PS3 a real problem or not

[Shioban]

I remember back to an old live letter in which Yoshi said that the console wasn't holding back development.

A complete and utter lie.

list the known, things that are FACTS

The PS3 has a combined total of 7 SPE's which run at approximatley 3.2 GHZ per SPE, coupled with 256MB of system memory and 256MB of GPU memory.

This is very very very small.

Your average consumers PC will have at least 512MB > 1024MB of GPU Memory, and 4-8GB of System Memory, with a fairly decent Quad-Core CPU at around 3.4GHZ.

Your average MMO will consume around 1GB of memory with ease, the amount of tweaks, adjustments, cutbacks and considerations that are taken to accomodate the PS3 drastically hold back the game in terms of;

•Area Size
•UI Capabilities
•Character Count
•Complex Systems/Effects
•Model/Animation/Sound Data
(Only to name a few, I can list more if you require)


Basically any action/design/development is constantly wrapped around the PS3s hardware specifications.

"We want to add an Alliance UI, but only have [X] amount of memory left to work with in the UI to accommodate all platforms. Let's axe; [X] from the UI to make room"

This leads to adjustments to how the UI looks, functions and it's overall design.

You can apply this to anything in the game. Sadly the PS3 does hold the game back in what they can do, and will continue to do so for at least another year or so.

thing is FF11 is still supporting PS2

The game barely runs on a PS2 now, and imposes significant performance issues and bugs simply due to the bleeding edge hardware limitations on the already beaten down and adjusted game.
It's only supported in Japan now, NA/EU versions are no longer available.

It held back a fair number of things that FFXI could've adjusted over the years.

Did it make the game any less fun? No.
Could they have added some more complex and fresh content if they'd dropped it earlier? Yes.

The PS4's hardware will never be an issue in the lifetime of this game.

^ This.

With an 8-Core AMD CPU, 8GB of shared GDDR5 Memory, the PS4 has a lot of breathing room and performs perfectly fine, if and when the PS3 support is dropped the PS4 and PC client will significantly reduce the development team woes of;

"We don't have the hardware capabilities to do this"