So... What Exactly ARE the PS3 Limitations

[Greydor]

All too often, people throw out the excuse of "PS3 limitations" when asked why certain features don't exist in the game or why changes can't be made. Examples include:

- We can't have more inventory because of PS3 limitations
- We can't wear two hats because of PS3 limitations

So, has the developer given a list of any actual PS3 limitations? Has anything been confirmed to be missing/unchangeable due to PS3 limitation that aren't heresay?

EDIT: Rephrasing to clarify. What I'm asking is what total game additions/changes cannot be made due to the PS3 being the limiting factor. In other words, what are PC/PS4 players missing out on because the PS3 flat-out couldn't handle it?

[MugenMugetsu]

The PS3 has a total of 512MB of RAM. This limits how much information can be loaded when zoning into a zone or while navigating through a zone, limiting the number of player characters, enemies, terrain objects, etc. that the game can display at one time as all of this information has to be stored in the systems RAM. So while a PC user with plenty of RAM can see all player characters,mobs, terrain objects, effects of attacks/spells, etc. a PS3 user can only see as much as the RAM will allow to be loaded at one time.

That's pretty much the main factor holding back the game's potential on the PS3.

[Greydor]

The PS3 has a total of 512MB of RAM. This limits how much information can be loaded when zoning into a zone or while navigating through a zone, limiting the number of player characters, enemies, terrain objects, etc. that the game can display at one time as all of this information has to be stored in the systems RAM. So while a PC user with plenty of RAM can see all player characters,mobs, terrain objects, effects of attacks/spells, etc. a PS3 user can only see as much as the RAM will allow to be loaded at one time.

That's pretty much the main factor holding back the game's potential on the PS3.

I updated the question. How you answered the question was due to my lack of clarity - sorry about that. I was referring to what changes/additions cannot be made to any version (e.g. PS4/PC) because of PS3 being the limiting factor.

[Claire_Pendragon]

The PS3 has a total of 512MB of RAM.

Dont know if its been said, but its actually 256mb. (360 had 512mb)

[MugenMugetsu]

Hmmm. Well first and foremost we can start with High Definition textures. These will take up more RAM for the game to process visually along with character models etc. The amount of objects (player characters, NPC, terrain objects, decorations, etc.) in any given area could be limited by the low amount of RAM available in the PS3 as SE wants everyone to have an equal experience when playing the game. The amount of items available to be visible on a character model would be limited by the small amount of RAM, character creation options which if more options were added would cause each character to take up more RAM, just anything that you can think of that's going to take memory for the game to display is going to be limited by the 512MB of RAM available in the PS3.

Again, with SE wanting everyone to have the same, or nearly the same, experience while playing the game, SE will not add things that people with more RAM can benefit from to the point that it gives a PC or PS4 player an advantage or a much better gameplay experience compared to a PS3 player.

[StrejdaTom]

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.

Cities are divided into separate zones, it is the same for all locations and dungeons while you can see that the zones are clearly modeled even behind the transition wall.
The game could easily be one huge open world + dungeons could be 1 zone with no loading screens (I had a friend back in 2.X who used to bug behind the transition balls and wander around for hours and make screenshots. With a bit of adding some details the game is imo ready for open world, I mean world design wide).

RAM basically influences how much stuff you can have in inventory, in each UI window etc.

Most probably dyes? It is really weird that we can only put one dye into each gear piece while it could handle even 4 different colours.

EDIT: And yeah.. size of locations.

We as a players can only guess what are the real reasons behind devs decisions. Plenty of stuff was probably done because they only wanted to save some time, resources etc., but there definitely is plenty of other stuff that is plain impossible without ditching the PS3 too (UI, open world for example).

[AsteriaStarfall]

Cities are divided into separate zones, it is the same for all locations and dungeons while you can see that the zones are clearly modeled even behind the transition wall.

Not entirely, only what can be viewed from anywhere in your current zone is modeled, everything else is left blank.

[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