Kill the PS2 limitations end of the Dark Ages Era

It wouldn't be terrible if either of these situations happen:

1) SE themselves release a new PS2 HD that can hold more content.

2) Warn people 6 months to a year in advance that PS2 support will end and to recommend preparing to continue with a PC, 360, or even a possible PS3 version.

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Originally Posted by Swords

The main limitation I think is the PS2's maximum HDD size is limited to 40GB. The good news about this is 40GB HDD's are getting a lot harder to find, so sooner or later PS2 supporters would be out of luck. SE might be just waiting for this to happen where they could safely drop support without hurting their playerbase.

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that was an issue with the size of the partition the installer made on the PS2. FFXI doesn't have full access to the entire hard drive. They expanded it once (forget if they said it was in ZM, or CoP, one of them). That is why people got the disk space errors--they weren't deleting unused files after an update and that partition ran out of room--even though the drives still had 20GB free space. Their work around (for now) is to delete the files as the update takes place, but it is going to make the updates a lot longer on PS2 because of it. Once the drives get cleaned up, they should have a little elbow room again in the partition--but may need another expansion if they do another major expansion to the game (provided the engine doesn't have an LBA limitation limiting the size of the partition).

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Originally Posted by Atomic_Skull

An enhanced PC client would have higher detail models and zones but otherwise it would be the same content with more detail. There's no reason PC and PS2 couldn't run on the same server.

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Originally Posted by rog

It already does.

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The models and zone geometry as well as the textures are the same ones used in the PS2 version actually.

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Originally Posted by Atomic_Skull

The models and zone geometry as well as the textures are the same ones used in the PS2 version actually.

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I've played both. PS2 has drastically reduced graphics already.

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Originally Posted by Atomic_Skull

The models and zone geometry as well as the textures are the same ones used in the PS2 version actually.

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No it doesn't. Why do you think the ps2 files are like 8 gb, and pc uses around 13?

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Originally Posted by RAIST

This isn't exactly accurate, but the easiest way I can think to explain it The engine is designed to load the entire zone's data at once, and then clips what is displayed due to the limitations of the PS2 graphics engine. This exists in all version, but the cut off isn't as drastic on the 360 and PC version, but it still does it. You can see it in action simply by walking around whitegate--watch how the barrels and building features and stuff suddenly jump in/out of view or change models completely at times to show more detail. If you are on a PC and have the way to put it in wireframe mode--you can see almost the entire zone's wireframe and see almost every NPC in some zones.

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There is absolutely nothing stopping them from removing that limit for pcs. If they wanted to do so, they could do so right now.

Yeah.. but unfortunately, they are hung up on the whole keeping things consistent for some stupid reason. If they would just give us the freaking tweaks and quality upgrades, a lot of people would just naturally migrate to the better versions and the PS2 would die out on it's own and everyon would be happy.

...'tis nice to dream......

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You can have all the new content SE is willing to make. The ps2 can hold another 30gb+ of content.

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The game cannot utilize that other 30GB, because the PS2 only allocates 10GB to it.

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Originally Posted by RAIST

Yeah.. but unfortunately, they are hung up on the whole keeping things consistent for some stupid reason. If they would just give us the freaking tweaks and quality upgrades, a lot of people would just naturally migrate to the better versions and the PS2 would die out on it's own and everyon would be happy.

...'tis nice to dream......

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No, they are just too lazy to change it.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

The game cannot utilize that other 30GB, because the PS2 only allocates 10GB to it.

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Because it is sooooo hard to change the size of a partition.