Final Fantasy XIII: How Will It Work on 360? Comments by Richard Leadbetter

New to EG: Extreme nitpicking!

That was a very interesting article - nice to know there's a place for this on the 'net amongst all the clueless fanboy fighting :)

wow..at first i was like 'hmmmf, might be interesting to read'

then after the first few lines of mumbo jumbo i realised i don't give a fuck about tech issues....and i never liked FF either....O_0

HERETIC

Interesting article well written and it avoided baiting fanboys

Quite, that is the purpose of this section.

The problem is the "carefully managed" bit.

If the storytelling is being planned without compromise, with the assumption the end-result is going to be streamed, then there's a lot of work involved in converting it to a real-time playable format. Which most likely means it won't be done that way.

@Eraysor
The title article pretty obviously was going to be about technical issues, and PS3/X360 Comparrisons. Seeing as there is so little difference between cross-platform games, and all other "comparrison" articles have to go to pretty minute detail to find differences, what were you expecting?

@DutchDemons
So you read an article clearly about technical issues in a Final Fantasy game despite not being interested in either? I think that reflects more on you than on the level of interest the article contains.


About the article itself, when did it become such an issue for a game to be across multiple discs? I've never really cared, since FF7. Obviously all on one is slightly less hassle, but in a way i kind of like/d multi-disc games, made them feel a bit more epic.

Square have already released quite a few 360 games, so they must know what they're doing or going to do.

Realistically we expect the 360 version to match the 720p and 2x multisampling anti-aliasing of the PS3 game, but at a cost – the HDR lighting in the PS3 game will most likely be pared down from high range to medium range dynamic rendering.

360, surely

Best read on EG for a long long time..

Devil is in the detail!

agree with with last poster, most interesting read in a good while

well, according to the article, the 360 seems to use MDR rather than HDR on the whole. So him saying the PS3's HDR will be paired down to MDR reads true. Of course it is speculation until the thing is built!

It's ambiguous at best. I don't think they'd drop HDR on the PS3 just because the 360 can't do it, which is how I'd originally read it.

I can read it both ways.

Wittynic, it was what I was expecting, hence why I said it. When you have to go to such extreme levels to see differences, as you say so yourself, is there really any point? Especially considering that the general conclusion of the article is that both consoles will cope fine. It's not like the PS3 and 360 specifications are from different console generations.

Can't say I've been much of a FF fan since FF VII. The others were somewhat lacking in anything new and sadly 13 looks to be just better graphics with no real advances in either combat or general gameplay. A realtime combat system is long overdue!

FFS the game isn't even out yet and here is EG, picking apart a fucking demo.

Oh how I wish the PS3 had "lightning fast eDRAM".

yeah, I see where you're coming from now.

"Wittynic, it was what I was expecting, hence why I said it. When you have to go to such extreme levels to see differences, as you say so yourself, is there really any point? Especially considering that the general conclusion of the article is that both consoles will cope fine. It's not like the PS3 and 360 specifications are from different console generations."

Indeed, everyone but Sony and their fanboys seem to know this.

I still maintain that these op-ed articles (following on of course from the notorious face-offs) are little more than the guesswork you can find in forums and other sites across on the net, though admittedly there's somewhat more education and reason going on here. The Digital Foundry system (which as an ongoing concern must surely be wholly owned by Eurogamer by now? =)) can only analyse the symptoms, not the cause.

Anyway, on the topic of 'engine-replacement scenes', its a practice thats been employed for a long time, and not just in this generation. Primarily it allows the developer much greater freedom to switch scenes back and forth, or to include greater detail or object diversity in a scene that could otherwise be achieved without clearing out the ingame assets and loading a set of new ones (in the case of a cut-scene involving more than one 'set', sometimes multiple times). Uncharted, as a recent example, employed this technique very effectively to insert transitions between areas, often hiding the actual loading of the new level's assets behind the cut-scene being played. Final Fantasy as a series is notorious for leaving the player looking at a blank screen while the narrative bounces between various different scenes and locations. This will go along way to preventing this and maintaining the player's level of immersion.

I was very interested reading this article, being a huge fan of FF and owning a 360 (but not a PS3). In reply to lord's comment:

Realistically we expect the 360 version to match the 720p and 2x multisampling anti-aliasing of the PS3 game, but at a cost – the HDR lighting in the PS3 game will most likely be pared down from high range to medium range dynamic rendering.

360, surely

I was confused when I got to this part, too. After doing a brief double take, I realised what the author meant, but it was a little ambiguous to me in the beginning. Enjoyed the article, though. I'm very curious to see how they are going to deal with the 360's lack of blu-ray.

@penhalion
Why is it long overdue? Should every game be, say, a first-person shooter?

How Will It Work on 360?Magic...anything else is a speculation...
Title should be changed to speculative analysis..

Besides this is a really really old demo.

I'm speechless

Damn cant wait to play this game next year!

"Final Fantasy XIII: How Will It Work on 360?"

Redbull influenced Hamster+Wheel?

so... a game that you haven't seen is going to be better than the game that you haven't seen finished.. so judging from that do you do junior voodoo.

Does anyone else read these articles even though they haven't got a clue what's being said half the time and somehow still enjoy them?

Or is that just me? No? No? Just me then.

