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Square Enix Attempting Final Fantasy XIV Damage Control
basscomm writes "Just the other day, it was discussed here on Slashdot that Final Fantasy XIV was released into the world as a buggy, incomplete mess. Now, it's been announced that due to 'generous amounts of player feedback' that lots of changes are coming (honest!). And, as a result, anyone who registers their game before October 25th will have their 30-day trial upgraded to a 60-day trial. But will it be enough to keep the game from hemorrhaging players once the free trials end?"
Not to be pessimistic, but I don't think it's possible to completely rewrite the game in just a few weeks.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
From the reviews I read it sounds like the entire concept was borked. The game itself is buggy, the installation is a mess, the game play is boring and tedious. One review I saw showed a five minute gameplay clip where the character was being relentlessly attacked by butterflies.
Is it sad that those little characters on the side didn't make me think of Final Fantasy, but 8-Bit Theatre instead?
I already stopped my subscription to FFXIV. Even though I still had two weeks left before 30 day trial would've been over, they already disabled my logon. To me, this seems inexcusably bad. I paid for the game, which includes 30 days and they haven't given that to me. There's no way I'll be coming back.
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
As a long time player of FFXI, as well as several other MMORPGs, my feelings were that a lot of the highly negative reviews were really harping on subjects that for the most part were irrelevant. That being said there is a LOT of work necessary to get this game going. I was about to cancel my subscription and wait 6 months and see where they were at.
AH, Interface issues, Repeating terrain graphics are all things that actually didn't matter much to me. I don't mind having to learn a new way of doing things for a new game. What got me frustrated quickly was that the world seemed to have no content.
One of the things I like about FF games is that when you're in a large city it tends to be well-developed, with lots of weird little quests among various townsfolk, and lots of hints about up and coming content that you won't see for hours, levels, or even at all depending on how you play. None of that is present in the game currently. Every step of the one major town quest (which is a chainquest) feels like a tutorial exercise (which it is of course)...not like environment deepening material.
The world is simply not alive enough. If you run around outside there are few monsters...no killer bunnies...95% of the mobs are instantly generated for a specific person's grind-quest and aren't attackable by anyone else.
I love FFXI, I love slow worldly feeling MMOs and regular RPGs, but at this point the game is a series of grindy-quests that you pick and choose at with no end-goal in sight...there is one story-arc quest line that gives you very little and reoccurs in your progression extremely infrequently.
At the moment the game feels like they got their basic systems down, but they've got nothing actually in the game that's game-like yet.
I assume you're talking about the offline Final Fantasy games.. Those tend to have a nice, somewhat deep storyline that western games often lack.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
They're fun (Generally, maybe not this one)
Now someone explain to me the appeal of poems. As far as I can tell they're nothing but crazy poetic crap.
That can't just be because they're not to my taste or I haven't put the time into appreciating them, they're just crap.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Let's say what gamerankings says:
Final Fantasy XIV: 51.43%
Daikatana: 54.08%
That's a "throw it in the garbage bin and start over" rating.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... I would like them to perform this kind of damage control. You know, the kind of damage control that involves listening to your user-base.
Mind you, it's not like they had a choice.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Holy shit, they aren't even releasing the patch for over a month?
I don't even play this and that sounds absolutely ridiculous.
You mean, give it the Star Wars Galaxies treatment?
Back then that largely applied to PC releases as well. Because it was difficult to impossible to apply patches after the fact, the portion of the budget spent on QA ahead of time was much greater than it is today. A lot of what's released today would have been considered completely unacceptable to developers of yore.
But it's also the release schedule, while 3D Realms took it too far, there is something to be said for releasing a product when it's done. The main mistake they made was not sticking with an engine and not defining a fixed list of features. Had they done that and released it when the bugs were fixed, we wouldn't be waiting for Gearbox to finish it up.
Nothing against Gearbox, I've been playing borderlands for a few days now and have yet to come across a single bug. Which I couldn't say at that point for the poster boy for incompetent QA that is Fallout 3.
Now would be the time to announce PS3 remakes of Final Fantasy VI and VII, available together for $29.
During the mid- to late- 90's I'd heartily agree; Square's RPGS were great in those days, and I still pick up Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI from time to time. These days, their popularity is more due to leftover nostalgia and riding on the coattails of their classics. Which, if response the the latest two games is an indicator, may soon be running dry.
Having played this game and read the list of "updates", they don't have a prayer. The "updates" are more like basic features and UI stuff that no serious MMO would launch without.
- They're adding a way to "search retainers in a ward for specific items." aka: Functionality like an auction house. It's good that they're adding this. It's not good that they launched the game with a system that was so completely and fundamentally broken at the design level that it never should have been let out of alpha. Seriously, someone thought it was a good idea to make players wander around from retainer to retainer in the hope of finding item that they need, in a game where crafting is heavily dependent on player made inputs? Have these people ever played a MMO?
- They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly. Which is good, since you can't right now. Again, who ever heard of a MMO where you can't reply to messages? This isn't rocket science, it's the most basic chat functionality on the planet. (While they're at it they should make message size limits something slightly larger then a twitter message.)
- They're adding a way to let you scroll the map with the mouse. Seriously. Go read it yourself. You can't scroll the map with a mouse. In a PC game. I can't make shit this stupid up.
These are just some of the changes. They're also hitting the broken targetting system (target, pick a spell, then... target again? For real? Who thought this up?). Hopefully they do something about the poor performance and terrible stability of the client. But it won't matter.
You only get one chance to make an impression in the MMO market. Recovering from the perception that you've got a bad game is extremely difficult after the fact. This game has nothing going for it except that it's pretty (if you spend enough on a computer that can actually run it with acceptable performance). In basically every other area, it's inferior to that other game that has 12 million players and just happens to have an expansion launching at the same time as the patch that will add basic functionality to FF 14.
