Final Fantasy XIII Demo is Enormous

[Bourne Endeavor]

Well provided the PS3 version is not scaled down, Square has just given me enough reason to buy a PS3. I should congratulate them.

Not a very good reason, now is it?

Why is that? I intended to purchase a PS3 eventually once it had more of the games I liked, now it will. Although I will avoid that 'upgraded' model that does not play PS2 games. And Sony wonders why people are not rushing to buy their console...

 

[Ziadaine_v1legacy]

I will donate to a fund if The Escapist will force Yahtzee to play this game

He might be based in Australia, but we're in the US, and the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

Nothing said anything about us aussies finding him and forcing him.

 

[Vlane]

um, isn't the 360 still HD-DVD capable? i dimly remember that being one of the selling points before that format lost the war.

Honestly I wouldn't mind having 2 or 3 discs. Have you damn kiddies forgot the age of ps2 when a good JRPG would come in this huge doorstop size jewelcase and have sockets for FOUR discs?

think you mean PS1

somewhere in teh cinema heavy Xenosaga on the ps2 one or 2 or all 3 of those damn games had 4 disks, i'd go count then but i'm to tired.

Xenosaga 2 (which I own) has 3 discs but one of them is just cutscenes from the first game so you understand what happened there since it wasn't released in europe (where I live).

 

[nova18]

Good grief, why the heck are video file sizes so much larger on video game cinematics? That just seems crazy to me.(compared to regular HD full length movies.)

* 12 hours into cutscene one* "Half way there!"

I think SquareEnix and Konami are trying to outdo each other in the cutscene stakes.
They should just release 13 as a movie that requires you to press a button ever 30 minutes to keep you occupied.

God I hope thats not what Im going to end up paying for, I still like having some GAME to play in my GAMES.

 

[Sparkly-elf]

When the hell is it coming out anyway? Hell, if the game is that big I can only imagine how HUGE the fucking walkthrough is going to be

 

[Jman1236]

More reason that I'm getting the PS3 version, it'll be on one Blu-Ray disc instead of several DVDs.

 

[guardian001]

4GB of video for a demo seems a little... excessive. I feel sorry for people who want this for xbox, they're gonna need to change discs three times to get through a cutscene.

 

[Eolirin]

If you were to "record" it the way you're suggesting, you'll lose significant picture quality. Also, it is a video file. And it is scripted to play at a certain point within the demo.

The movies are not being rendered by the game's engine or anything like that, they're pre-rendered videos. The point is that you still have all of that information on screen, and it's a lot of data to process. The program that creates the videos is where they would export from, and that original video file would be massive. They could compress that video, but then they would lose the video quality. (Even with a lossless compressor, the size is still huge.)

HD footage typically works out to be about 1 minute of HD video = 1 GB of data. And that's talking about a handheld, home video camera. If you create CG images, with tons of special effects, and export out as HD video, you're file sizes are going to be massive.

Point being, they clearly did all the compressing they could to the videos, and that's about as small as they're going to get without sacrificing video quality.

Also, most movies these days still shoot on film. So an HD-DVD video was not actually shot on HD footage necessarily. It was just converted to HD for the DVD version.

It's starting to become more popular, but it's still quite recent. Michael Mann is one of the folks who have started shooting HD Hollywood status films. i.e. "Collateral" and "Miami Vice".

But... that's not true. At all. The size of uncompressed video is a factor of length and resolution, not of what's actually in the image. A pixel is a pixel is a pixel; they take up exactly the same amount of space regardless of what's in them. A completely black frame is exactly the same size as one that has several million colors. So special effects have zero impact on the size of that data. And compression algorithms aren't particularly partial to them either: depending on the method being used a particular frame will be better or worse compressed based on how many parts of it are well suited to the algorithm. The "quality" of the visuals isn't particularly relevant, only the suitability for the compression technique; lots of special effects could theoretically improve the compression rate for a given algorithm, depending on their nature.

