FFVII Episode 1

[Fox]

Outside of FMVs, the game is about 100 MB, and all of it is present on every disc.
.

Oooo I didn't know that!

Wow, the entirety of Final Fantasy VII... 100MB... I'm looking at our speech packs on F1 right now and just one of them is almost double that.

[Psychotic]

Game development is an expensive process. How long will it take to make FFVII in its entirety to today's standards? There were four years between Skyrim and Fallout 4.I am confident that FFVII R has much better graphics than Fallout 4 and much more diverse areas where you simply can't cut and paste like you might do for Ruined Office Building #5.

Square-Enix are also... shall we say... less efficient than other companies. See: Kingdom Hearts III and FF Versus XIII aka FFXV. They've continually been pumping millions into these projects. They are both failures already as there is no way they will be able to make back what they've lost on them. Hell, look at their (not Japanese developed but) franchises Tomb Raider, Hitman and Sleeping Dogs. They all failed them despite selling millions.

Based on the above, I'll be really smurfing surprised if FFVII is completed in four years. I wouldn't be if it takes double that. They can't take another huge disaster like XV. They can't work on any more projects for years upon years without any signs of breaking even on it, much less profit. Space constraints, as I think NeoCracker said, is bulltrout. They're being forced to do this because it is not remotely financially viable to make FFVII in 2015 (and onwards) and release it as a single game.

It seems as though they've learned their lessons from the XV disaster and that's why they're trying something new. I don't like it, you don't like it, none of us like it. We'd all like to have FFVII Remake delivered for (price of triple A game in your country) in completeness tomorrow. I don't believe that it's possible. If this is what it takes to achieve it, so be it. If indie games that took a month to make are sold for $1 I don't have a problem with a multi-million budget game which has been worked on by thousands of staff for years costing more than a usual title. That's just simple business. Of course, I'm not overly sympathetic to Square-Enix and a decade of mismanagement means this is nobody's fault but theirs but I think that's how it's got to be.

[Mirage]

Outside of FMVs, the game is about 100 MB, and all of it is present on every disc.
.

Oooo I didn't know that!

Wow, the entirety of Final Fantasy VII... 100MB... I'm looking at our speech packs on F1 right now and just one of them is almost double that.

I'd wager even the most of that is the pre-rendered backgrounds. The 3D models are extremely simple and often have no textures at all. The music is a midi-like format and each track is just a few kilobytes. The text for dialogue is of course also probably just a few kilobytes. Consider that all of shakespeare's works can be contained within 5 MB of uncompressed text.

[Del Murder]

FFVII is not longer than the Mass Effect trilogy. What the hell are you doing in FFVII to last that long? I guess if you just line up the required story content for each game FFVII is longer than any of the ME games but that kind of goes against one of the main draws of the ME games. With everything, FFVII is at most 50% longer than a single ME game. And, unlike the ME trilogy which has three self-contained plots that are part of a larger narrative, FFVII is one continuous plot. I'm not against the FFVII episodic format in theory, but this type of approach is not really comparable to any of the major series right now, except possibly the Telltale games.

[Loony BoB]

FFVII is definitely more than 50% longer than an ME game. I'm not sure what you're using as a measure of content, but going by "main story +" on this site which seems pretty decent...

ME - 29 hours
ME2 - 35 hours
ME3 - 35 hours

FFVII - 58 hours

If you're going for completionist...

ME - 43 hours
ME2 - 50 hours
ME3 - 48 hours

FFVII - 92 hours

And then consider the fact that the content of FFVII is what I would call "more diverse" than that of ME (although admittedly we don't know how that applies to the remake)...

EDIT: Just to reiterate, I'm talking about the development cost vs. reward thing. In other words, the cost of making FFVII would probably be considerably higher than the cost of making, say, ME (and potentially the entire ME series, although that's probably a stretch) and therefore they would want to justify that cost by increasing revenue. Essentially you get the scale of game you pay for.

[Mirage]

Naturally, that includes pointless filler (aka grinding) in FF7. ME is more straight to the point with better pacing when it comes how how fast you gain levels, and the fact that player skills to a bigger degree can cut down on leveling time.

Not to mention the "roll a dice" mechanics of chocobo breeding. Now, I liked that minigame but that's what it was. Roll a dice and hope for a good chocobo. Spend time going back to the farm and check if you rolled a 6 or a 1, repeat the process if you rolled a 1. These things take time, and I'm not gonna hold it against any dev who cut this sort of mechanic out of the game.

