SquareEnix explains why FFXIII is PS3 exclusive - DVD9 not enough

[mckmas8808]

All the doom and gloom about DVD9 is extremly too much. It's not THAT bad guys. Really.

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Surprising

That's ridiculous, the CGI videos are what tell a lot of the story and unless you want to play a FF without knowing the story, changing the disc every time there's a cut-scene would be impossibly tedious. And why play a FF game if you can't be bothered following the whole story? Might as well go play Tekken.

It is surprising for me to be seeing some people do not like new technology. I am very happy when technology is better because this has amazing new possibility for imagination and expressions but I feel some people like "antique" old technology more. What you say is correct about FF. It is a story game, not fighting game only.

 

[Sis]

It is surprising for me to be seeing some people do not like new technology. I am very happy when technology is better because this has amazing new possibility for imagination and expressions but I feel some people like "antique" old technology more. What you say is correct about FF. It is a story game, not fighting game only.

Question: Do you think it's possible to do X within the constraints of technology Y?
Person A: No way. You have to use new technology Z.
Person B: I think it may be possible, if not optimal.
Person A: Why do you hate new technology?

 

[AlNom]

Question: Do you think it's possible to do X within the constraints of technology Y?
Person A: No way. You have to use new technology Z.
Person B: I think it may be possible, if not optimal.
Person A: Why do you hate new technology?

Sounds not unlike an argument from a female friend of mine.

Anyhoo... way too early to really understand why they're saying this. My first impression is just to give an excuse as to why they released FFXI on X360, and now they're doing this other FF on a different platform, other than saying "X360 is doing poorly in Japan". The flow of the game itself is yet undertermined...

If it's CG movies taking up too much space, well... personally, I'd prefer in-engine cut-scenes just for immersiveness, especially in the year 2006 and this level of tech.

 

[Moonblade]

That's ridiculous, the CGI videos are what tell a lot of the story and unless you want to play a FF without knowing the story, changing the disc every time there's a cut-scene would be impossibly tedious. And why play a FF game if you can't be bothered following the whole story? Might as well go play Tekken.

Tedious? That depends on how developers organise the story and the use of their CGI. They could use CGI less frequently but more extended at the same time. You don't need CGI all the time to tell the story. Look at FFX or Xenosaga, most of the cutscenes are ingame.
Let's say you want to make a 60 hours japanese RPG for example.
You could make:
10' CGI intro
5' x 4 CGI for the in-game climax moments
10' CGI ending 1
10' (alternative) CGI ending 2

That's 40-50 minutes of FMV while gamers only have to skip discs every 10 hours on average. That's doable imo.

Btw skipping cutscenes can be useful
1. when you want to play the game for the second or third time just to unlock the sidequests
2. when you die and have to reload saved games over and over again. Most RPG's tend to have long cutscenes before boss fights (xenosaga comes to mind)
3. when the story is really boring and you're only interested in playing the game and finishing it as quickly as possible. Not every story is as good as the ones you get in Final Fantasy.

 

[Moonblade]

Question: Do you think it's possible to do X within the constraints of technology Y?
Person A: No way. You have to use new technology Z.
Person B: I think it may be possible, if not optimal.
Person A: Why do you hate new technology?

priceless

This reminds me of
Person A: I'm against the war in Iraq
Person B: Why do you hate America?

@ihamoitc2005: it's got nothing to do with 'loving' or 'hating' old technology but working around constraints like Sis already said. Discussing 'how I wished x360 had a HD DVD drive' is not going to solve anything.

 

[kyleb]

Tedious? That depends on how developers organise the story and the use of their CGI. They could use CGI less frequently but more extended at the same time. You don't need CGI all the time to tell the story. Look at FFX or Xenosaga, most of the cutscenes are ingame.
Let's say you want to make a 60 hours japanese RPG for example.
You could make:
10' CGI intro
5' x 4 CGI for the in-game climax moments
10' CGI ending 1
10' (alternative) CGI ending 2

That's 40-50 minutes of FMV while gamers only have to skip discs every 10 hours on average. That's doable imo.