And if you get past that, shortly after there's some Star Wars MMO coming out. Between those two games, a buggy PS3 port with the worst UI a MMO has ever seen has no chance of recovering. It'll be running at 80,000 subs (if they're lucky) in 6 months. Fortunately for them, it's really meant as a PS3 game anyway and on the PS3 the competition is much weaker.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
In this case, it's surprisingly true. If you look at the stuff they're adding, its not that advanced. It's basic functionality. Like searching for items ala an auction house, rather then clicking on every store trying to see if what you want is even for sale. Oh, and scrolling the map, and replying to messages.
No serious company would release a game with basic stuff like that missing... which shows you how seriously Square takes this game on the PC. You're buying a beta test for the PS3 version, nothing more.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Back in the Verant days, yes, MMOs were dicks to their players and that was ok (well ok in that people would put up with it). You canceled your account, they deleted your character and other silly punitive measures like that. However WoW showed everyone that isn't how you do things. You be nice to players. Cancel your account in a rage? No problem you can keep playing for all your paid time. You wanna come back later, even years later? No problem, all your characters are just as you left them, database space is cheap. Get really mad and delete your characters? No problem, they can be recovered from backup. Someone steal your account and sell all your hard earned shit? No problem, they can trace that and recover to an earlier state.
That is how things should be done and, no surprise, what gamers want now. Once Blizzard started doing that, other companies learned. SOE went and screamed at EQ's developers and producers and they went and recovered all the deleted characters and sent out a "Please come back and play we've restored your shit," e-mail and EQ and EQ2 now operate similar to WoW.
Square sounds like they are still in the old "Us vs them," mentality. The users are the enemy, and if they do something you don't like, such as cancel their account, they need to be punished. No, sorry guys. As a subscription service with lots of competitors, you are in the customer service business. That means making your customers happy PARTICULARLY your angry ones. If someone leaves in a huff, you want to be nice to them. Tell them "We're sorry to see you go, feel free to play out the remaining time, and come back any time you like." Maybe then later they change their mind. If you are a dick about it, more likely they do write you off forever.
Also I could potentially see this opening them up for a lawsuit. If the agreement is X dollars buys you Y days of access, and there are no refunds for partial time, then I can't see how it is ok to refuse to provide the complete paid time. If I call and cancel my cable, they'll shut it off immediately. However they will also refund all unused time. If I call and cancel my AC service contract, they won't refund my money, but it'll continue for the rest of the time I've paid.
Counter-point one: the Japanese people are basically Klingons - they hate and despise everyone else, and will have no problems in tilting the playing field in favour of the Homeland. Japanese studios would rather lose 100 US subscribers due to unplayable than one domestic one due to being pwned by gaijin scum, not because it makes financial sense, but just because we are Klingons.
Counter-point two: the PC release is just a beta for the PS3 version. There are six PCs in the whole of Japan, and five of them are used exclusively for hentai. Nothing that happens on PC matters. I doubt they'll even support the PC after the PS3 version ships.
Counter point three: the players who matter have no expectations, beyond being able to dick around with midget cat rabbits, or whatever the hell those munchkins in FF are. The players who matter are all Japanese, although Wapanese are also welcome as long as they don't get uppity. Being insular is an implicit design goal, not a failure.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
FFXIV isn't being released on the Xbox 360. It's a PS3/PC "exclusive."
So, yeah - given how horrible the Windows version is, that might explain why there's no Xbox 360 version. They simply have no one who knows how to write code for the Xbox 360 or Windows.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
UI lag isn't a disadvantage?
Actually, the effectiveness of that is not beside the point at all. If it doesn't even actually solve a problem, it's taking away basic functionality without offering anything. Plus, you can gauge people's (or companies) competence by the solution they come up with: seeing someone come up with a pencils-up-the-nose pants-on-head retarded solution is actually a bad sign.
First of all, it's an idiotic solution anyway. I've seen, used and in ye olde DOS days even _made_ trainers for games, and none ever needed switching to the trainer to activate. The way you do it, is you hook on certain key combinations that the user can press while in game. E.g., numeric 1 = add a million cash, numeric 2 = infinite health, etc. The game never sees a task switch at all.
Second, if you're really determined, even that is old hat, and you run the game in a virtual machine instead. Glider did basically that to get around WoW's checks. Again it's not stuff that'll need a task switch, or the game to notice one.
Third, and even more important, it was defeated already by making it run windowed. So it's a thoroughly incompetent solution even for the stated problem.
Fourth, and the most important, anything important should be checked by the server, and you shouldn't trust the client for more than movement and animation. It's not possible to memory-hack WoW and give yourself more money or duplicate items, because the server doesn't trust the client with that. That Square-Enix even needed something like that, is reason to worry. If the client is trusted enough to worry about client-side cheating tools, that's a crap MMO implementation and reason to expect a deluge of duped gold or duped items or whatever down the line.
That's the real important part. Crap implementations aren't beside the point, and aren't just academic discussions in how competently the game is implemented. A crap implementation can set the stage for bigger problems down the line. And that they even need to try to disable ALT+TAB is not a good sign.
Fifth, MMOs are inherently social setups and in more than one way. It's not just a SP game plus an in-game chat. A lot (most?) players also use guild web sites, some have an IRC channel too, check or update sites for advice with quests and whatnot, have at the very least as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak running, many use some form of IM to keep in touch with other players or just friends, etc. Restricting access to those is seriously crippling something which is by now pretty standard MMO gameplay. Needing to basically close the game every single time you even do basic stuff like post something to the guild site or checking some guild schedule or to post a screenshot of your char or to IM a guild mate, isn't just a pain in the butt, it's crippling the experience of playing the damned game as a MMO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.