A good lossy codec (such that it's visually difficult to tell the difference on most displays) can compress a 720p 2 hour movie down to about 2-3 gigs. While loseless is a bit bigger, it shouldn't surpass 8 gigs. Unless the video is 1080p and very long, those numbers are absolutely ridiculous. But a good lossy codec is a barely noticeable quality hit but a huge space saving, and since the difference between 720p and 1080p is only noticeable if you 1. have a 1080p capable screen and 2. you're sitting at distances closer than twice the screen width away (roughly 8 feet on a 2000 dollar 50" display), so the 360 verison won't be significantly hurt by having the videos compressed better or reduced to 720p. *Just* dropping to 720p would cut the uncompressed size in half with minimal noticable loss of quality in most cases (compressed size reduction could be a smaller gain, depending on how well it's compressed. Under the best case scenario for the compression algorithm you get the same file size, but the best case scenario is the entire screen being a single color ).

But those numbers are big enough to concern me in terms of what they mean for FMV use. Texture and sound data also take up a lot of space, so unless this comes on multiple blu-ray discs, if those video files are representative of the final game it's going to have very little room for gameplay assets if they use a typical (for an FF game anyway) number of FMVs.

 

[the_tramp]

To be quite honest I would prefer to have a 5-6 disk long game for the xbox rather than a diminished version. Come on, Final Fantasy is all about the disk switching, I felt a little bit of me die when I realised that FFX was only on one disk.

 

[Kyp]

actually looking forward to this and FF XIII versus. i don't think it should be on 360 though, just doesn't feel right having an FF game on it. also like the guy above me has stated, it better be worth the delay just because your greedy microsoft.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy it's coming out on the 360, now that means if I want to play all the Final Fantasy main series games, all I have to do is buy a PS2 rather than a PS3, because, honestly, I don't think there are any good playstation-specific games, whereas the console-specific games I want to play are Halo, Mass Effect, and Fable.

Plus, I love have random hardware errors

 

[Disembodied_Dave]

Hopefully we'll see this get translated quickly and then done by Graham and Paul. Hey Unskippable only uses the openings, so a demo should be fine.

Yeah, but opening cutscenes in final fantasy are rather....lengthy. I don't know about any of you, but after 3 hours of Unskippable I might be unable to turn off the little narrating voices in my head ever again.

You can find the intro on Youtube. It's actually only about 4~6 minutes long and Highly Riffable. *glee*

 

[timmytom1]

Good grief, why the heck are video file sizes so much larger on video game cinematics? That just seems crazy to me.(compared to regular HD full length movies.)

I do beleive i accidentally reported your comment i now feel like a complete `tard still i guess that what happens when you`re not paying attention
on topic i suspect that of the 5.9 GB 5.89 GB will just be a variety of impressivly over dramatic cutscenes.

 

[Disembodied_Dave]

Hopefully we'll see this get translated quickly and then done by Graham and Paul. Hey Unskippable only uses the openings, so a demo should be fine.

Yeah, but opening cutscenes in final fantasy are rather....lengthy. I don't know about any of you, but after 3 hours of Unskippable I might be unable to turn off the little narrating voices in my head ever again.

You can find the intro on Youtube. It's actually only about 4~6 minutes long and Highly Riffable. *glee*

If they actually ever do riff this game, I might have to skip Unskippable (c wut i did thar?) because I'm trying to stay pure. I've had every final fantasy spoiled for me beforehand so I'm hoping that I can actually play this one and see what it's like not knowing what is going to happen.

Hrmm I don't really see how the intro spoils the game anymore then a screenshot or trailer would, but that's fine. Actually, come to think of it, I did something like that with Digital Devil Saga. So I do understand.

 

[JenXXXJen]

It's just uncompressed. I don't really see why they'd bother to compress it seeing as they have another 45 gigs of space left, it'd just be a waste of time.