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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."
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.
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
Lovingly crafted with attention to detail, yet not pragmatic enough to make money, money, money. It must be art.
No kidding. Personally I really go for a game with intricately designed accents, such as flower pots. If they're just the rough-n-ready ones like from the garden department discount bin, count me out.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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?
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.
As someone who actually tried the revamped version I believe they have done a good job fixing all the concerns your listed above. There's no need to grind at all for your primary class as quests can take you the entire way there. If for any reason you find you don't know where to go next they have a very nice recommended quest/zone/dungeon list and loading is not any worse than any other game. I played a new character up to around 35 on my main class and I enjoyed most of it. Not playing it anymore but that's more me not spending as much time playing games period anymore.
The article pretty much just says that the flower pots were merely a symptom of a much larger problem - that the developers spent far too much time on graphics and not nearly enough time on fun, story, stability, playability. They were not blaming the failure on the flower pots.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
So... you're pretty much agreeing with the article you didn't read.
All those things you described sucked because they spent too much time detailing other less-important things such as pot plants.
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; }
So basically, it's japanese and it's not for casuals. What were you expecting?
The Final Fantasy series have always featured complex systems and all Japanese games have grinding and farming elements.
That it would be grind heavy was a given, nobody doubted that. And if that had been the only "problem", it would certainly not have been one for me, I've had my share of "grindy" games.
The main problem was that it was simply boring. And not because of the grind, because of the lag in between grinding. If looting takes 5-10 seconds because that's pretty much the average lag between clicking and result, it gets a bit tedious.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There's a completely reasonable and logic in game explanation. Phoenix Down has always and will always restore a party member from the KO status. KO is not dead. KO is knockout. Aeris was killed and no amount of phoenix downs are going to reverse that.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The article pretty much just says that the flower pots were merely a symptom of a much larger problem - that the developers spent far too much time on graphics and not nearly enough time on fun, story, stability, playability.
I think that pretty much sums up AAA game development for the past decade. If I was writing a book about the stagnation of AAA gaming, I might call it "The Allure of the Flower Pots"
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 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.