/vr/ - Retro Games

This is fucking basic graphics stuff, anon. But I'll bite.

The battle models are more detailed because they only show up in a very small room (the battle arena itself) and there are no more than 7 of them onscreen at the same time (3 players + 4 enemies).

Now compare this to the overworld, where you have to render the backgrounds, NPCS that are walking around, AND you give the player control over stuff (moving, opening the menu).

This will seem like a shock to you, but turn-based battles are like flash animations. The control you have on them is severely limited, so it frees up memory to do all the other stuff like animations, special effects and whatever else they had in mind.

About FF8 and 9. FF8 was released more than 2 years after FF7. Of course they would have a better grasp on what the console could do than 2 years before. I'll give you a very easy analogy: compare an early PS2 game, like Evergrace, to a very late PS2 game, like God of War 2 or Black. Hell, you could even go further and compare softhouses: just look at what Sony did with Gran Turismo 3 and 4. It seems like fucking magic. That's because they understood the inner workings of the console better than anyone else.

The amount of necessary memory and processing you need to render a few models inside a battle is magnitudes lower than rendering the whole overworld at once. Someone posted this in a thread yesterday, but those tech demos that get released with a console show stuff that's only possible if you severely limit the scope of what's rendered onscreen.

You _can_ render a character model on the PSX that approaches the amount of detail of a PS2 character model. But you'd have to blank the whole background, disable lightning effects and only draw one character onscreen. There's your graphical fidelity. But you can't have a game just with a single character model and a blank background.

>>5460235
Storage limitations and immature knowledge of the Playstation hardware would be my guess.

There are fanmade mods for the PC version that switched out the low-poly/super-deformed models with more proportional models. I think they just look awkward since the animations weren't changed from the original. The scale between the new models and the backgrounds are way off in my opinion too.

FFVII was the only PS Final Fantasy game I actually finished. Got far in IX, but stopped playing for some reason or another and just haven't gotten back into it. I dropped VIII after only a few hours.

They had to pretend it was a final fantasy title.

>>5460235
Though they changed the style of the maps to more traditionally cinematic views from 8 onward, it's likely that the level of detail they could manage around 7 made the more functional maps -usually top-view and more crowded- a better choice (which would make characters with battle-proportions look tiny and honestly unappealing)

Anyway, since the FF tradition was chibi-on-map/tall-on-battle, the approach wasn't particularly out of place

Hardware usage in early PS1 looked kind of a delicate matter anyway. The battle engine could handle 3 characters a a bunch of monsters with a certain complexity (plus lots of sprite and geometry-based "effects"), but also used extremely simplified environment geometry and ran at a reduced frame rate. Field maps involved potentially a lot more character models plus the base hidden geometry in a way more responsive and smooth engine AND sometimes it could use video as a background as well.

>>5460269
FF8 was in February 11, 1999 and FF7 January 31, 1997 so not much more than 2 years.
>>5460269
>The battle models are more detailed because they only show up in a very small room (the battle arena itself) and there are no more than 7 of them onscreen at the same time (3 players + 4 enemies).
Then why is it the final fight against Sephiroth the character models look even more detailed then even the normal battle models? And then of course the chibi models look like papercraft compared to everything else about the game. I'm wondering if maybe its just that Squaresoft was actually learning more and more as they were developing FFVII which would explain why it has so much different art associated with its game. By the time they got that really good model you see in the OP pic they had already largely built most of the game and weren't going to try to implement the models you saw in FF8 or even FF9 for the overworld/exploring stuff. If those models are even in the game I can't see how they couldn't have been applied the whole game.

>>5460281
>Then why is it the final fight against Sephiroth the character models look even more detailed then even the normal battle models
Because that's a specific "cutscene" battle that has just two characters and basically no environment anon.

>>5460283
I'm not convinced of that. Even if what you say is true they still could have clearly had battle models in place of the chibi ones.

>>5460285
>they still could have clearly had battle models in place of the chibi ones
What makes you think that's "clearly" the case?

I miss the days when memory was still a huge limiting factor in games. It forced devs to be creative and inventive with techniques and tools, which in turn helped create timeless, if flawed, classics.

Now, devs have huge amounts of memory and computational power to work with and just half-ass everything.

>>5460290
My feelings.

>>5460292
That's a grim view. I like older games better, but I see the issue more as matter of the HOW to put things in games evolving into WHAT things to put in games.

But yeah, I guess that means games now are likely to look and feel very similar since developers are usually working with universal engines instead of tailor-making their own according to the needs they thought the game would have

>>5460298
We live in a world in which Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter use the same game engine. Let that sink in

>>5460302
Conversely, there's some lovely humor in Guilty Gear Xrd, the most "looks like a moving cartoon" game around, using an engine that was specifically designed to make games look as realistic as possible

Ctrl+F "Final Fantasy VII"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

>>5460292
Memory was a huge limiting factor in games at the end of last gen and it just resulted in horrible performance and ugliness

>>5460330
You forgot to make a point son

>>5460302
>>5460323
Unreal Engine is really versatile; you can do basically anything with it. It's just that since the "out-of-the-box" style of lighting and rendering looks so fucking good few developers tweak it that much

>>5460279
This is the only good/accurate answer in this entire thread

>>5460235
>Why is it that Squarsoft didn't just make the entire game look like pic related instead of the chibi models and regular battle models?
It was expected to have chibi art in a jrpg.

>>5460235

>>5460729
>>5460729

>>5460732
If Square Enix re-release Final Fantasy VII but all characters and enemies were updated with the left model's quality during battles, I would buy the game. They way they went with the new remake is excessive IMO, and they are already changing how the game plays, which is a no-no for me.

>>5460751
The pc version from a couple of years ago it's what you are looking for.

>>5460235
>>5460281
>>5460285
>>5460297
You sound like a typical millennial zoomer jackass who can't understand basic concepts like
>devs are unfamiliar with new hardware and had to be careful about what they did and didn't understand about the hardware
Even when presented actual information about why "thing can't into thing" you just can't accept you're misinformed and have no argument for why you hold an opinion, other than steadfastly holding your dumbfuck opinion somehow makes you "right".

>>5460767
But are you talking vanilla or modded? Because the mods I've seen don't cover the entire roster and they look fairly awful to boot.

e.g. >>5460732 has more detailed models, but mods, such as the one for the scorpion robot, also retexture the whole thing and it looks awkward.

>>5460235
It boils down to what >>5460269 said, which is basically:
1. There are limitations as to what hardware can do, but in THIS particular case it has to do with
2. Square not knowing the PS1's limitations. Had FFVII released at the end of the PS1's cycle, they could have had these extremely detailed characters models.

>>5460837

>>5460751
Left battle models with the chibi models from 9 would pretty much be a perfect update to the original game without going overboard with the work tbqh if we are talking a more simple update to the original though. The remake was always going to have much grander expectations but I do agree it shouldn't be changing genres. Very disheartening to see.

>>5460837
Soul | Soulless

>>5461073
I just want hands on the chibi. And battle models chibi.

>>5461087
>Soul | Soulless
Kill | Yourself

>>5461178
But he is right

>>5460297
>muh feels
anon, it’s has already been explained to you why, now you are just being intentionally dumb, you obviously don’t know anything about programming, how about you get into contact with a square employee from the time so they can likely tell you what the other anons here have already told you, even though you’ll probably disregard them too because my feeling

>>5461178
co | pe

>>5460330
>>5460349
Wheres FFXV?

I love FF9 very glad the switch added it, never been a big FF7 guy but maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another chance.

>>5460235
limitations retard.

>>5460823
I was talking vanilla. Like >>5460837 posted.