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Square Steps Back from 'No FF on 360' Remark
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Square/Enix has stepped away from a comment made by Executive Producer Shinji Hashimoto. Wednesday we discussed his comment, which would seem to indicate that Final Fantasy titles won't be coming to the 360. Square took pains today to specify that he was only referring to current plans. "A spokesperson for Square Enix told GamesIndustry.biz, 'Hashimoto-san was talking about the current situation' - which would suggest his comments shouldn't be interpreted as forward-looking. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said he expects the next Final Fantasy to appear on PlayStation 3 exclusively - but observed that Square Enix will face a tough decision. 'The series has always been single console and given the Xbox 360 sell through in Japan, it would be hard to put the next Final Fantasy installment on the 360 only. Square Enix faces a dilemma: put the next game on the 360 only and alienate Japanese fans, depart with tradition and make it multi-platform, or go with PS3 as an exclusive and deal with the backlash from the west. I view Square Enix as a tradition-bound company, and expect the last alternative to be chosen.'"
Go back to Nintendo! I'd be interested to see
1) If the wii had the horsepower for what they want
2) How the Square guys would take advantage of the wii design
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
I make it a rule to disregard any "rumor" that can be traced back to flamebaiters on message boards attempting to piss off fanboys. Speaking of which: did you know Gears of War might come to the PS3?
Indeed. And that inevitably results in the ported game actually being LESS feature-rich or MISSING content due to the problems of translating code under time constraints. And that results in morons being led to think that the inferior console is instead SUPERIOR or that the more powerful console's architecture is somehow COUNTER-INTUITIVE. Which results in my face COMBUSTING.
That is just pure flamebait, and shouldn't have ended up on the front page of anywhere but an Xbox360 fansite.
Why is it flamebait? The subtext to that one sentence is that the PS3 is going to fail in the US, and ignores the fact that Final Fantasy titles usually sell as many copies in Japan alone as they do in the rest of the world. He, and everybody else with two or more brain cells, knows that there isn't a snowflake's chance in hell that a Final Fantasy game will ever be an Xbox360 exclusive given the non-existence of the platform in Japan, and that the next-gen race isn't even close to decided in the rest of the world. So why post the false dichotomy except to troll?
I'd much rather get updated versions of Chrono Trigger and the Soul Blazer trilogy.
Unfortunately, getting an update on the Soul Blazer series isn't likely to ever happen, given that it wasn't quite a best seller, and the people responsible for it have long since moved on from Square-Enix. However, you might be interested to know that it's not quite a trilogy.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Final Fantasy VII and VIII were both released for the PS1 and PC.
Final Fantasy XI is on the PS2, PC, and 360.
A 360 port wouldn't exactly be an earth-shattering move.
"When you make a crossplatform game, it is limited by the lowest hardware specs of each console. maybe graphics for one, storage medium for another, and persistent objects for a third."
Now that's just silly. If all they're doing to change from building for Platform A to building for Platform B is changing a command line switch in their compiler then they deserve to be LCD'd.
Good porting means balancing and mitigating the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. If Console A has less graphical power than Console B, then THAT version might get geometrically simpler models or smaller textures or a lower framerate. If Console C has the juice to perform full physics on a moving car while Console D doesn't, your build for Console D will have a simplified physics model.
I mean, PC gaming has had those tweakable settings for over a decade, to compensate for the varied power in each machine. Naturally developers know of this.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Blue Dragon -- to be released in the US this summer -- is directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original creator of Final Fantasy, who directed or produced every FF through FFX. The music is by Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of all the music in FF 1 through 9 and some of FFX. Neither of them were involved in FFXII nor are they involved in FFXIII. Blue Dragon is an XBox 360 exclusive.
:)
I know a lot of people liked FFXII, and indeed I thought the gameplay was awesome, but I was disappointed by the story. Although intriguing in some ways, it was much thinner than in previous FF games, and lacked any sort of emotion. I'm hoping that the spirit of FF has gone with Sakaguchi and Uematsu and will return in Blue Dragon. This is also convenient because I have a 360 but really don't want to buy a PS3.
