Final Fantasy VII Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi has offered an explanation for why the physical disc version of the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox requires a download to play.
Same but only because I rebought a used copy years later, played it up to disk 3, only to find that disk 3 had a tear in the label and couldn’t be read at all. 😩
They could probably reasonably just ship half-resolution textures on disc and make higher-res textures be a downloadable option. Bethesda did that with their games, later on added free, downloadable higher-res textures. Shouldn’t require a lot of technical work. Maybe reducing texture resolution could trip some existing bug, a race condition somewhere, but it should be pretty mechanical, as changes go.
I don’t really have a dog in this race—I wouldn’t get the game either way. So I’m not pushing for that as an option. Just saying that I think that it’s an option from a technical standpoint, if one wanted to provide a compact, on-disc version of the game.
Space available on a bluray disk: 50GB max for a dual layer disk.
Game’s total size: 210GB.
The only other choice was to do what they used to do back in the day: Put it on 5 disks.
PS5 discs can store up to 100 GB.
3 then.
Just thinking about final fantasy 7, needing 3 discs, turns my stomach.
/S
Same but only because I rebought a used copy years later, played it up to disk 3, only to find that disk 3 had a tear in the label and couldn’t be read at all. 😩
So there indeed was a perfectly good other choice.
A normal part of game optimization is making sure that it doesn’t take up all the storage space on every device.
What exam is in that game that justifies those file sizes?
I would guess that most of that is textures.
They could probably reasonably just ship half-resolution textures on disc and make higher-res textures be a downloadable option. Bethesda did that with their games, later on added free, downloadable higher-res textures. Shouldn’t require a lot of technical work. Maybe reducing texture resolution could trip some existing bug, a race condition somewhere, but it should be pretty mechanical, as changes go.
I don’t really have a dog in this race—I wouldn’t get the game either way. So I’m not pushing for that as an option. Just saying that I think that it’s an option from a technical standpoint, if one wanted to provide a compact, on-disc version of the game.
Wonder if these 210gb are worth 210h of normal playtime. If the game is 20h long, all these textures and gigs are worthless.