4MB VRAM to store polygon data. So the space on VRAM for textures is the same using tons of polygons or not.
Are they us saying that the problem of bad textures is a limit of main RAM ???

I don't understand it.


About the thing I hinted before about LOD in FFX. It's curious how Square did this on PAL zones. The left the game @ 50Hz and with huge black borders but they changed many things in the game, dissabled support for HD, did all the translation and made modifications to the graphic engine. FFX uses 3 kind of models which have more or less geometry. In the PAL zone only 2 models are used (the two best ones). Curious...

 

[London Geezer]

It's curious all this polygon thing...What's the problem ?
All the polygon data is stored on the main RAM. Then it is processed through VU 1 and you construct the framebuffers on VRAM...But you don't use the 4MB VRAM to store polygon data. So the space on VRAM for textures is the same using tons of polygons or not.
Are they us saying that the problem of bad textures is a limit of main RAM ???

I don't understand it.


About the thing I hinted before about LOD in FFX. It's curious how Square did this on PAL zones. The left the game @ 50Hz and with huge black borders but they changed many things in the game, dissabled support for HD, did all the translation and made modifications to the graphic engine. FFX uses 3 kind of models which have more or less geometry. In the PAL zone only 2 models are used (the two best ones). Curious...

HD support was never there

But yeah, Square is slacking this generation, especially (as usual) on the PAL conversions.

 

[ShinHoshi]

It was on the japanese version (the International)...The one in which is based the PAL one...You can check it on SCEI official game listing.

 

[maskrider]

It was on the japanese version (the International)...The one in which is based the PAL one...You can check it on SCEI official game listing.

I think you mean HDD support for installation on hard disk.

 

[ShinHoshi]

I see...I expressed myself bad. By HD you understood High Definition... Yes, I wanted to mean HDD.