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Multiplatform FFXIII Not as Good as it Could Have Been?
03/09/2009 Written by Michael Gruver
The screenshot on the left is from when FFXIII was a PS3 exclusive. The pic on the right is its current multiplatform state. Will PlayStation 3 users be getting a lower quality version of FFXIII due to Square Enix’s greedy ways?
Is this the fault of the Xbox 360? What are your thoughts?
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20 Responses to “Multiplatform FFXIII Not as Good as it Could Have Been?”
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My analysis, a Famitsu screenshot is better than a screenshot taken from VLC
Looks like a contrast issue more then anything. If I could see a drop in quality in the textures, then yeah.
It would not harm the PS3 version but the 360 version may be inferior. I don’t see how the quality could go DOWN on the original if you do a port. That would be like re encoding a Blu Ray into SD and then the BLU ray disk’s quality goes down. Makes no sense.
Also someone’s playing an MP4 in VLC so we don’t know about any of the settings or anything. I really wouldn’t look into this too much..
Besides Final Fantasy XIII Versus is what I want.
SE also doesnt have the best reputation of showing what the actual game is going to look like before it comes out. It would be amazing if it looked like the one on the left, but with SE’s history so far I would’ve believed it looked like the shot on the right anyway. I can’t wait for April 16th though when the demo comes out, I’ll see first hand.
I can’t completely agree with this right now without further information. Yes the left picture does look MUCH better, however… did SE pull a GG and use a ‘target’ pre-render and have finally moved on to using the actual engine itself? Until I hear from SE on this I can’t really pass judgement.
yes
Versus>
I am not sure how it can lose quality if they are simply porting it over to the xbox360. In reality the xbox version should be the only version with lower quality. I guess we will have to wait and see some more evidence before we start judging. I am still not that upset about the whole thing. Who cares if more people get to play the game now. If it had been an xbox exclusive that came over to the PS3 everyone would be jumping up and down with joy. Who cares. You should be happy that it is coming out and you get to play it at all.
Sorry, I got a little carried away there. =)
I guess we will just have to wait and see.
i hope this gets a lot of attention so that people realize how much more the ps3 can do……it probably wont though
That has been my thought from the beginning.
That due to a multiplatform divide of their resources that the PS3 version will have to be dumbed down to fit on all 15 DVD9′s to fit on 360.
I hope Square Enix loses billions in doing this. They should have kept it exclusive to the ps3 cuz we all know the ps3 has way more power when it comes to gaming than the xbox does. And PS3 blu ray discs are 50 gigs, c’mon its a no brainer. Take that to your advantage and fill it to the max, but instead we have to use 8.5 gig regular dvd discs cuz of microsoft. This is bullshit and again I hope square enix fails big time.
But judging from the pictures above the new one looks bad…poor lighting and very blocky compared to before, but who the hell knows….
SE will lose money and i hope they do. I mean they got greedy and took Star Ocean to 360 only and it sold 170k in one week, not even close to what yakuza did on the ps3 in 1 day. Now think if they would have taken Star Ocean to the PS3 or to both? Hell look at WKC, an unproven franchise did more in a 3 day time than Star Ocean ( a proven franchise and LOVED franchise) did in a week.
oh well, screw XIII, Versus is the only FF game i am really looking forward to right now.
I hope SE will realize that they’ve made a mistake.
I’m getting the Versus only.
they were basically done with the PS3 version before the announcement (hence) why the game gets delayed..(for the 360 port). i wouldn’t read into those pictures to much because they are working on the 360 version last. The best example is like building a racing car and than making another one thats street friendly.
you can only lose from a better port to an inferior one. Unless squareenix actually was making FF13 for both at the exact same time.
im just gettin versus
I think its obvious that the overall quality is lowered now, it would have been the same if it was a Xbox 360 exclusive first. Exclusive games can always do that extra thing because they don’t have to consider the other console. I was very VERY disappointed when I found out that Microsoft was spending his unlimited dollars again, since I was instantly aware that 1. we will have to wait longer and 2. the game isn’t going to be like it was going to be
I highly doubt that the 360 would lower the quality of the PS3 version as the PS3 version was being worked on way before the 360 version. Plus, if you dig deeper, the engine, dubbed White Crystal, was created for the PS3…The only thing I’m worry about is if SE will include the Japanese track or not since the 360 won’t have enough room for it on DVD even if the PS3 Blu-ray does.
P.S. – SE is full of failure now, making me wait longer for FFXIII so it can be released at the same time as the 360, but yet they didn’t give a shit about Last Remnant taking longer to develop on the PS3 to slow down the 360 version release, even if it was a hurt game.
There is an absolute difference between the two images, there’s obviously (as mentioned before) the ‘blocking’ of the hands and sleeves of the girl, then there’s also the loss of shadow on the character on the upper right, then there’s the overall reduction in brightness.
I brought this into Paint and the HSV (Hue Saturation and Value) pretty much across the board looses 10%, which to me, means they had to reduce the lighting in the scene, lights and their properties tend to take up a substantial amount of memory, and therefore are usually one of the first things nixed when memory becomes an issue. That would account for the overall ‘darkening’ of the scene.
This may seem trivial, but light is how we see, with less light, you get to see less. Guerrilla was extremely proud of the sheer number of lights they worked into every area and is key to making scenes ‘pop’.
So yea, there is definitely a loss of assets from one image to the other, and the fact it’s being taken off a VLC player doesn’t account for the consistent loss of light, that’s not what the program does.
Overall the images are muddier, but hopefully the second image is based on the 360 version, it would stink to have existing assets taken out for the sake of multiplatform. Then again, SE hasn’t shown any real love for PS3 to date, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they completely gut it to fit the specs for the 360. The scores for SE’s games are across the board lower then what they have released for Sony (PS2 & PSP), I guess quality is optional when money talks.
As a beside, you can’t just blame this on MS’s ‘unlimited dollars’, for nearly any game that’s released multiplatform the 360 consistently has better sales numbers, it’s simply a matter of footprint size in the industry. If you tell a company they can more then double the size of their sales, what in the world do you think they’re going to do, if you could more then double the size of your paycheck would you do it? And try not lying to yourself, these developers are human aaaand a company is inherently founded in order to make a profit, loyalty is always sitting in the trunk gagged and hogtied, that is unless a company is partially bought by a particular production company (Sony= Guerrilla, Insomniac, Naughty Dog; Microsoft= Halo and Gears (wholly own the first 3 games)).
Ofcourse it could hamper the PS3 version even if the PS3 version is being ported to Xbox AFTER the PS3 version is finished.
Since SE are handlig the port themselves do you really think they DON’T have that in their heads during the PS3 development cycle? Ofcourse they have. They want to make the porting as easy as they possibly can. If they come to a point where they could put in a feature/special effect in the PS3 version that would be hard or a real challenge to port over to the xbox version, they would probably drop to implement it instead, because they allready know that they are porting it to the xbox afterwards. I’m 100% sure that they take the easiest path on the PS3 development just to save time on the porting over to the xbox later. If you think of it, it’s logical. If you can’t see this you are naive.
This industry is about finding the perfect balance between making as much money as they can with using as little resources as possible. This can be applyed to all buissiness strategies in most corporations.
THIS is why the PS3 version will suffer because of the port. I’m not saying the changes will be huge if the title was exclusive or not, but it will certainly be some minor details lost in the process.