Unless you're talking about a company that's actually owned by a console maker, there's no loyalty in the 3rd party world. If Wii has 95% of the market, Square will probably find a way to get FF13 on that instead even if it means scrapping the grahpic engine they've been working on. It's not like Square stayed exclusive to PSX out of loyalty to begin with. It's because PSX/PS2 had a huge dominating position in the market, coupled with some technical/political issues (i.e. feud with Nintendo, plus N64 was delayed so they couldn't develop for it even if they wanted to).
When N64 wasn't going anywhere, 3rd party had no problem jumping ship (but still develop for the dominant Nintendo handhelds). No reason to assume it's any different for Sony. And if PS3 really manages to take off, expect FF13 to go back to exclusively PS3 again.
Japanese are not like Americans. They need to make a profit. They do not feel compelled to maximise their profit at the expense of all else - in fact, they often loathe that attitude. Many things are more important to most Japanese businessmen and executives than profit, particularly if they are traditionalists. Not everybody there is like this, but Square-Enix is run by some fairly traditional people. If Americans are slaves to the bottom line, then Japanese are slaves to tradition and pride.
A Japanese company would rather stick with somebody they know well and have prior connections with, than "shop around" for somebody who will give them a 10% lower price. They will not normally abandon a current partner unless they are mistreated or they are at risk of losing money (ie, making a loss, not just reduced profit).
If you want to make a traditionalist Japanese executive incredibly angry, offer him a bribe to switch to your company. It's a direct insult. If Microsoft even proposed something like you suggest, it would inspire hatred of a religious fervour, and it would be likely that no Square-Enix title would ever run on any platform made by Microsoft, ever. They may be able to win FF by persuasion; they will not be able to do it by throwing money around.
2. The 360. Piss-poor market in Japan, good everywhere else, but not selling as fast as:
3. The Wii - Fastest selling home console on the market worldwide, as fast as Nintendo can make them. Selling faster than the current numerical market leader (the 360) is or ever has. Popular everywhere, including Square's home turf.
Now, of course the intelligent thing to do would be to just make the damn series Wii exclusive. But of course, Square has be too smart for that! So instead they're pissing around waiting to see if PS3 sales will perk up, and trying to cover their asses in the meantime. I think it's clear they desperately don't want to have to crawl back to Nintendo. They ran off from Casa Nintendo 10 years ago like a spoiled Rich-Bitch, "You don't own me! I don't need you! I've got Sony!"
Of course, I'd really love to see Nintendo turn Square out on their ass "Uhhh, yeah, see, I'm kind of busy, and you're really a lot older and saggy now. Not as hot as you used to be at all." And let them slum it on a system with a barely 7 figure market, while Nintendo's well into 8.
I'd guess they don't want to go to Microsoft because MS poached all their talent. Including fucking Akira Torayama. Who by the way, has the worst fucking art style on the planet. Who the fuck decided that the most bland, uninteresting mangaka on the planet needed to be the most famous? Any schmuck with a one-shot in Shounen Jump can draw better than that hack (and make characters that don't all look alike through every fucking project he's ever been involved in!)
Good porting means balancing and mitigating the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
Please note that you said "good porting". That's the problem. Many ports are shit and do get held back by the lowest common demoninator. Xbox owners were constantly receiving substandard ports of PS2 games because the PS2 happened to be the main development platform last generation.
MEDIA: Do you plan FF on 360?
Exec1: Well.. I don't know of any plans to make one on 360 for now.
MEDIA: Aha! "EXEC SAYS: FF ON 360, NEVER!"
Exec2: Wait, we never said that, we're talking about immediate plans.
MEDIA: Aha! "SQUARE STEPS BACK FROM WHAT THEY SAID BEFORE!"
Exec3: But we never said it...?!
MEDIA: Aha! "SQUARE TRIES TO BEND HISTORY AND CENSOR MEDIA!"
Exec1: O_o
Exec2: o_O
Exec3: O_O
Well, one of the distinctions isn't so much "profits" overall, but "when" the profits will come. Most countries in the world tend to think longer term than we do in the US. Most decisions in large corporations, these days, are made by the quarter or the year. Then again, many corporations in the US get big very fast, and then die very fast. American companies aren't very good at, and aren't too concerned with longevity. Japanese companies notice that what's good for the consumer is often good for the corporation, in the long run. paying employees higher wages, for instance, insures that the quality of living remains high in the surrounding area, and that people can continue to purchase their products for years to come. Also, paying higher wages means more productivity, and higher quality products.
