So... What Exactly ARE the PS3 Limitations

[Reynhart]

UI - as SE wants the UI across PC and PS3/4 to show the same informations, they had to hide party bonus (INT/STR/etc.) in order to show TP bars, TP bars even don´t show numbers. PS3 is the reason.

Wrong.
There were already differences between the PC and PS3 UI.

• On PS3, if you activate Focus Target, gils disappear.
• You can't have hotbars displayed on top of cross-hotbar.

So, it would have been easy to remove the party bonus only for PS3 without touching the PC version. And we don't need numbers for TP since everyone one has the same max TP. It's easy to see if someone is around 50% TP left or 20%.

As for the size, why would we need larger areas than we already have with HW ? They are already fairly empty to justify such size. And one big open world doesn't really offer anything more, apart from required more power, which is also an issue on average PCs.

Inventory limitation is not because of the PS3, it's because of the server stress. Servers refresh at a very fast rate to prevent any information loss in case of a crash. Adding more space to the inventory would suddenly requires a lot more date to save, since you have to multiply this by the numbers of characters.

[Niwashi]

There were already differences between the PC and PS3 UI.

• On PS3, if you activate Focus Target, gils disappear.
• You can't have hotbars displayed on top of cross-hotbar.

There's a few more differences, too. PS3 doesn't get the miniature dot-matrix view of how full your inventory is like the PS4 and PC versions do. PS3 doesn't allow the expanded inventory window like the others. On PS3, duty and FATE objectives replace quest objectives in the duty tracker rather than be shown in addition to them like on PS4 and PC. Along with the hotbars you mentioned, those are the differences I can think of, though there could still be more. (I hadn't even noticed the Focus Target one you mentioned.)

SE's rule in this regard isn't that the different versions need the same UI, it's that any differences in the UI shouldn't make different systems a marked advantage or disadvantage in combat. (Actually, the loss of quest objectives when a FATE appears over your quest target is kind of pushing the issue there, at least when a quest requires use of a key item. Selecting the item from your quest tracker can be a lot easier than navigating to your key items inventory while in the midst of combat and selecting the right item from there.)

I agree, that party bonus could easily have been among the differences SE allows between systems, though simply removing it was probably a better choice. (It's not like it really added anything useful when it was there.)

[Tint]

(I hadn't even noticed the Focus Target one you mentioned.)

when 2.0 was released there wasn't even focus target on PS3 at all. they implemented it in 2.1, and had to remove the clock, server status and exp bar from the UI, everytime you activate focus target.

playing a healer on PS3 got sooo much easier after that xD