So......FFXIII is huge and amazing. Thanks for the information.

I actually did read the thread, apparently my brain filtered some posts out.

I can't complain much though, since I didn't miss anything important ;)

I wish my brain could just do that. Would make my time here much easier.

I know its ridiculous isn't it!

Ah Avatar. I was referring to CGI yes. Did not take avatar into account. I haven't seen it yet. I suppose it's time to seperate 3d and cgi since 3d viewing of movies is becoming popular.

My point was that it was visually far ahead of it's time :P

It could be better.

Actually there has been some debate over this. Not in relation to this game. Rage developer Carmack said that they would use as few discs for rage as possible. A natural reason ofcourse, would be because it breaks up the game.. However ! A different reason was given. He said that royalty fees increased a lot when you used multiple discs. (atleast if you use 3+)

I'm not sure if it's the same for rpg games but it's a viable concern. It wouldn't affect microsoft published games since they don't have to pay royalty.

Anyways you can read for yourself here:

"id's post-apocalyptic open-world shooter Rage (PC, PS3, 360, Mac) will look worse on Xbox 360 due to the compression needed to fit the game's assets on two DVDs, programmer John Carmack revealed at tonight's QuakeCon keynote.

According to Carmack, the royalty fees to include a third disc in the Xbox 360 version would be so high that it simply isn't a feasible solution, with the programmer hoping for Microsoft to make a concession. He stressed that the issue is merely a storage problem and has nothing to do with the power of the Xbox 360 hardware, while adding that the PlayStation 3's Blu-ray format is Sony's one leg up on the competition."

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/53976

EDIT: for your first sentence. Well it depends on how many extra assets they would need and if they would have to be placed on all discs or only one.

The Spirits Within was not ahead of its time. It's CGI was about at the level that could be done for movies at the time.

These threads are full of ignorant people!

OK, let's get a few things clear;

First of all, it's not unusual for the vast majority of a game's data to be taken up by the cutscenes. FF7, for example, had about 250MB of game data (i.e. everything that wasn't an FMV); the rest of the game data (about 900MB) was FMVs. All of the game data was the same across all three discs; the movies were the only things that changed (besides one animation for Supernova, but that took up a few KB IIRC). Each disc had ~250MB of game data and ~300 MB of movies. FF8 and FF9 worked the same way AFAIK. Incidentally, this means that games which took up three or four discs back in those days had less than two discs worth of data; they needed more discs because there was repetition and data had to be shared. Likewise, the data on the three disc 360 version of FF13 probably takes up about 10GB of data: it's certainly less than 15GB worth. The reason why it is split across three discs rather than two is because some of the data has to be repeated.

It's also obvious that the game data on the 360 version of FF13 is much more heavily compressed than the data on the PS3 version. Whether or not this leads to a loss in quality is a different question (it probably won't lead to a noticeable loss, unless you're one of those twats who zooms in on one or two pixels just for the sake of an internet argument), but it's certainly more compressed. Even if they picked out the game data that doesn't have to be shared across all discs (such as monsters or locations that only appear on one), there would still only be a tiny amount of space left for the movies. Let's say they cut down the movies and data that doesn't have to be on all discs to 10GB and cut down the data that does have to be shared to 2GB less than the disc's capacity. They'd need five discs, because there'd only be space for 2GB of the data that is unique to each disc once they'd put the data that has to be shared onto it. My guess is that they've compressed the data that has to be shared down to less than half its original size, because that's the only way they'd be able to fit the rest onto three discs.

BTW, please don't write an angry response to this post of you haven't taken the time to understand what I've said (it will make you look silly), or if you're going to bitch about some perceived slight to your favourite console (it will make you look like a fanboy).