[Loony BoB]

Grinding isn't too different in each of the games in my opinion. In one game you grind on random and fixed battles with various mechanics, in another game you grind on reactive battles with various mechanics. 95% of the ME content was "move around, shoot things, talk to people." In other words, grind be a grind regardless. Looks like FFVII:Remake is going down the "3D real time battle" road closer to ME than it is to FFVII, so if they manage to do that while simultaneously retaining all the various other content in FFVII then I would argue that this game will cost at least twice as much as an ME game to develop.

[Mirage]

You rarely have to stop the progress of the game in order to just level up to fight some big bad (like Ruby in FF7) in ME. Sure, you gain levels from random encounters, but it's part of the exploration process in ME, rather than the goal itself. That's why I said the leveling process is paced much better.

[Psychotic]

I'm not against the FFVII episodic format in theory, but this type of approach is not really comparable to any of the major series right now, except possibly the Telltale games.

A better shout is probably Square's own Life is Strange series given the publisher. Or for a full Triple A game, Metal Gear Solid V. Sort of.

[Mirage]

In what way would you say MGS5 is episodic?

[Ayen]

Game development is an expensive process. How long will it take to make FFVII in its entirety to today's standards? There were four years between Skyrim and Fallout 4.I am confident that FFVII R has much better graphics than Fallout 4 and much more diverse areas where you simply can't cut and paste like you might do for Ruined Office Building #5.

Square-Enix are also... shall we say... less efficient than other companies. See: Kingdom Hearts III and FF Versus XIII aka FFXV. They've continually been pumping millions into these projects. They are both failures already as there is no way they will be able to make back what they've lost on them. Hell, look at their (not Japanese developed but) franchises Tomb Raider, Hitman and Sleeping Dogs. They all failed them despite selling millions.

Based on the above, I'll be really smurfing surprised if FFVII is completed in four years. I wouldn't be if it takes double that. They can't take another huge disaster like XV. They can't work on any more projects for years upon years without any signs of breaking even on it, much less profit. Space constraints, as I think NeoCracker said, is bulltrout. They're being forced to do this because it is not remotely financially viable to make FFVII in 2015 (and onwards) and release it as a single game.

It seems as though they've learned their lessons from the XV disaster and that's why they're trying something new. I don't like it, you don't like it, none of us like it. We'd all like to have FFVII Remake delivered for (price of triple A game in your country) in completeness tomorrow. I don't believe that it's possible. If this is what it takes to achieve it, so be it. If indie games that took a month to make are sold for $1 I don't have a problem with a multi-million budget game which has been worked on by thousands of staff for years costing more than a usual title. That's just simple business. Of course, I'm not overly sympathetic to Square-Enix and a decade of mismanagement means this is nobody's fault but theirs but I think that's how it's got to be.

Agreed. I don't have any sympathy for them either. We're basically at a point where we can either wait another decade or get a game in portions every few years due to their own incompetence. Meanwhile, almost every other single video game developer on the planet manages to take on their own big projects in half that time, and knows how to actually smurfing communicate with their audience.

[Wolf Kanno]

I forgot nothing. There were replicas, but if Cloud has even seen Genesis for more than an second (or at all) or so was not mentioned. Also, seeing how much of the story can be expanded upon and can always be explained by "it was not mentioned before" it is not a retcon.

When you change the story by adding new information to it, it's a retcon dude. Thetrip to Nibelheim is dramatically changed in Crisis Core to fit Genesis into a part of the story he originally wasn't in. The entire nature of the mission was changed in CC with the reason to go was hunting down the remnants of Genesis and to see if he was still alive, whereas the original and BC state it was due to a malfunctioning reactor core creating monsters. Sephy doesn't come to the conclusion he's a monster by stumbling upon Hojo's experiments, it was a long conga trauma line of watching his two slightly less powerful buddies turning out to be lab experiments and Genesis point blank telling him he was no different.

Yes Cloud doesn't remember any of this because A) Non of this bulltrout had existed in 97 when the plot was originally penned, but also B) Cloud wasn't there as he was outside which makes the fact he even knows even the original scene not really make any sense. We can assume Sephy just let Cloud know what he needed but there is no reason to omit Genesis from that now, and its not like Cloud didn't spend half of CC helping Zack fight off Genesis in the game to not remember him in some way considering he was leading global terror attacks against the Shin-Ra. Honestly there is no reason to omit Genesis now from the scene unless we're just going to pretend CC didn't happen, which I'm pretty cool with.

