Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's two-disc release is another blow to hard drives in an already gigabyte-hungry year
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is apparently so honest-to-goodness big and gorgeous that the game needs two discs just to contain its sheer heft (also it's coming in 2024 now). That's the most exciting explanation anyway. Scope and fidelity aside, the decision to include two discs is likely a function of multiple factors, and it could mean several things for physical owners of the game. One thing's for sure, though: this game is going to buckle some already struggling hard drives when it comes out.
Why might a game need two discs? Well, we could be looking at the opposite approach that some games take nowadays by essentially including a cosmetic disc leashed to a mammoth mandatory download. Hell, a few physical games have actually come with a worthless decorative disc paired with a digital voucher. Instead, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will seemingly put more emphasis on installing content rather than downloading it to supplement what's on the disc, but that does not mean the game will be small altogether. One way or another, your hard drive's getting both barrels.
The obvious precedent here is Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which also came with two discs and a whopper of a drive footprint at 100GB. I'm assuming that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will work just like the Remake did, which itself worked just like Red Dead Redemption 2 did - another rare modern two-disc game, albeit a last-gen one. Basically, you got a data disc and a game disc. You'd install the bulk of the stuff with the data disc then never need to touch it again. Instead, you'd polish things off with the game disc and then use it to actually play in the future.
The important, if obvious, thing to remember is that we aren't talking about the same setup that the original
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