It could be done of couse, but getting up to switch disks in the middle of a game just to watch a 5 minute cutsceen and then having to get back up again to swtich back to the game disk a few times over the course of the game is tedious.

 

[Moonblade]

It could be done of couse, but getting up to switch disks in the middle of a game just to watch a 5 minute cutsceen and then having to get back up again to swtich back to the game disk a few times over the course of the game is tedious.

I know, that's why I started talking about the 'skip movie' option. :smile:

 

[kyleb]

But seriously, if any game did that I'd most likely take the "skip game" option.

 

[Corwin_B]

Another possibility would be to copy large amount of files (the whole game world, maybe ?, as opposed to a small cache) to the hard drive if present as a kind of "best case scenario", leaving the disc swapping to users without hard drives.

 

[GB123]

I couldn't be bothered to read through the whole thread so i duno if anyone said this or not but, FF 10, FF 10-2 and FF12 have all used very llittle CGI cutscenes so I don't think this is the reason.

Don't be surprised if FFXIII: Haeresis is 360 exclusive.

 

[pakotlar]

I never said anything of the sort. Rather, I know that it is Impossible to say one way or another until the game is completed.


And I am saying that whatever they might wind up creating, it could end up being something that can't rightly be broken down onto DVDs.

"Maybes" don't make for realistic assesments. The truth is that some things will work nicer with the extra capacity, and in other cases DVD9 will not be the limiting factor. However, I think what Chef O is trying to say is that he doubts that Square would be incapable of working around the limitations.

Devs always have hardware constraints to work with, and in order to circumvent those issues they find creative solutions . Splitting a game onto multiple disc has been done in the past with good result, and while you may argue that Square simply thinks that there is no way that they could break up the game onto several discs, the truth is that they don't want to. If Sony had DVD9, my bet woud be that Square would still stay with them. Sony and Square are extremely close partners, and this partnership is probably the more likely reason that Square is developing their main IP's on PS3 and not on any other system.

I'm not arguing that Blu-Ray is worhtless, because it clearly has benefits. I also would rather play a game on 1 disc, but is not a case of "need" but "want" like ChefO mentioned. I played RE4, which was a fairly non-linear game (you revisited previous areas several times) was split over 2 discs that consumed only 3GB. I had to swap disc once in 25 hours of gameplay. It was not an issue. FFVII, as has already been mentioned, was a 3 disc game. Some earlier Resident Evils on PS1 were multiple disc. It is only until this last generation that we got used to single disc games.

If there was a recurrence of multiple-disc titles this generation, I don't think many would complain. As long as disc-swapping is kept to a minimum, it will not be very distracting in my opinion. Let's keep in mind the scale of limitation. Blu-Ray offers only ~2.5x the space that DVD9 provides. The last time we had a gap like this was Dreamcast vs PS2, (1.5GB vs. 4-9GB), and the space was not an issue. For instance, Shenmue had multiple discs, but was still a great game that became a fan favorite. Even devs working on the N64, which could hold only 64MB (if my memory holds), compared to PS1's 650MB's, found ways around the space limitation, although in that case space was such a constraint that non-critical aspects like FMV and even spoken dialogue were curtailed.

This is all just my opinion of course.

 

[Nesh]

I couldn't be bothered to read through the whole thread so i duno if anyone said this or not but, FF 10, FF 10-2 and FF12 have all used very llittle CGI cutscenes so I don't think this is the reason.

Don't be surprised if FFXIII: Haeresis is 360 exclusive.

Was that a sarcasm?

 

[Powderkeg]

"Maybes" don't make for realistic assesments. The truth is that some things will work nicer with the extra capacity, and in other cases DVD9 will not be the limiting factor. However, I think what Chef O is trying to say is that he doubts that Square would be incapable of working around the limitations.

That's the impression I get.

Basically ask yourself this.

If the PS3 did NOT support Bluray would that mean Square wouldn't be able to make the game at all?

 

[TrungGap]

....This is all just my opinion of course.

