Was VII the only PSX one that did it?
History lesson time. And it's relevant to Rev60, so sit a spell and listen.
Now, before I continue, you've gotta realize that the early 32-bit system days (Playstation/Saturn) were marked by a unique time in gaming, when PC games
weren't necessarily better than their console equivalents. I'm serious. This was a hard time in Compy Gaming history - Polygon graphics were just becoming a major deal, and games at the time were having compatibility problems out the
ass depending on what 3D card you were using. Depending on which 3D acceleration card you had, a huge number of games simply wouldn't work, and a lot of them just had insane requirements that made sense in no reality whatsoever, so Console games were a blissful reprieve from this nonsense and often quite capable of running any game you'd want to play on PC and then some.
This said, there's a number of games that did graphics the way FFVII did back in the day - (this
was the formative polygon graphics days, after all), but FFVII is by
far the worst offender, and you'd never know it just by playing it. The three "Big" costs of space in the PSX days were (and to a lesser degree, still are):
* Uncompressed video/audio (FMV/Cutscenes/speech)
* Poor optimization of models/assets (200+ Cloud models, improperly structured models)
* Poor math/shitty engine use (
Doom couldn't do bullet holes because they made the game's saves too large)
By
no means is FFVII the only game that did this, it's just the worst offender. And a
lot of great games did this.
Wing Commander III, which preceded FFVII by quite a while, had like four hours of FMV footage (starring Mark Hammil, John Ries-Davies, Malcolm MacDowell, and more), necessitating
four discs to play it on PSX (the game is great even without these). Its sequel, likewise, was about three discs long, for much the same reason (Better compression meant less issues with more stuff).
Metal Gear Solid used
every fucking trick imaginable to keep its space down: The cutscenes you usually see are simply done with the game's
own graphics engine rather than FMV, overlaid with a filter to make the static models look better. Between audio and detailed environments, however, it was another two-discer. You could burn through data in an
insane clip if you didn't compress it right.
Final Fantasy VIII used
Parasite Eve's graphics engine, so it was better in both scaling
and compression ratio, but the massive number of graphical enhancements the game had, huge number of cinematics, and so on meant it became a goddamned
four-discer. This was also true of
Parasite Eve II (two discs) and
Final Fantasy IX (
four discs) due to the massive graphic and lighting engine enhancements.
This kind of shit almost
never happens these days in vidya. Multiple disc games are rare, and the number of games that one can get that
are multiple disc are grossly outnumbered by the ones that
aren't. Games and platforms are
way bigger now and compression methods are more competent. Optimization is now a really important thing less for making sure your game works, and more for making sure your game has more to work with and looks better whilst loading quicker.
Why is this relevant to
Revolution 60?
Because it does all of the three I mention above. It has uncompressed audio fairly often (speech/dialogue), extremely poor optimization (uncompressed files and stretched textures; particle count in Rev60 is a
joke), and ridiculously bad engine use (What's a framerate?). Fucking Infinity blade is
less than a third of
Revolution 60's size for a game substantially longer and more graphically intensive.
It's practically
Amy levels of shit optimization.
