I don't know Justinian. I never installed Lost Odyssey to test it out but I was told that you only needed to have disc one in the 360 after you installed all four discs. Can anyone on here confirm this?

First day on the 360. FF VII on the Playstation was the first RPG that I really loved.

A FF VII remake for the PS3 would make me go out and buy a PS3 that day as well.

When playing Lost Odyssey I would just install the disc I was using so I only had to change discs when I progressed to the next disc (days/weeks for me so I don't really understand the angst peeps have against changing discs) .

However I am sure if you have all 4 disc installed you would still need to have the proper disc in the 360. So you could not be at the end of the game with disc 1 in there. You would still need to have disc 4 in there. So you still would have to switch the disc.

Installing games on the 360 is mainly for improving preformance and cutting out the disc spinning noise. It does not save on having to swap out discs. But again if you play more than one game a day you have to get up and switch discs anyway.....

If these forums are any indication FFXIII sales on the PS3 are going to eclipse that of the 360 version

@Darc Requiem

According to reports you need to do swapping with Star Ocean.

"The Last Hope on the 360 does have is poor packaging and an odd or forced choice of Tri-Ace to reinsert earlier disks in order to backtrack through areas. "

Why didn't the developers allow a full HDD install if you have a xbox360 with a HDD?

I can't help but think this will be the norm and FF13 will use this disc-swapping system. Maybe it is to stop piracy.

I think the game will work like this, on both systems we have i don't know, 4 chapter, on ps3 every time you change chapter you make a new installation and in 360 you change the disc. I'll get the 360 versions because swap disc is faster than HDD instalation.

First day on PS3 for sure.

Oh god, that sounds pretty bad.

I'm actually a little confused, so even if you install the entire game to the 360's HDD, you still have to swap out disks? or are you saying that you can't have full installs at all?

I was already annoyed with the prospect that I had to change disks to get certain achievements for LO and IU, but swaping disks in order to backtrack through areas? That can't be for real.

Even with a full install on a 360 you are still required to do disc swaps as usual since even with an install a disc is required in the disc drive.

This is also from the IGN review. Indeed you are required to swap discs yet again just to backtrack in the game.

This is why the "Who cars if I need to get up to swap discs" argument doesn't work well with me. I didn't even have to do shit like this back on the PS1 with my 3-4 disc games. This is just pathetic, you even need to do this with a full install (which would be around 18-20GB of space on the HDD). In Star Ocean you do a lot of backtracking, especially like said in the quote, when I need to items for synthesis.

The fact is that the full-disc NXE "install" is not a proper install, in the sense that it does not rely on the game software actually knowing what data was moved on the HDD, or how.

What it does is make an image of the whole disc (like the ISO files, for the less tech-savy) and then mount it to simulate the real DVD. The copy-protection data is treated in a special way on x360 DVDs, and the presence of the DVD in the drive is still required for this image mount to happen.

The good thing is that this way it works for games that had no notion of HDD install.
The bad thing is that those games, like Halo 3, might want to access the HDD on their own and in those cases the performance actually decreases.

If I understood how it works, it also means that no disc swapping is saved by this "installation". The best developers can do is replicate data on several of the DVDs (for example the worldmap in an RPG) so that no disk swapping is needed to access it. But if you are on disc 4, as soon as you access data that only exists on disc 1 you will have to insert it for the copy-protection authentication, even if you had "installed" the actual content.

PS: obviously there's another way: SE could code FFXIII so that it allows an optional real install on the HDD, copying all the data it needs and then only requiring disc 1 to authenticate, a bit like it's done with PC games. But it would be a first, and I suppose that's discouraged by MS.