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The Hassles of FFXI on the 360
Via GameSetWatch, an IGN article looking at the frustration and hassles of the SquareEnix PlayOnline interface on the Xbox 360. From the article: "If you've played FFXI previously, the process of going through Play Online to get into and out of a game session may seem familiar. On the PS2, which didn't have a complete Online solution like Xbox Live, Play Online's existence was justified and even welcomed. On Xbox 360... not so justified, and definitely not welcomed."
So the point of this article is that Square designed Final Fantasy IX to include a complete system for registration of players, management of accounts, and now that they are trying to port it to the Xbox360 which already contains that funtionality...they are having a hard time.
Wow, big suprise there. While I am not going to absolve the Square-Enix team, they're taking a game made for one platform, and putting it on another platform which has a totally different set of features they are required to use. I don't really see this as news. If the person who wrote this article is pissed, just think what the dev team is dealing with. They are required to do certain things for the Xbox 360, which conflict with infistructure already in place because the PS2 (nor will the PS3 support) any kind of unified online service. This means that every individual developer/publisher will have to develop their own solution for online play. When you try to move those solutions to another console which has an inteligent design, you will get burned.
Of course players will want to access their old accounts (if they allow this feature) so they will have to tie into the existing user database. This will confuse users because they will have an Xbox Live login, and then a FFIX login, and there is no good solution to this.
Will there be issues, of COURSE there will be issues. Is it dated? Well last I saw Ultima is what 10 years old or so and still being played? Is it for everyone, probabaly not the normal American 360 players but then general opinion is it wasnt ment for them nor are many MMOs in the traditional sense since they have a want for fast pace action akin to what SoE did to Star Wars (and we all know how well that was recieved by true MMO players)
Seriously Im starting to both get tired by people thinking
a) betas are ment to be perfect representations of the game.
b) all games HAVE to be exactly like the twitchy first person shooters on PCs
c) Everyone HAS to love your game or else.
Course I would expect nothing less from IGN since they have managed to alienate most gamers against each other in recent months.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I'm not saying you're a troll, but I wonder exactly what you're talking about here. Specifically, what "dumb idea like this" you're referring to. Also the sanity of the article in question.
First, assuming you're referring to FFXI when you mean either "dumb ideas like this" or "there is no more story," this is far from true. FFXI has a very deep and long-running storyline; the fact it takes a lot of work to experience may turn off a lot of people, but no one is demanding they play it, either. In fact, I warn most people away from FFXI unless they have time to dedicate.
But the story is just about as Final-Fantasy-esque as they come. (There is even Cid!) I will not spoil it (and indeed I don't know a good bit of it, having not yet played all the way through it), but there is far, far more than your typical MMO, involving multiple large story arcs. Both current expansions (Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia), as well as the upcoming Treasures of Aht Urhgan, are for the most part story additions, consisting of a large number of new missions.
While the game is obviously adapted toward a large multiplayer world, you still have all the typical Final Fantasy bits you'd expect, like riding chocobos, fighting large critters, summoning familiar faces, and going to weird magical worlds to save the planet. But you do it with your friends, and you are the characters that experience the story. (Given the fact FF1 and FF3 had "you" as the characters, not predefined roles, this not something unusual to the series.)
But it takes a major time dedication. This is not something you will finish in 50-100 hours. This is for people who want to have the time they spend now still paying off after a year, two years, three years down the road. (Although you will be "into" the game in a much shorter period of time.) It's not for everyone.
On the issue of PlayOnline, having used POL on a regular basis (being a FFXI player since the PS2 release), I can say (along with many who have played it since the PC beta) that POL is very nice. This is one benefit of "some companies" to leave the online handling to publishers; when they need an integrated multiplatform framework, they're not locked in by the platform.
The article basically boils down to "waah, this UI is just like the PS2 version!" What do they expect? The interface provides uniform features to two other platforms. Unless Microsoft wants to provide its Live functionality to other platforms, only exclusive titles are going to use it. This is something XBOX fans had better get used to.
Additionally, it's somewhat humorous to note the complaint about 6GB of space taken up for the hdd image. The X360 drive is suprisingly small... even the PS2 HDD is 40GB, and the FFXI image there (which loads completely and requires no disc) is 12-16GB now with all the expansions loaded. Yes, this is a big game. Don't complain to Square about having a lot of content, complain to Microsoft about having restrictively small media.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The Square Enix of 2005 is not the Squaresoft that produced all those great games you remember. After the company invested over $250 million (US) in a poorly-planned CGI movie production facility that was quickly obsoleted by competitors running on commodity hardware and Linux, the "Final Fantasy" movie they planned to recoup the loss with bombed in nearly every nation it was released. Hironobu Sakaguchi, long the creative heart of Squaresoft, was the director of the movie, and was ostracized by the rest of the employees afterward finally gave in to Japanese tradition and quit. It's a pretty safe bet that similar fates befell most of the other Squaresoft old timers, and some less than stellar management after the failure of the FF movie lead the company into massive debt, which opened it up for a takeover by Enix.
Now Squaresoft is just a brand name Enix markets to bring in easy cash to gamers looking to feed their hunger for nostalgia. Smart gamers would do well to stay far away from future FF games...