Yes, all of the stuff that made DN3D so great is missing here. They've taken the worst cliches of modern shooters and stuck them onto something that looks superficially like Duke Nukem, while leaving out all of the good stuff from modern or classic shooters.
I still can't believe they went for a 2 weapon limit, given the extent to which DN3D was about playing around with loads of cool and eccentric weapons. They even have the cheek to have a "joke" in there where Duke takes the mickey out of Halo power armour. Hate to break it to you, Duke, but you have only 2 weapons and a recharging shield bar. I'm no fan of the Master Chief, but the modern Duke looks like nothing more than a hanger on to his coat-tails.
Now if they'd wanted to do a decent Halo joke, they'd have confined the player to a pistol and shotgun up to that point, then put the third gun next to the Halo power armour. When Duke went to pick up the third gun, he could have got the "hold X to swap guns" message, but on pressing it, he'd just add a third gun and say something like "Two gun limits? Who the hell do you think I am?" That would have been a neat jab at Halo - and would have made for a better game to boot (especially when he later went on to pick up 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc weapons as well).
I hadn't spotted the PCGAMER review. That was a good, decent thing they did there, giving DNF 80%. They've sent out a nice clear signal that I should absolutely never let any of their reviews factor into a purchasing decision. Good of them to give me a warning like that, wasn't it? Refreshingly honest, in a curious way.
This is not an 80% game. Five years ago, it might just about have been a 50% game. In fact, even that's generous. Resistance: Fall of Man is a vaguely similar fps which launched with the PS3 around 5 years ago and it is infinitely superior to DNF in every conceivable way.
You know what? Under other circumstances I'd agree with you.
However, having actually played through the "alien hive" level mentioned in the review, I can't actually think of a better description of it. As the Ars Technica review states, that level made me feel almost physically dirty. Not in a good way, like after making an uncomfortable neutral or "dark side" choice in one of the better RPGs, but rather in a "I really wish I had never had to play that and never want to play it again" way.
Yes, IGN with a 5.5 seems to be one of the more generous scores - and IGN tend to "mark high" anyway. That's not a criticism of IGN - their scale is internally consistent and I know that a 5.5 from them is actually really quite bad.
I've posted my own review of DNF in my journal and basically agree with the overall consensus - that this is a really bad game.
I see comments below a lot of the reviews on the major sites defending the game, claiming that the reviewers are holding it up to unfair standards due to its development time. This isn't true. It's just a bad game which is not fun. If you compare it to any current major fps, it is horribly lacking. If you compare it against the better fpses from 5 years ago, it is horribly lacking. In many ways, it is horribly lacking compared to its own predecessor; Duke Nukem 3d.
Interesting to note that the console versions are being slammed even more than the PC versions. The Eurogamer "face-off" comparison made it clear that there is a clear hierarchy to the versions. The PC version is the best, though still desperately ugly. The PS3 version lacks some of what passes for graphical polish in the PC version. The 360 version is horribly, horribly broken. That's extremely unusual for an Unreal engine game, where the 360 would normally be expected to outperform the PS3.
Don't forget that in a world where console manufacturers were forced to make their consoles accessible to people with disabilities, there basically wouldn't be a Wii (or PS Move, or Kinect).
Until a few months ago, a friend of mine was dating a girl who worked as a therapist in a centre that helped people recover after "life changing" accidents or surgery - in other words, people who found themselves suddenly lacking (or at least lacking the use of) an arm, a leg or more. They didn't take younger kids - that's a field that requires its own specialism, apparently - and the largest single category of their patients was elderly stroke victims. But they did get a fair number of teenagers and young adults - and "does this mean I can't play video games from now on" was apparently a common question.
I don't know whether they used modified controllers of the sort talked about in TFA, but they did have a few gamers on the staff (including the young lady in question) who compiled lists of games that could be played using one hand or with limited motor control. There were apparently plenty of examples on the "normal" consoles (PS2, PS3, Xbox, 360) and PC, but next to none for the Wii aside from a couple of very basic kiddy games. What they were after were games like the Forza Motorsport games or Bayonetta, which can be configured with assists and the like to allow for entirely 1-handed play.
So, in a world where developers were required by law to make their products fully accessible, it's likely that a large portion of current games wouldn't exist - along with an entire platform (the Wii). And besides, where do you want to define "accessible"? Playable with 1 hand? Playable with no hands? Wanting to make products accessible is a worthy goal, but there does, in any sensible world, come a point at which the opportunity cost is just too great.
Amen to that. The first thing I thought on seeing this was "hmm... it looks a litte like the Dreamcast controller". Which is fitting, really, given I fully expect this thing to be the next Dreamcast.
Nintendo could find themselves in big trouble in 18 months time. I can't see this thing having the mass appeal of the Wii - or drawing the hardcore away from their PS3s, 360s and PCs. And while saying anything nice about Sony is unfashionable around here, the Vita looks like a far superior piece of kit to the 3DS, which is going to launch with a decent games lineup at the same price as the 3DS. I fully expect the knowledge that the Vita is coming to further dent the 3DS's already-poor sales over the coming months.
If Nintendo find themselves with a Dreamcast and a Virtual Boy as their current generation hardware, then it's squeaky-bottom time for the,
But that's the whole point with WoW. Most WoW players never go anywhere near the cess-pit of the official forums. They simply log in and play with a bunch of friends - either people they met in game or, in a great many cases, people they know in real life.
