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Final Fantasy Creator on Xbox 360, PS3
Anonymous PC Gamer writes "I'm now in the acceptance phase of reading console war coverage. It's just not going away, and it won't until one stands victorious. Throwing his considerable voice into the din is Final Fantasy creator Hironubu Sakaguchi, currently working on Xbox 360 titles with Mistwalker Studios. In a concise, revealing interview with Gamespot Sakaguchi-san gives a simple, honest outlook on developing for the current console scene that cuts both ways (PS3 'really challenging', XBox 360 has 'poor' documentation). On competing with his former series, Final Fantasy: 'I'm willing to break them into pieces, crush them at my feet. [laughs]'"
'I'm willing to break them into pieces, crush them at my feet. [laughs]'" I take it that the false modesty thing doesn't translate into Japanese :-D
"I'm now in the acceptance phase of reading console war coverage. It's just not going away, and it won't until one stands victorious"
Uhh, why? Is there some unwritten law that states that there can be only one console? Having 3 different consoles gives us different type of technology, different functional designs, price competition, and all sorts of great stuff.
Think about it, if there were only "one" console, and all others were decimated in sales years ago...How long would it take to get a rumble pack? An integrated DVD player? The Cell processor? The Wii Mote? HD video out?
Heck, if we didn't have MS, Sony, AND Nintendo, the only changes to the console industry would be a yearly upgrade to processing power so that the latest driving and football sims could have marginally better graphics. There would be no financial gain by doing anything more risky.
So personally, I hope they all succeed. I hope they all turn a profit. And I hope they all continue to drive innovation in the console market.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Yeah, because we don't want any of those slur flinging bigots around here.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Gee, if you took one thing away from the interview about microsoft it wouldn't be "poor documentation", it would be that their marketing is awful. He did complain that it takes time to translate the documentation of the unreal engine docs into japanese, and in that respect the documentation is poor. But I think it incorrect to make that the summary of what he thinks about the 360. He was pretty positive about it overall, and this complaints about marketing are more to the tune of its a great system, too bad the marketing is preventing it from succeeding.
The part where the interviewer turns to the Microsoft PR guy and says, "you should be taking notes" rings particularly true...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
He was using the Unreal Engine as an example of what is wrong with the 360. The summary is correct.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Obviously, the guy is a legend in his own right and deserves some respect, but I'm going to take issue with the following statement:
On the motion-sensor front, I've been intimately involved in creating role-playing games. It's all I've been doing, so when I look at the RPG space, there's not a huge need for motion sensing. So I'm not that interested in that aspect of the technology. But take the 360 controller, for example, which is actually the best one that I've seen, especially the analog. And it's easy to operate, and it's really reactive, unlike the Sixaxis.
That sounds a bit narrow-sighted to me, if not overly biased. Let's avoid the "next-gen/previous-gen" feature debate - the Wii really is drawing in audiences based on the motion-sensing party games. That's what's selling the system right now. To throw out motion-sensing just because it might not pertain to your field right now is wrong, IMO. What he says and what he does are two separate things, and he might make a motion sensing RPG down the line, but the guy makes his money off the 360 so he needs to sell it well. He does give Microsoft a little criticism, namely about the marketing campaign in Japan, but I think this statement was pretty wrong in the long run.
Still, having impressive visuals do draw me. I think it has to do with the nature of the genre. Much of RPGs are about being immersed in the environment. It's easy for that to happen if the story is good and the visuals are appealing. The actual game mechanics themselves are quite secondary, which is why games like Dragon Quest VIII, which was very simplistic in gameplay, still did extraordinarily well. I should note that DQVIII didn't use realistic 3D imagery, but instead opted for extremely rich looking cel-shading, which was visually appealing.
That said, there is no reason why you can't have impressive looking RPGs on the Wii (perhaps focusing more on stylized art, rather than "raw polygon output") and innovative gameplay (actual sword swinging using the Wii-mote, etc.). If the player base continues to expand at the pace at it is, then no doubt this will happen. (Keep in mind that the Wii is still quite behind the 360 in worldwide sales, although that may change by the end of the year)
-- jchenx
From TFA:
So the development environment and support are "very good" and the two complaints about the documentation that make it "poor" are: multi-lingual support in some documentation (example: Unreal Engine3 [by Epic, not even Microsoft]) and version differences because by the time the documentation gets translated, it's sometimes out of date. So the challenges are associated with the language barrier, thus yielding "poor" because of the lack of, or out of date, Japanese versions of the documentation, for example in non-Microsoft documents (no mention specifically if this is also in relation to Microsoft documentation of development tools, which he says is 'very good'.
Programmers who can't speak English? How does that happen? Learning English is pretty much a requirement for programming.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Notice he didn't say, "I don't like the PS3's architecture, and it's so distasteful to me that this will be the last FF title I will develop for it." He's got an opinion, he's entitled to it. Apparently his misgivings haven't prevented him from committing to FFXIV on PS3.
He's talking about Kutaragi, not the PS3. The underpowered CPU is probably the reason for his "great" PR statements lately :P.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
They are the same basic CPU, but customized in different ways. The biggest difference is the design of the VMX units. The Xenon has twice as much L2 cache available. There are also many more minor differences (such as instructions that allow greater control over the use of L2 cache) that would appear to make it possible for developers to "coerce" the processor closer to peak utilization.
He doesn't work for Square, he works for Mistwalker. He was the original FF guy.
He isn't doing FF anymore. RTFA. He's got his own company, making X-Box 360 games.
All of the Cell's power is in the SPEs. The main unit is a little anemic so if you can't keep the SPEs busy you'll get lackluster performance.
Ninendo has also announced dev kits for indies. Problem is, they currently seem to have a shortage of dev kits since all big developers are moving to the Wii. In February, they postponed the dev kit release for indies :-(
Not sure where this is standing now. It seems at least some indies are getting dev kits, because there have been some Wii games announcement from them in the past few days.
I'm usually playing DS while sitting in a hot bubble bath. Very immersive. I recommend it :-)
That's actually why I'm only 30 hourse into Twilight Princess: Can't play it while taking a bath :-)
Got my surnames mixed up. Thanks.