Interesting feature, I didn't know the Xbox 360 struggled with HDR lighting but I did know that the one game that supposedly has the best lighting, Halo 3, runs at an ugly sub-720p with zero anti-aliasing, which IMO almost totally negates the impressive lighting effects anyway. Why? Because the game at times looks like an upscaled Xbox game when the lighting effects aren't apparent, such as indoors, that's why. I think Halo 3 is one of the fugliest games I've seen this generation, which was very disappointing considering that the earlier games were ground-breaking visually on the original Xbox.

As for Final Fantasy XIII, sounds like the game will be pretty much identical on both platforms, the key difference being that one will come on more than a single disc. Personally, I'll opt for the PS3 version for that reason alone and since the game is unlikely to run natively at 1080p anyway, those 1080p video sequences are going to look that bit nicer than anything the 360 can render real-time at 720p, right?

Who cares what Digital Foundry & Eurogamer have to say these days? Boring article, discussing small differences that noone will be able to see in the final product is senseless. At the end of the day it's all about the gameplay and its quality. These articles are pointless.

So on the PS3 article for Uncharted we have a PS3 fanboy trying to reassure himself, whilst on the article as to whether FFXIII will work on the Xbox we have an Xbox fanboy trying to reassure himself.

... O WAIT... it's the same person. Duh.

If you find this kind of thing dull then this article probably isn't for you. Not everything is.

As expected, the PS3 version of a multiformat game will be the worse looking version, nothing new or unexpected there.

Good read, i confess to not knowing 100% of what Ricardo's on about but still t'was enjoyable.

EDIT: schnide, guess this answers your question....

Yeah, pointless articles focusing on pointless details nobody cares about. They should cancel them. In fact, why do we even have sports competitions, for instance? It's only a matter of (milli)seconds/inches between the first place and the last in so many of 'em, right?! So why bother? Let's just give every competitor a medal and be done with it!

ffs

Um... could you freeze the video when you want to highlight something next time? I didn't have time to read half of the tiny captions.

@farticusmaximus

"As expected, the PS3 version of a multiformat game will be the worse looking version, nothing new or unexpected there."

Did you even read the article??? Where did you get this conclusion from?!

I can't believe people still read these articles when it will obviously annoy them (no idea why it annoys them in the first place). Do yourself and everybody else a favour and just don't get involved.

Another example of wishful thinking by Eurogamer ....oh if only S-E did let you handle the conversion decisions this must be a nightmare for you!.Fact is ,the demo was only 50% complete ,the game will use a 50Gb Blu Ray ,probably will make use of the serial HDD to cache some 4-5Gb of data etc etc

Besides ,I have been seeing FMV videos in FF since FFVII and most of those couldnt be done right now real time anyway ....good luck showing the crippling of MIdgard ,the fall of Alexandria etc with ingame engines.Now with FFXIII it will be the same ,there will be some epic FMV here and there with a scope that cant be done on the ingame engine.Oh never mind ,the Xbox fan (he will get an orgasm next time he says lightning fast Edram!) has seen 30 minutes of demo early in the game so he must know better right ?

There's no chance they'll get rid of pre rendered shit on 360. They really do look quite a bit better than normal graphics, so they 360 game would look noticeably worse in some areas.

The guy who has played past Final Fantasies and posts on an internet forum must know better than a proffesional videogame journalist with more than 10 years experience, right?

Yeah, I give you that PS3 is the better video player. The better option would be to play the game on a 360 and watch the cut-scenes on a PS3.

As said many times, just becuase a PS3 version of a game needs 50Gb doesn't mean the 360 version will need 50GB. It all comes down to compression, PS3= loads of room why bother compressing anything?, 360= not as much room so compress everything. I don't think the 360 version will make it to 1 disc, but I can't imagine it being more than 3 and may just make it onto 2.

As for demo size, I have seen many demos which are big files (over half the game) yet don't equate to half the game.

As for the PS3 using pre-encoded 1080p video, I do doubt this will make it to the 360 but I am sure the game engine at 720p will do a good job, if there is a few scenes which really do push it further the 360 could still use pre-renders for those.

Basically only time will tell, but this does really fit with what I orginally thought, the PS3 version may have a slight edge, but is that enough to spend £300.00 for a PS3... I don't think so.

Saying that I am hoping for a PC version so I can have 1080p at all times.

To be honest, given the news that S-E are including the Japanese vocal track on the Blu-ray, I'm not convinced they've struggled to fit the game itself into the space available. As mentioned above, perhaps the full-HD FMV will see a quality reduction but I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't that many other differences.

@marmaduke

Pause button?

Looks awesome - very ffVII

I don't mind the odd FMV once it's plays smoothly.
I still play the earlier FF on the DS and PSP, these minute graphical differences between the consoles won't make much of a difference if the gameplay and story is good.

I'm just happy they have returned to a more turn based format.
I wished they had an option to increase the difficulty the last few FF games weren't much of a challenge.

I'm curious to see how the 360 version will look. Not many games are ported from the PS3 to the 360.
Will be interesting to see if they give it a go or rush out a piece of crap.

looks insanely good to me, especially char faces

"Our guess? Such scenes will indeed be real-time on Xbox 360, saving gigabytes of data over the PS3 version with only minimal amounts of difference in the quality of the visuals." I really really doubt this would happen.