I was looking at older games that I played as a kid. Lunar 1 had 3 discs compared to Breath of Fire III that had 1. I remember them both being similar pixel art styles and similar lengths. What made Lunar 1 require so much more data than BoF3? Was it the cutscenes? What was the major contributor to high data requirements during the PS1 era?
In: Technology
Game engine size, asset counts, compression techniques – all of which would have been dictated by the studios budget. Given consistent play time and asset quality you are left the game mechanics/engine and quantity of assets.
Most of the time the answer is FMV sequences, and Lunar had plenty of those. Final Fantasy as well.
Almost all the ‘extra’ data for that era is full motion video. This takes up huge amounts of space. With the Ps1 in a cd, the big benefit was that you could put a lot of video into a game, which with cartridges was near impossible.
CD quality audio also mattered, but that could be altered. It was video. Everything else, game, art, etc were not that big. Even in large multi disc games, the game was often small, just video.
Even PC games at the time on CD had the same situation, and full motion, recorded video was a big draw to many games. It was a large change in how games looked and felt
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