Final Fantasy XIII

[rewak]

PS3

Spoiler:

show spoiler

360

Spoiler:

show spoiler

Apparently, anyway, there's been a lot of debate over screenshots. I'd also say the 360 screenshot looks interlaced so it's not exactly a fair comparison, but you can tell it's slightly lacking anyway. Here's another comparison.

PS3

Spoiler:

show spoiler

Spoiler:

show spoiler

[Borman]

The 360 looks nothing like interlacing. Thats not how the dev kit handles screenshots anyway.

[Carnivol]

An interesting turn of events.

Though, I still don't trust Square-Enix on this subject after their amazing Homecoming-like incident

Although it's not interlacing, as Rewak suggests, he's absolutely right about there being something off about the 360 shots. It could just be the game having a horrible way of rendering things on the 360 (as apparent by the really terrible amount of rough dithering, which by the way a friend of mine has been talking about being very much present in the PS3 version too, but maybe not as brutal as in those 360 shots. I dunno), but either way the colors feel kinda oddly washed out... something that certainly shouldn't happen if those screengrabs were taking with the 360's screencapture tool. And I dunno what they've used to get such clean and "warm" shots off of a PS3.

I guess we'll have to buckle up for an epic console comparison this coming month!

[rewak]

The 360 looks nothing like interlacing. Thats not how the dev kit handles screenshots anyway.

I dunno, i don't have a dev kit It just looked like it to me cause if you look at the guy in the middles hair in the first screenshot, on the left there are hints of interlacing lines, and again on the girls fringe. Maybe i'm wrong, it was just a conclusion i jumped to.

As for the kinda washed out look, it looks like the contrast is a bit off on the 360 shots. Maybe they weren't captured properly? I kinda have to wonder if Square-Enix is doing these kinda things on purpose to keep the whole debate down until it's actually released and they rack up sales on both platforms. With them releasing the screenshots a little earlier that just had the button overlay changed and now these off looking 360 shots, it's all a bit...off

[Carnivol]

The way you grab screengrabs from a 360 is pretty much the same way as you get a screenshot from an emulator. You take a 1:1 grab of the system's framebuffer, iirc. You can do the same on a 360 development station, but I dunno if there are any proper universal screengrabbers that'll work on a TEST kit. I've never seen one and have always had to rely on stand alone capture equipment when doing PS3 screengrabs for work related reasons.


The "thing with the hair" is what I referred to as dithering. Also, the part where the image is a bit more "tacky/blocky" is a result of the scaling from a lower resolution... which is part of what I find a bit strange in the 360 shot. As most games I've seen that have rendered the 3D at a sub-HD level (like... say 576p, as I hear people suggest FFXIII 360 runs at), has the HUD rendered in the full 720p resolution as an overlay on top of the 576p after it's been scaled to 720p. (Tales of Vesperia PS3 is a good sample of a recent game that this.) Of course, maybe this wasn't done on the 360, as the 360 has a scaler of its own, so no need to use software to scale it to the target output (so they can render everything at one resolution and then just let the hardware scaler do the rest... which means that there should be more system resources available.)


As for the contrast thing; Yeah. Brightness/Contrast is totally borked on the 360 shots. Either their engine is completely stupid or these shots were taking with an improperly configured Component setup or something (by the way, the same type of brightness/contrast issues tend to show up in PS3 shots taken with Component capture equipment, unless you've got a pre-set adjustment configuration to counter it.)

But, yeah, I'm not trusting anything from S-E when it comes to their screenshots of FFXIII

The previous batch of screenshots that were doctored to have platform specific button icons looked spot on with the PS3 version according to quite a lot of people I've spoken to who's got the PS3 version, and the 360 shots in this batch looks like they almost belong in the same pile as the doctored shots from that previous batch. Not to mention that they've sure been happy with the target renders and bullshots in the past for the PS3 version too.

[Zombie Fred]

I don't trust in the Square PR when they fucked up on the screen shots, in the past 3 instances, and wait for several people when they get the press (between Saturday to Monday) and wait for their impressions. Definitely bad captures from them (even some had the mouse cursor on them! hahaha) so I just wait for soem good captures.

[BadWolfX]

After all the cock-ups with the screenshots and the PS3/360 one with Snow I'm just going to wait for English reviews to roll in for the 360 version and see if they say anything about the graphics.

Having said that, gameplay videos of the 360 version have looked pretty much the same as the PS3 so...

[riderkid]

it will be the same gameplay wise, but the conversion for video will be a drastic difference between 720 and 1080p and the audio will also be uncompressed for the ps3 version

[Zombie Fred]

it will be the same gameplay wise, but the conversion for video will be a drastic difference between 720 and 1080p and the audio will also be uncompressed for the ps3 version

Wouldn't bet on it.

[BadWolfX]

Yeah, there'll be a difference but I wouldn't say it'll be a drastic difference....

[Zombie Fred]

Yeah, there'll be a difference but I wouldn't say it'll be a drastic difference....

Indeed. Compression wouldn't affect the game's overall quality much, with the 360 version. You would not see much difference unless you was "right close" and have a hard eye for such things. It all boils down to the effort Square has done on the 360 port. But seeing the footage from X10 a few days ago, and past media releases on this, I hardly doubt no one will be able to see much on what is different between the two.

[Rick Hunter]

I'm on chapter 10, and hell I'm bored.

The game is just a succession of copy pasted corridors. It's extremely linear, very repetitive and you mostly always do the same actions in the same order during the battles, the system is new and original, but it quickly becomes repetitive and tedious as well.

I didn't really enjoy FF12 for a lot of reasons, but this one is even worst... It's just some kind of corridor repetitive action game. The menus are good looking, the graphics are beautiful, the music is really nice, but everything else is really bad.

I played 2 hours tonight but after 2 hours of the same chapter 10 underground corridors filled with 3 enemies variant I just gave up and stopped playing. If you wanna enjoy this game you probably have to play during short sessions of 30 minutes - 1 hour.

It's definitely not what I was expecting from a Final Fantasy.

[BadWolfX]

The English Opening Cinematic has been uploaded onto Gamespot and it looks awesome. Cannot wait for this game.

[BadWolfX]

Clips of the 360 version has been uploaded onto a site. (Found here.)

From the comments I've seen, the graphics are nowhere near as bad as the screen of Snow and NORA. In fact, they seem to be almost on par with the PS3 graphics.

[A-J]

Yeah, there's some odd pixelation on Lightning's hair in the closeup shots but otherwise it seems to be holding up pretty well visually.

More importantly it seems to be PLAYING really well too, seems a solid 30 FPS with no drops or slowdowns. Awesome. I've also played the PS3 demo that came with Advent Children Complete and that had severe frame drops on it, they say the final game fixed that so it's all good I suppose.