ELi5: During the PS1 era, why were some games so massive in data size compared to other games of similar length?

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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?

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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