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Final Fantasy XIV Failed Due To Overly Detailed Flowerpots
_xeno_ (155264) writes "You might not remember Final Fantasy XIV, the Square Enix MMORPG that flopped so badly that Square Enix fired the original developers. But Square Enix certainly does, and at a recent GDC panel, producer Naoki Yoshida explained his views on what caused its failure. One reason? The focus on graphical quality over game play, leading to flower pots that required the same rendering power as player characters, but without the same focus on making the game fun to play. Along with severe server instability and a world made up of maze-like maps, he also cited the game being stuck in past, trying to stick with a formula that worked with Square Enix's first MMO, Final Fantasy XI, without looking at newer MMOs to see what had worked there."
Lovingly crafted with attention to detail, yet not pragmatic enough to make money, money, money. It must be art.
Instead of trying for massive multiplayer, Maybe they should of concentrated on the people that got the series there in the first place - the ones not playing multiplayer?
Thoughts?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
It's easy to shit on the graphic artists, but were they in charge of the gameplay? Were they in charge of the game design? No way. These are totally separate departments, and a producer trying to shift the blame for the game's failure onto the art department is pathetic.
I played it, Black mage, the reason why it failed was because the skill system was so messed up it was better for me to run around punching mobs to get skill points than using my spells.
Also the bazaar system, searching through 1000 player shops to find one item gets old really really fast.
Also the scaling for parties was very bad, the difficulty did not scale at all but you got alot of bonus xp.
what the? wow. talk about graphics overload. wonder how many and vertices or polygons those flower pots needed. how about the specular and other lighting effects? it'll be interesting to see why or how detailed the flower pots are.
Why would I not remember a game that was revamped and re-released less than a year ago?
Of course I remember it, I'm still playing and there are plenty of others on my server.
I've been preaching that game creators should be spending some time on actual fun game play for years and years now. Graphics are nice, but game play is huge. Take Nethack for example. The Half-Life 1 & 2 games figured out the game play thing also. There are more, but the point is... I hope all game developers realize that it's important one day.
-hps
It wasn't a WOW clone.
Let none now doubt, FLOWER POWER!
why pot is called pot?
The pot plants? Really? Are you that deluded? If that's what you really think, then I guess I should better not reactivate my account. I was actually contemplating it.
What sunk the game was INSANE lags, zoning/loading times that made you wonder whether the game has to send you the whole zone via network every time you zoned, pointless resource gathering, impossible crafting, a skill system from hell, a leveling system where the only way to get at least halfway decent xp was a mind numbing, boring task system, completely shot class balance, a constant "where the hell am I supposed to go at my level?" feeling (and the aforementioned zoning and general traveling times didn't really encourage simply exploring).
And that's what you can really describe easily. The myriad little tidbits that irk you and that make you want to drop the game and never look back are hard to describe.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It failed for many more serious reasons than engine performance.
There were no quests in version 1.0, it was pure grind. Most of the players were so bored out of their minds they took to crafting.
So how did this game compare with Final Hallway 13?
If only the same sort of people that took over the new FF14 could take over Final Fantasy proper, we could maybe get some good games again.
That, and the fact that it's an MMO in a series that has traditionally been a single player character-driven story-based adventure.
Twinstiq, game news
According to Wiktionary: Pot as in container most likely comes from a Proto-Indo-European word reconstructed as *budnos. Pot as in cannabis appears to come from a contraction of Spanish potación de guaya, literally "drink of grief", meaning a drink made with marijuana buds in wine.
The test was not a success, but that does not mean it was a failure. It just means we now know the next version of the Matrix have that feature set. It's hard to get you humans to perform calculations for the sake of calculating. You think homeomorphic encryption is hard? Just try running programs atop a logic lattice that require teenagers to do their homework! Hell, you even propagate errors ON PURPOSE just to be lazy. That's why there has to be so much redundancy!
Honestly I think the main reason it failed was because it was NOT like FFXI. It's like they took all the greatest parts of FFXI and replaced them with WoW crap.
So why did EVE fail? The same thing - labrynthine GUI, endless grind just to get through the tutorial, massive download size, perpetual patch treadmill.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Along with severe server instability and a world made up of maze-like maps,
That's one little problem I have with the later maps in FFXI. While the original areas had nice big areas, most of the later expansion areas were what I call "outdoor dungeons". Pits connected by trench hallways, with the areas in between being up on 10 foot high cliffs. There are even some areas you wouldn't realize are outside except when you look up and see a tree canopy.
