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@MarkGrass There are many (perfectly good) reasons for using containers in the way Resident Evil does. The main reason is loading and seek time and the secondary reason is just to keep things slightly more organized (since, although RE is not the prime sample of it, building massive folder trees is just stupid). On a horrible disc based system like the PS1, you'd much rather use the disc space to duplicate data several times to decrease seek time than add unnecessary loading time by having the game fetch "some here and some there." Even if they're assets that should always be in memory and only fetched once.
Another thing about recycling assets and all that is disc layout. I don't really think many companies had their own in-house experts on this subject back then (and some don't do to this date either... stupidly enough), but you can see how important the file layout on a disc is by comparing the original release of Front Mission 2nd with the re-prints (Front Mission History and the latest wave of budget re-releases). The original release pretty much looks like a copy and paste of everything the game needs, while the re-release has the files arranged in a very specific order, which significantly decreases the absurd load times the game was infamous for having.
Also, I don't think it was a PR stunt of any kind the way they did RE2, but the 2 disc thing surely is a selling point. Sort of. But if you check the disc IDs for the US version of the game, you'll see that the game obviously wasn't meant to be two discs in the first place. Probably a minor 1.5 left-over (where I guess the game did indeed only sport one disc, while RE2 expands it to two discs, mainly 'cause of its heavy amount of FMVs).
The way they split the game on two discs makes sense from a design perspective. Obviously the game wasn't gonna get infinite development time either, and I don't think anyone would be able to come up with the wizardry needed to pull off the game on one disc and still reach a reasonable deadline for a game that'd already been scrapped once. If you wanna see something that blatantly doesn't utilize its space, at all, I suggest looking at Lost Odyssey. It is on 4 discs, but could've been just 3 (which they could've easily pulled off... amazingly enough, for a JRPG with over a handful of audio languages and lots of FMVs. Kinda puts the disaster of a 360 port that FFXIII got into a new perspective too, doesn't it?)
As for Final Fantasy VII and its use of duped data on all discs?
The entire game is present on all 3 discs and the only major difference between each is a tiny fracture of story related FMVs. If a game was slapped on multiple discs just for the heck of selling it on as many discs as humanly possible, it was probably FFVII. I'm sure that if you even sit down and make a study out of it, fitting it on 2 discs shouldn't be too much of a problem. (A single disc would be a piece of cake if you were allowed to change the formats used for things too.)
The PS1 sure suffered a lot of wasted space thanks to developers' reliance on creepy ass 1994 formats all the way till the end. Fortunately, by the next console generation, other options/codecs and middleware started to pop up. <3
Another thing about recycling assets and all that is disc layout. I don't really think many companies had their own in-house experts on this subject back then (and some don't do to this date either... stupidly enough), but you can see how important the file layout on a disc is by comparing the original release of Front Mission 2nd with the re-prints (Front Mission History and the latest wave of budget re-releases). The original release pretty much looks like a copy and paste of everything the game needs, while the re-release has the files arranged in a very specific order, which significantly decreases the absurd load times the game was infamous for having.
Also, I don't think it was a PR stunt of any kind the way they did RE2, but the 2 disc thing surely is a selling point. Sort of. But if you check the disc IDs for the US version of the game, you'll see that the game obviously wasn't meant to be two discs in the first place. Probably a minor 1.5 left-over (where I guess the game did indeed only sport one disc, while RE2 expands it to two discs, mainly 'cause of its heavy amount of FMVs).
The way they split the game on two discs makes sense from a design perspective. Obviously the game wasn't gonna get infinite development time either, and I don't think anyone would be able to come up with the wizardry needed to pull off the game on one disc and still reach a reasonable deadline for a game that'd already been scrapped once. If you wanna see something that blatantly doesn't utilize its space, at all, I suggest looking at Lost Odyssey. It is on 4 discs, but could've been just 3 (which they could've easily pulled off... amazingly enough, for a JRPG with over a handful of audio languages and lots of FMVs. Kinda puts the disaster of a 360 port that FFXIII got into a new perspective too, doesn't it?)
As for Final Fantasy VII and its use of duped data on all discs?
The entire game is present on all 3 discs and the only major difference between each is a tiny fracture of story related FMVs. If a game was slapped on multiple discs just for the heck of selling it on as many discs as humanly possible, it was probably FFVII. I'm sure that if you even sit down and make a study out of it, fitting it on 2 discs shouldn't be too much of a problem. (A single disc would be a piece of cake if you were allowed to change the formats used for things too.)
The PS1 sure suffered a lot of wasted space thanks to developers' reliance on creepy ass 1994 formats all the way till the end. Fortunately, by the next console generation, other options/codecs and middleware started to pop up. <3
I will have to find out myself.
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