- In the US, the difference between highest and lowest paid workers is somwhere around 600:1 in a given company
- In most industrialized nations, the difference between highest and lowest paid workers is about 50:1
- Japan is somewhere around 15:1, on average
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Anti-aliasing essentially takes neighboring pixels, such as those in between every pixel on a diagonal, and makes them a semi-transparent color of the internal edge, thus approximating "half way to being the edge". What results is a pixel-based structure that represents more geometery than the exact location of all the pixels. Probably not a very clear way of describing it, but I don't know a better way without grabbing a sheet of graph paper and making a diagram.
Flicker occurs when "jaggies" (to use layman's terms) change their geometeric structure, usually by the simple rotatation of a diagonal line, or finely detailed texture. If you can dimish or completely stop jaggies from occuring through anti-aliasing, you also kill the flickering that occurs from the result of it's rotation. So yes, anti-aliasing, does, in fact, reduce flicker, tremendously.
There is a small similarity between anti-aliasing and interlace flicker filters used on NTSC displays, although an interlace flicker filter is much more simplistic and just a vertical gaussian blur applied to an image. But interlace flicker and alias flicker stem from similar problems with displaying abrupt edges on a pixel-based display.
Video doesn't share this problem because the chip on a video camera already acounts for neighboring pixels. But in a 3D graphics envirnoment, not accounting for neighboring pixels will create jaggies and huge amounts of flicker.
And obviously, no, anti-aliasing doesn't reduce framerate if you have the horsepower to do it. It's extremely graphically intesive because you're forcing the computer to calculate geometetric positions far more detailed than the screen resolution itself. But I can make a strong case that anti-aliased graphics appear to be much higher resolution than the same graphics at 4 or 5 times the ACTUAL resolution. If you would like, I could go into more detail.
As a graphic designer, I have to know a certain amount about the ins and outs of the visual perception of graphics.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I have a HDTV (only 37") that will display and enhance standard definition input (composite or AV and S video) so if I play a GameCube game the graphics comes out as "good" to "not bad" and the same is true for my PS2 games. From my personal perspective it can be quite hard to pick the difference although I would definitely concede that the GC graphics for the games I have are marginally better than some of my PS2 games but not all.
Enter the 60GB PS3 (Australian) which I recently purchased for a very good deal (US$400 + PS2 and 10 PS2 games trade-in). Put on V1.7 firmware and most of my PS2 games still played but I could not notice any graphical enhancement. A few days later I put on the V1.8 firmware and the graphical improvement on my PS1 and PS2 games (all except 2 of my games play now) was remarkable since they were now upscaled with smoothing to 720p or 1080i via component or HDMI. Even DVD's are upscaled via HDMI and the result is also remarkable. With the V1.8 firmware the PS3 will now upscale PS1/2 games to 1080p but my HDTV does not support that so I cannot comment.
I still play the GC (Metroid and Zelda) but if you compare it's graphics against the PS3 upscaled PS2 games it is now no contest since the PS2 games just look better to the point that I am now replying many of my favourate PS2 games. IMHO the only downside of the PS3 is it's lack of PS3 games but since I can play graphically enhanced PS2 games I can wait. Even some of my PS1 games are now graphically acceptable on my HDTV.
The problem many people have with the PS3 and the Xbox360 is choosing a decent HDTV and I would be very wary of "HD ready" because your TV must support 720p at the minimum to qualify as a HDTV. Just because you have a large screen does not necessarily mean it is a HDTV in-fact once you look at getting a HDTV over 47" you really should look at 1080p but that is going to be more expensive. Re your post I cannot comment on screen flickering since I have never seen it on my TV but then I prefer RPG's and Action Adventure games.
My recommendation to anyone at the moment is if you have the money and want a gaming/home entertainment system get a decent HDTV first but do some serious homework before you buy and I can't repeat this often enough make sure your HDTV has HDMI and supports as a base minimum 720p. IMHO any HDTV less than 32" should be relegated to the kids room (if you have any) but then this does depend on your disposable income.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.