Another problem XIV had was the degree to which sections of a map were copied and pasted. Sure, in FFXI you can see stuff like similar looking forks in the road, but in XIV, entire small hills were practically rubber-stamped all over a zone, without so much as even rotating them.
he also cited the game being stuck in past, trying to stick with a formula that worked with Square Enix's first MMO, Final Fantasy XI, without looking at newer MMOs to see what had worked there."
My own analogy of what happened is that they effectively had a list of "stuff that didn't work in FFXI and we need to fix when we don't have PS2 Limitations", and "stuff that works great in FFXI and we should keep". They used the first list, and threw out the second.
Another problem I think XIV had was that someone had A Great Idea, which is always trouble. "Hey, guys! What if we made your class depend on the weapon you were using?" Which sounds like it could possibly be a pretty good idea. Except they apparently never bothered to actually play test it to make sure it worked well enough, or even tune it. Instead, all the preview demos were all about the uber graphics resolution. Of course, this being in Japan, anyone who might have pointed out that it wasn't such a great idea would have instinctively held back so as not to embarrass his superiors.
Other radical ideas were thrown in, apparently from just trying to do something different without trying it, such as "People weren't 100% happy with the auction house in XI, so let's not have an auction house! We'll make people's characters stand around and bazaar their stuff even when they're not online!" Except that the number one problem with that is NO INDEXING. If you want, say, a cotton thread, you have to check every character's stuff individually, with no way to compare prices or even know who has what you want. Or at least that's what I understood the problem was from reading a bunch of forum posts from people in beta, because no way was I going to start another grindy MMO from the start, so I stayed with XI. (If I do go try other MMOs, I've sworn that it will be for exploration and seeing cool landscapes and maybe cool plot lines, not for grinding gear to help me grind more gear.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It's "you're a gal and an argonaut", you moron!
I find the prettier the graphics get, the less I seem to like their characters. If I hate the characters, I'm not going to get into the game enough to finish it. And I'm not going to drop $60 sight-unseen from a studio whose characters I typically hate. I've gotten to the point where I pretty much just ignore new game announcements from them, and that consider that to be an indicator of pretty bad health for the studio. They very much need to put some effort into making sure their games are actually fun and that people will give two shits about the characters in them. That's how you make an epic game, even with PS1 graphics.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Really? Here all this time I thought that lyric had something to do with bestiality. If you have ever watched that show you know what I mean...
God, yes. I bought a PS specifically to play FFVII. In fact, that's why I ended up with a PS rather than an N64. I played many of the other FF releases on a variety of platforms, with many fond memories.
As soon as I heard Square Enix was jumping on the goddamn MMO bandwagon with the series, FF became dead to me.
I want something I can play at home, offline, as the fucking singular, main character around which the entire epic plot revolves. I even enjoy the oddly culturally inaccessible Japanese angst that is imbued in these storylines. I also *like* that each damn JRPG revisits the same basic tropes, albeit from different angles.
ABOVE ALL, I DON'T WANT A FUCKING ONLINE, SOCIAL GAME WITH A GODDAMN SUBSCRIPTION MODEL! WoW already has nailed that market perfectly, for those who are interested in that kind of experience. For all practical purposes they own the market and the market seems both satisfied and fully tapped (ie. there's unlikely to be a vast untapped market for MMO subscribers so competition is effectively a zero-sum game among the various companies).
Square Enix, do you want to be an also-ran with a mediocre MMO that everyone compares to WoW, or do you want to once again be the unrivaled master of the JRPG archetype?
its the fact that a hangnail can dramatically change the course of history in a FF game, and yet everything else is flat out horseshit that does nothing
you got teenagers flying off 50 story drops like it was nothing, one hitting giant robots with their bare fists, a crappy JPOP song with 5 min worth of inspiration in the biggest shithole imaginable saves the world, but yet flowerpots is the straw that broke the camels back
yea, no wonder you have produced nothing but super expensive fail, you are retarded, thats why
I remember how it took me nearly two weeks to get to level 12 in FFXI.
Why would I ever want to subject myself to the same kind of leveling game mechanic a second time?
The focus on flowerpots, while a little misguided, is still correct. Yoshida explained (or rather, a translator in my ear explained because he was speaking in Japanese) that, because they had such great success with FFXI, they failed to look at where the MMO genre had gone and stuck conservatively to their (cartoonishly large) guns. Undeniably, Square-Enix is a graphics powerhouse. Their games look gorgeous. Correct me if I'm wrong but style is just part of Japanese culture. The systemic problem was that the focus was not where it should have been: player experience. This is a game, after all. He emphasized that the success of FFXI blinded them in the creation of FFXIV and development time was spent in all the wrong places because they believed they were doing a good job without realizing what was going on right under their noses.
There's also the part that the game suffered upwards of 400 crashes per day (I'm assuming across the various servers worldwide), which was just a symptom of the larger problem.