By the way: Retcons are not bad. FFVII-1 is a mess. It can only get better as long as the most important aspects are not totally rewritten.

True, they are not all bad, but it really depends on the strength of the writer. Nojima is not a strong writer and the retcons of the Compilation are bad considering even fans of the game want the Remake to move far away from it. We'll have to wait and see what the Remake chooses to change and keep.

To those complaining: I'm genuinely interested in how people can give the likes of Mass Effect and Uncharted a free ride on having multiple games in the series which all tie into each other (okay, very loosely in Uncharted), but then when FFVII - a game that was probably longer than all three Mass Effects put together - having three games... they rage. I understand that the original was a single game. But they also weren't making it for the PS4, with the detail being put into the remake. I imagine that there is only so much a single game sale can cover for FFVII. I would love it if this turns out to be a single £50 game, but I would also be absolutely stunned. If this is indeed going to be the biggest game in history when it comes to the amount of data it takes up, then I am not shocked they would want to charge considerably more than the cost of a single game.

But as I've said before, people need to remember that this is not the best game in the world. This is just a tribute.

Well when you remove grinding, and there is a trout ton more grinding in VII than ME, and you cut down on locations that have nothing to do with the plot in the grand scheme of things (pretty much every location on the first continent that isn't Midgard, Fort Condor, and Junon. Also Mt. Corel, Ancient Forest, Bone Village, Sleeping Forest, Coral Valley, Coral Valley Cave, and the Great Glacier) you'll find that VII's story isn't necessarily longer than ME it just has more places you have to fight through to get to that story content despite not really adding much to it from a broad perspective. There is honestly just a lot of superflous content in VII and the game is on rails for most of the plot. Even when you get the Airship, there isn't much to do except move the plot forward and go to the Gold Saucer and there second disc is actually shorter on story content than the first because it mostly entails backtracking and is the point in the game you can really start doing sidequests which chew up more time than you think. If the remake simply stuck to important locations and expanded them to have more content, then the VII Remake will probably be as long as XIII on average.

I can totally see Episode 1 (if we're being generous with game content) would do the Midgard section mostly unchanged storywise with a few new locations and redesigned dungeons. After leaving Midgard, the party hijacks a truck and journeys to Junon to find more information about Sephy. Here Cloud tells the party the whole story of the Nibelheim flashback. We get something to do with the Midgard Zolom which involves detouring to Fort Condor, and then the party arrives in Junon (minus the dolphin bit) and the Episode ends with the party reaching Costa Del Sol. I imagine the first two episodes may end with the Jenova fights which will cover the first disc.

Frankly the game could probably be made entirely and more faithfully had SE and fans not insist on AC style graphics.

[Loony BoB]

Frankly the game could probably be made entirely and more faithfully had SE and fans not insist on AC style graphics.

But let's face it: This is the only thing that was going to happen because what the hell else is the point of remaking it?

[Aulayna]

I'm not against the FFVII episodic format in theory, but this type of approach is not really comparable to any of the major series right now, except possibly the Telltale games.

A better shout is probably Square's own Life is Strange series given the publisher. Or for a full Triple A game, Metal Gear Solid V. Sort of.

Also StarCraft II.

[Del Murder]

FFVII is definitely more than 50% longer than an ME game. I'm not sure what you're using as a measure of content, but going by "main story +" on this site which seems pretty decent...

ME - 29 hours
ME2 - 35 hours
ME3 - 35 hours

FFVII - 58 hours

If you're going for completionist...

ME - 43 hours
ME2 - 50 hours
ME3 - 48 hours

FFVII - 92 hours

Ok, but my estimate of 50% more is much closer than your estimate of all three combined. I will give you diversity of content but the story and characters are all very self-contained in the ME trilogy which doesn't really argue that they are one big game. I cannot see a split of FFVII that would create such heterogeneous games.

I can see the development cost issue which is one argument for needing a higher price overall to compensate. RPGs have done this for years by often being $10-$20 more than other games at retail. The episodes would be another way to do this that could generate maybe 2 times the cost of a normal game but I can't see justification for much more than that for a single gaming experience.

In what way would you say MGS5 is episodic?

Yeah, MGS5 was more like a paid demo followed by the actual full game.

I'm not trying to argue that the episodes is a bad idea, just that it's not intuitively a good or understandable idea. It does require giving SE some rope to accept and I totally understand people who won't give them that rope.