The Final Fantasy XIII XB360 announcement discussion* (spawned)

How would the DVD data read capacity of 11 Mbps affect the porting of the 1080p prerendered movies on the PS3 version to the 360?

BD reads at maximum 54 Mbps (audio and video). I doubt the prendered movies in FF13 has that high bitrate though but what about 20-25 Mbps for video?

 

It's CGI, not film. I'm sure they'll be able to make it look plenty great with the 11Mbps they have to work with. And if not, I guess they'll just down-res it/further compress it for the 360 version. I'm sure 360 owners will be able to deal.

Can we *please* leave the DVD/BD talk alone? I feel I was fairly clear on this.

 

Sorry for stepping on anyones toes here but the prerendered movie squences has been a major part of the latest FF games. We're not talking about Simpsons/Family Guy quality either. Look at Pixars Cars BD version and the DVD version.

 

Point taken, but I don't think the premise of this thread encompasses bitrate limitations between the formats. Frankly it's further mooted because we're not talking about a 360 drive that's limited to the ~10Mbps of a standard DVD; the drive is a 12x drive, and thus transfer rates will not be an issue here.

Capacity is the issue between the two formats. For this, it will be on multiple discs.

 

According to SE work on the 360 version won't begin until after the PS3 version is complete. So unless they were consciously making concessions all along in anticipation of a 360 port, I wouldn't worry so much about the PS3 FFXIII being hampered.

 

True enough. It will be interesting to see how a multi-disc version of it actually works out, though. In the PSX era Square made design decisions based around the assumption of disc breaks. If FFXIII was designed around the assumption that this wouldn't be a concern it may be very difficult to go back and reengineer the data to accommodate spanning multiple DVDs. And it's not simply a matter of dividing the total data by 7GBs. There's a significant amount of data which will need to be duplicated on each disc. If the PS3 version's common data set already pushes against the DVD limit it leaves very little room per disc for unique audio, video, levels, animation, etc. FFXII, for example, doesn't really cut you off from any area throughout the game. In fact, revisiting areas is an important part of the hunting mechanic. Obviously Square designed the game to be less linear than the PSX Final Fantasies, knowing the DVD gave them the storage they needed. This issue is the reason that claims that Blu-ray has no benefit to games is simply false. Obviously you can make multidisc games just like was common in the before times, in the long long ago, but it's a limitation that you have to design around. Obviously Blu-ray has it's own limitations with regard to read speed and you have to design around that as well. But if you design your game around a larger, slower storage medium the task of translating that experience to a smaller, faster medium is non-trivial and will almost certainly require sacrifices.

 

It'd hurt to much to wait and actually atleast some preview builds before discussig how the development for each console will work out? We can speculate all sorts of wild theories and argue about them endlessly but in reality, it's a wait and see game. Also, I expect MS to send their top people over for help as needed along with the latest tools and tricks.

 

Do you have some source?

And Does some people here played the baldur gate series (I&II + extension).
It was release on four CD, the game was not linear, but disc sweeping did happen that often mostly because when you were living an area, you were doing it on purpose (meaning you had seriousjob elsewhere).
Or some place were not available for some time.

No matter the game is completely linear or not, all these issues are overblown (and to some extends trollish... or stealth trollish), FFXIII won't be oblivion.
It's likely that the storyline (completely linear or not) will directive enough to allow easy disk management.

For the FMV, I guess SE could go with sub HD resolution, the scaler is good enough.
And IMO lower quality FMV would better than 4 disks.
In my opinion SE shouldn't execede 3 disks.

 

My source is having played every final fantasy game (save 11). From pretty early on in 12 you can start exploring areas even before they are relevant to the story. And you continue to go back to all the areas to hunt monsters. This is a significant difference from the PSX era games 7, 8 and 9 where you often go through a dungeon you'll never see again. The whole series has a history of restricting player movement through various means (necessarily so). In the NES and SNES games you could only get so far on foot, and then only so far on boat, and some places you'd need a raft or hovercraft to reach, then you'd need an airship to get to more and eventually you might get a space ship. It's all very clever, but it's designed to channel the player from one plot point to the next. On the PSX that changed some. Your access to the world at large continued to be tightly controlled, and structured to accommodate the limitations of the disc being used for storage. Generally there were points of no return which made the duplication of data for certain areas unnecessary. FFXII breaks from that formula most strongly and it's not hard to imagine that design philosophy continued into 13. That said, 13 is the product of a different team from 12 and there's a certain amount of design inertia that may inform the choices made in the latest game. For all I know it is very linear and follows the established structural tropes of earlier as a thematic choice more than anything else.

And I do remember Baldur's Gate. It came on 5 discs and it was a fucking pain in the ass to swap back and forth. If you accidentally clicked the wrong zone you'd have to swap, wait for a long load to complete, click back out, swap back and wait for another long load. It was a great relief once I had a big enough hard drive to copy all the discs into the install folder and edit the config file to point to the hard drive instead of the CD-ROM.

 

I agree "that accidental clicking" was boring like losing quiet some time.

But you get the idea, you can put a lot inside a dvd, an erea huge enough to fake some freedom.
The real question is how big the world will be .
There will be a shitload of FMV but say if the real world/game fit on say 1.5 dvd without the FMV (which would be pretty huge) they will have ways to arrange data accordingly to the storyline to make the issue (swapping disks) minimal.

 

Hrmm... I'm struggling to think of any parts in FF7 could you not go back to on the third disc. Certainly nothing to make your statement of "often" correct.

 

Wise words that I agree with.

 

Take exemple from Lost Odyssey, the 4th DVD let you able to regoes in atleast 80% of the areas you travel in the adventure, so Multi-Disk for a JRPG is not a problem and is already exist for a long time.

 

SE must of looked at the ramification of porting to the 360 way before they announced it at E3. There is something there thats makes them feel confident enough to finish the PS3 ver first then port to the 360 and have the 360 port make the NA and PAL launch.

Why would anyone really expect or think possible that SE would be willing to expose their main franchise to alot of negativity by haphazardly putting together a 360 port that requires constantly swapping disc for cutscenes and area changes?

 

Wishful thinking, or denial, or months and months of arguing it wasn't possible only to be proven wrong, and now clutching at straws..?

Obviously if they're doing the port, DVD is not a substantial limitation for the game, so this discussion is a little silly to say the least.

 

Thread closed. There's nothing to be gained through further back and forth arguments of an announcement.