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Square Enix Considers Revolution Support
IGN reports on a recent interview with Square-Enix president Wada, where it's revealed that the RPG crafting company is considering heavily supporting the Nintendo Revolution. From the article: "One area that Wada seems to be impressed with is a particularly controversial side of Nintendo's Online plan. In his comments posted at Impress Game Watch yesterday, Iwata states that Nintendo is going through with the idea of letting players connect only to players whom they've met in real life. While it's unclear how strict Nintendo plans to be with this idea (Animal Crossing DS is reported to allow for play amongst strangers), Wada applauds the move in his comments today, stating 'It gives the image of taking the real world seamlessly into the virtual world.'"
Considering no details have been announced yet, we should all keep our panties unbunched for the moment.
Think of online play now. Most systems now give you access to everyone and people try to branch off into smaller groups to get away from internet jerks. This doesn't always work, however, as often times random people still have access. Watching my friend play NFL 2K3 on XBOX live highlights the problem. He's good, and more often than not opponents disconnect, quit, or act like total jerks when he is winning.
Now imagine an opt in system. You look online for certain groups. These groups have rules you have to play by. Moderators can kick you out if you don't follow them. Because it is an opt-in system only, these groups would not be affected by outsiders at all. The downside would be to do the legwork to find groups of people to play with. The upshot is that internet ass clownery is greatly reduced. It will result in more finished games, more civil attitudes, and more fun.
That's my take on the whole thing. In games like MMORPGs or Animal Crossing most of the game is centered around player to computer conflict, but in sports or fighting games you have direct conflict with another human, and the current anonymous system leads to alot of frustration. I think Nintendo is trying to reduce this.
That's just my opinion though.
Don't be so narrow minded. A feature like this wont be all bad and only for kids. Think of it this way, you'll have a whitelist of people you are willing to play with. And only if both parties communicate with each other in some way can they play games with each other. As long as the whitelist is unlimited in size, this would be awesome.
No more problems of people dropping out of games. No more problems of accidentally getting team killers on your side. I know tons of people who have only one argument about Counter Strike, that argument is the sterotype of the CS player. A system like this solves that problem flawlessly.
And you can bet within a day that there will be people sharing info all over the internet so that they can find strangers to play with. There is simply no way Nintendo can prevent that, in fact I think they would encourage it.
Nintendo prides itself on making things very polished, very simple, and flawless by design. I believe that this move is true as it perfectly fits in with the Nintendo philosophy. However, there better be more to the revolution than just this or it will be more of a quickly routed rebellion.
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Square needs money for one reason: Final fantasy (the movie). The only way they can generate more income is to sell more games (that should be a Maddenism) and they're selling as many games as they can on the PS2 currently; which means that they have to produce games on other platforms. The reasons they might choose Nintendo rather than Microsoft to support are that
1)Being a Japaneese company Nintendo's coporate culture is closer to their own.
2)Square/Enix produces a lot of RPGs (which sell well in Japan) and the XBox has no presence in Japan.
3)Nintendo has the DS and GBA so Nintendo may be leveraging SE to develop more games for their "main" platform.
4)SE may actually like the direction that Nintendo is going with and see it as potentially more profitable than Microsoft's aproach.