I bought it on steam a couple of weeks ago and I'm not impressed with this game. Any reviewer who gave this game high praise must have been blinded, as they could not have reviewed the game on its own, but rather how it compared to their feelings about the original version, which may be an improvement, but only a handful of critics seemed to review it for what it was; an attempt at an MMORPG which is bland at best.
What meets you in this game is, first of all, NPCs named Wrdarfral or other random keyboard hammering names, which just destroys immersion and gives you the impression that nobody cares about this game's environment. An insane amount of text compared to what an objective is. I ended up not caring and flying through the text, except that you can't, because it seems to need an ACK from the server/lags sometimes. A poorly developed map system which is good at showing icons but not good at orienting players. A poorly structured user interface. I also get a much lower frame rate at 1280x1024 with the lowest settings in FF XIV compared to running Elder Scrolls Online at 1920x1080 with normal settings. The game struggles with a clear identity and has no clear direction. Only "moogles" and "chocobos" are the only things that vaguely says Final Fantasy. There are level scaling rules that pop up in your face every time, that get in the way of playing. Why is this a problem? Because when you're running around the map, the low-level or higher-level fates you encounter spawn often and everywhere in proximity. I mean, I could just get lower XP, not have my face blasted with useless text informing me that my level is too high or low. Big jumbo ass text filling the 1/4 of the screen when you complete or accept a quest, enter/join fates.
Anyway, I tried a game that reviewers gave high praise, only to find that the reviewers hyped a poorly designed game, mostly because they felt sorry for it due to its past. It's not your job as a reviewer to feel pity. My overall feelings from the game is that it's bland and lacks focus. Do read the negative reviews. After filtering out all players who gave it a 0 as a sanction because of server issues at launch. Anyway, I did not play it at launch, I played it just now.
Students of MMORPGs. This game has a lot of examples of how not to do an MMORPG. What you like or don't like obviously depends on what you got indoctrinated with at first, so we're all biased.
You'd think that they would know this by now. Dong Nguyen has over 170,000 followers on Twitter for a good reason and it's not the graphical quality of Flappy Bird and neither is it game play. It's the fun factor.
ayottesoftware.com
the game being stuck in past ... without looking at newer MMOs to see what had worked there.
Creativity isn't about following the latest and greatest trends, or throwing your resources at a project. Yet with large Japanese bureaucracies, approval requires precedence, and innovation turns into copying. This is a general trend with any large bureaucracy, but it is especially severe in Japan, where they make it a formality. Proof that it is a formality is in this speech. Even given failure, they attribute the cause to not copying the latest trends well enough. That is why game companies should never merge.
If you thought your game was stuck in the past, think again. Maybe YOU ARE.
And given that, your games will NEVER RULE AGAIN.
yeah! thank you
thiet ke website ban hang
Frankly - despite being a long-time fan of the single player games - I've got no issues with an FF MMO. I won't likely play one, but if they want to make one of those every few years, go ahead. Skyrim is a great single-player game and they are also planning an MMO in that universe. Given the open nature of Skyrim it seems like a reasonable choice.
What I DON'T want is to see MMO's cannibalizing devs from single-player games. I also don't want to see single-player games that grind like MMO's. Let them make MMO's for long-term low-rate consistent cash-flow, and single-player games for point higher-rate cash flow. It might be a good thing for both areas of play. Both can generate new ideas/mechanics that benefits the franchise overall
For example, ATB has been a fairly big staple of the jRPG world for a long time. It wasn't always well-received in the beginning, but it made its place. FFXII introduced a more MMO-like type of play.
In some ways it was a step beyond the play of games like Chrono-trigger, where battles took place in the same gamespace as navigation (no "battle zoom"). Unlike Chrono-trigger, the "turn-loading" aspect was more seamless in that there weren't loading based, and there was even less cutover between navigating and battle. The script-based attacks (if enemy vulnerable to ice cast ice) was actually quite cool as well. The big downside, the latter part of the story sucked. It was actually going good for quite awhile, but the ending really just felt like somebody dropped a cleaver on the story partway. All that pretty ended up with no substance
FFXIII (FF13) was even worse. There's nothing wrong with beautiful flowerpots. There is if the flowerpot has more detail and intricacy than the story/gameplay. FF13 had terrible grinding gameplay, a rather crappy story (nice cinematics yes, but weak plot), *annoying* actors, and was very restricted/on-rails. Despite the beauty of the environment, you felt very detached. Worse, it has followed FFX-2 (X-1 being at least somewhat respectable) into the realm of "Sailor Moon Dress-up".