Very well put. BTW Shenmue (on the DreamCast) was an awesome game! The city felt large and unlimiting, while the game spanned multiple CD's.

 

[Bad_Boy]

Basically ask yourself this.

If the PS3 did NOT support Bluray would that mean Square wouldn't be able to make the game at all?

of course not. I think it would mean that Square Enix wouldnt be able to develop the game up to the potential they see possible on blu-ray. Meaning, maybe cutting back on specific features they are using blu-ray and the hdd for?

Of course no one here can answer that question for them, so we will just never know. It's a big IF. How about we just wait for the game and see what happens?(then again that would be an abitrary suggestion, its an everlasting argument lol)

 

[LunchBox]

I think the reason why Square-Enix is going that route is because they have the option for more storage. It's quite obvious that if both machines were using DVD as their format of choice, Square-Enix would have assessed to go a different route and use the DVD9 to fully use it's extent. But the case is... since they have another option to use more storage, they are saying that they are planning to use it. Although I do understand what some of people are saying, if it was the other way around, and the X360 used HD-DVD and the PS3 with DVD... and yet Square-Enix still went for the PS3 as an exclusive system for Final Fantasy, this would have been a different debate about exclusive liscensing clauses and contracts

 

[Nesh]

That's the impression I get.

Basically ask yourself this.

If the PS3 did NOT support Bluray would that mean Square wouldn't be able to make the game at all?

Ofcourse they were going to make it but they wouldnt have been very happy about it. Atleast thats how I see it.

 

[pakotlar]

Ofcourse they were going to make it but they wouldnt have been very happy about it. Atleast thats how I see it.

They seemed happy with the other FF's that spanned multiple disks. I don't think that this is such a finely cut sandwich. Could the space limitation be stifling to their vision? Maybe. But they will probably not come out and say, "Hey, yeah DVD9 is fine, Sony just wasted their time with Blu-Ray" because there are ramifications to their business for making that move.

I'm sure that the extra space is welcome, and I'm all for technology moving forward. This is not an issue about whether or not Blu-Ray could be a good thing for games, but whether or not it is necessary. History tells us that it isn't, but since technology and the conventions of game development change so quickly, history may not apply.

There are other issues to consider with Blu-Ray games. There are extra liscensing fees, disc cost, and extra dev kit cost, and all of these factors will play out in the final result. While a big developer like Square, which has close connections with Sony, may not feel the impact of the cost, I am sure that we will see a great deal of games that will be DVD and not Blu-Ray on PS3 because smaller developers will find their margins lacking.

The fact that there will be (and we have already seen the beginnings) a huge # off cross-platformers between Xbox360 and PS3 indicates that DVD9 will be the prevailing format this generation. The economies of scale are not there for Blu-Ray, and history has shown us that industry goes with the lowest common denominator.

I applaud Sony for trying to give their hardware an edge, as well as for pushing technology forward, but I feel that it was probably too early. It seems like the PS3 exists in light of Blu-Ray, and that's not where the focus should be. Technology for the sake of technology is what it looks like to me.

In the next generation I expect to see HD-DVD and Blu-Ray as the formats of choice for all 3 console makers. But in this transition period, costs are so high that the consumer ends up paying out the rear for what feels like an attempt by Sony to secure a new market. And $500-600 for an unproven format is not sitting well with a lot of people.

This is just a 5 am tangent and a bit OT. But I really feel that Square would make do with whatever standard the major player was using. The fact is that limitations always exist, and disc space is not the greatest constraint. I'm sure FB bandwidth (which is somewhat lacking on PS3) is a bigger constraint than the DVD disc format for instance. Or the lack of an HDD on the lower X360 SKU and the ramifications on streaming data. Tradeoffs will always have to be made.

The only games that will really benefit from the freedom from multiple-disc constraint are truly open-ended, "sandbox" type games. But as Rockstar is showing us with GTA4, DVD is here to stay for now. I just don't think the time was right for Sony and Blu-Ray. Industry seems to agree.

 

[Nesh]

they seemed happy because it was the biggest storage they could get their games on back then