The last good FF-style game I played was actually "Lost Odyssey." It's not even a Squaresoft title at all, but apparently had a lot of ex Square/FF guys on the team. It had a good, quirky plot, interesting characters and a decent soundtrack.
It's worse than that. As a seven year veteran of XI (from North American PC release through the initial release date of XIV), I find the claim that they were "trying to stick with a formula that worked with Square Enix's first MMO" highly dubious at best, and utter bullshit at worst. Because an XI-2 is exactly what I and many other fans of the first had wanted, but I can tell you that that was not what we received.
Yeah, this deserves reiteration. I'm not sure where the hell Yoshida got the idea that part of the problem was they were "stuck focusing on lessons from XI" from given that XIV basically ignored everything that made XI good, but it's his claim.
The scary thought is that he may be right, that XIV really did represent what they learned from XI, which, honestly, really does explain quite a bit about Square Enix's recent releases.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The focus on graphical quality over game play...
There's the real problem - they didnt care about game-play.
Good graphics do not make a good game. I mostly play older games because they're actually good and fun to play, instead of just pretty, boring pictures.
Daikatana? They hit that trend first with 640x480 arrows in 1997.
WTF ever happened to substance over style. How did they not get that was one reason FF13 SUCKED was because they cared more about making a pretty game then an enjoyable game.
Nichibutsu got the flowerpots just right, back in 1980.
There has been no need for innovation since then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
I love how everything is the developers fault when a project flops but I bet if it was a success it would suddenly be upper management with all the praise.
This guy Naoki Yoshida, according to wikipedia he was the guy in charge of the project so this is him basically throwing his employees under a bus.
So why didn't you set poly budgets, why didn't you lead and direct the game like you were suppose to?
Not played FF before and coming from WoW, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the graphics in FFXIV. I stopped playing only because I felt no danger, as FFXIV seems to be essentially a PVE game.
I really don't see any more fun playing the same ole game over and over again Squnix! Go back to the old school Final Fantasy genre again not a boring futuristic one! Give us a HD version of Final Fantasy 7! There does that answer your question!?
Finally,
I am so happy this has come around. I thought the Title was misleading, the premise of the game it self was "lame", I think there were a significant ammount of individuals whom tried desperately, to beat a dead horse, as the name would Imply.
We are not children, we understand a new day will come right after the other. Working @ sony and various other game dev's I see this practice develop alot..
@ the end of the day, what comes of this?
People are left with de-flated dreams, a significant amount of memorbelia that is defunkt and will end in the trash. Look @ the time, effort, and labor involved in the development of the "Final, Platform (snicker)." So much effort "wasted".
At the end of the day whats the real "take away" from this?? Who won and whom lost? What value was to be realized by this adventure??
Thank the powers that be, for the Fantasy is finally over..
Whats the next Shiny thing that will attract your attention??
I played ff11 for so long and enjoyed it, till I was disappointed in game play by ff14. The old graphics in ff11 and everyone sitting around doing nothing because development team took so long to put out anything new led everyone to move to ff14 in first place. Played ff14 for awhile, then was so disenchanted. You login, and have to craft all the time, making the game so boring. At least in ff11 you could at least buy gil online and play game way you wanted, always fighting with the best gear. It was impossible in ff14, always had to do boring things instead of fighting. The other 2 key points were that they took away ability to search for people to fight with like they had in ff11. In ff11 what addicted everyone to that game to begin with was first time getting out in killing fields in sandoria to kill rabbits, and getting invites to join a bunch of people in valkurm dunes. Everyone loved it, they probably got killed trying to get there, but people wanted to play with you, and you would eventually make it there, it was fun. In ff14 you just sit there and noone cares to invite you to anything at any given point, it was boring fast. FF11 key element was joining up in groups so people could play with you, then buying gil , getting some good gear, to continue fighting well with your group so you weren't a downer to your group having undergeared player. Lastly the disenchantment with ff14 was they never let ff11 players continue into the ff14 world. ff14 should have been an addon worlds to ff11, just with better graphics. The games regardless become boring at some point. As with final fantasy 11, when you hit level 75, you sat around with your thumb up your butt for a week just to do some large event like dynamis, lagged all over the place because there was just to many people in the party to be able to play your character properly, especially with lag from foreign servers, they had no north america servers, so you can imagine the latency. All in all, they should have continued on with ff11, they had good system for inviting people to party, an auction house to buy everything you needed,(even if you bought your gil, cause let's face it who wants to sit there and craft over fighting anyways), ff14 should have been an addon to ff11 with better graphics, killing their way to invite people to groups and auction house, was what made game flop. People did not want to run around for years crafting , they wanted to login with their couple hours, get invited to a party , and enjoy fighting. It was as simple as that.