This is why WoW was successful - when it launched, it got a kind of "watercooler momentum" that I've never seen for any other game. The only comparator from the gaming world was the launch of the Wii. I remember the office I was working in when WoW launched - it was anything but a nerdy office, with a roughly even gender balance and, I would estimate, at least half of the staff over 40 and very, very few of them gamers. And yet for a month or two after WoW launched, it was the main topic of conversation in the cafeteria. I'm sure that not everybody who started playing it then carried on playing it for all that long - but quite a few did, and they drew in people that they knew in real life as well.
So it doesn't matter how nasty WoW's official forums are or how obnoxious its most vocal fanboys can be - most of the player base never goes anywhere near that particular world. And that's the kind of thing that most MMO developers would give their right arm for.
Nintendo says that region locking on the 3DS is optional.
Let me be frank...
They are almost certainly lying.
We know for a fact that locking on the 360 is optional. Historically, "home" consoles have been region locked. In the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, all three consoles were region locked. Ok, there were a couple of end-of-cycle Xbox games that weren't, but those were very much the exception. Despite this, when publishers are given the choice, around 75% of 360 games are released without region locking.
Historically, handhelds have never been region locked. As people tend to take handhelds on international trips with them, there is actually a bit of a business rationale for this. And yet, despite this, on the "allegedly" optional-locking 3DS, absolutely every game released to date and every known forthcoming release - including those from publishers that do not lock on the 360 - is region locked.
If region locking on the 3DS is not currently required for certification, I will eat my hat. Nintendo has a track record of lying through its teeth when it suits its purposes and I think this is just another case of that.
At the time I type this, the PSN is actually up and running. Or at least, it's online gaming components are. The Store and other features that require payments are still offline, as they have been since the initial shutdown several weeks ago. But you can, should you feel so inclined, log in and play games online at present. Whether this may change over the next few hours is open to question - while it wouldn't completely surprise me, I suspect that Sony will try to keep the network itself up this time..
What's just been taken offline is web-interface for changing passwords. Now, that's still pretty bad - in fact, given how stupid the mistake in this case is, it's verging on the awful - but I dare say that a lot of PSN users may not actually notice until Sony tells them. Furthermore, just to add a little perspective, stupid though Sony's mistake here is (and it is very stupid indeed and then some), no additional personal information or credit card details beyond what has already been leaked will have been compromised as a result of this - not least because you can't, so far as I know, actually input new credit card details into the PSN yet.
So it's a further embarrassment for Sony and will further undermine confidence in them (do you really, really want to trust them with your credit card details ever again). But unless I'm reading things wrong - and if I am then happy to be corrected- there's not been any actual additional harm done to users this time.
Hey, I was more of a PC gamer and Sega person myself (though I confess that there were some SNES games that turned me green with envy, like Super Mario World).
And it's not as if Sega went on to do anything evil. Well, not unless you want to count pretty much every Sonic game published between Sonic 3 and Sonic Colours (excluding those two titles). I've seen... pictures... of cutscenes... that I would pay a lot of money to be able to forget. Actually, yes, that counts as some of the vilest evil in the history of the gaming industry - but they did put out Valkyria Chronicles, so I'll forgive them.
Yes, I think that's right. Nintendo spent 2 generations as the "also rans" and even in the Wii generation have failed to turn their huge installed base into the kind of cultural dominance that Sony saw with the PS2 (because they targetting the wrong market segments). When your market position is poor, it doesn't really matter how control-freaky you are - to most consumers, it doesn't matter as you have no influence. Apple benefitted from this for years, then suddenly the ipod, iphone and ipad got big and people started to notice (belatedly) that however bad you thought Microsoft were for locking down their OS, Apple were umpteen times worse.
The Sony rootkit thing was completely unjustifiable by any measure. I felt a bit sorry for their gaming division at the time - they clearly hadn't been involved in the rootkit fiasco but the PS3's launch certainly took flak as a result of it. In fact, the PS3 at-launch was a pretty "ethical" piece of kit for a console - easy-to-install OtherOS features, backwards compatibility, no region locking etc. Sadly, Sony seemed to decide that their rootkit guy should be running their games division - hence of those big three pluses that the PS3 launched with, only "region free" is still standing.
And Microsoft - I have serious issues with what they've done on the OS side over the years, but I find it hard to pick on something truly evil that their gaming division has done. Shutting down the Flight Simulator series is the closest I can come. They entered the console market following the lead set by others (eg. Sony and Nintendo region lock, so we will region lock) and have generally tended in a more liberal direction since then, albeit slowly. The RROD was colossal incompetence (and while MS Gaming don't do "evil" as such, they can do "incompetent" as well as anybody else), but they did do a good job of compensating customers, for the most part and at the end of the day, the company itself ended up the only real loser from it.
The general direction of travel with Sony is away from region locking. The PS1 and PS2 were fully locked, the PSP and PS3 are not locked for games (besides that one example you name, which I believe was accidental). Sony's preferred HD video physical medium (Blu-Ray) supports region locking and some studios use it, but the proportion of region-free BDs out there is far higher than the proportion of region-free DVDs ever was. I would be very surprised (and cross) if NGP games were region locked.
The rationale for region locking is not strong. The "different languages" issue is just FUD - there's been an international trade in books for centuries and in music for decades and in those cases, buyers have proven perfectly capable of making sure that they buy stuff in the right language. Regional pricing issues within the developed world are also a silly justification; after all, if it costs you more to sell a title in a particular region due to distribution costs, taxes or whatever, then those costs should also apply to consumers importing a product from another region. So, for example, if I import a game from the US to the UK, the price I pay in shipping costs tends to outweigh the marginally lower RRP of the game (depending on where the currencies are) in the US.
For years now, the real justification for region locking has been the hope on the part of the entertainment companies that if they can find the right price point (far lower than in the developed world), people in the big emerging markets like China and India will actually buy their products rather than pirating them. This obviously involves the kind of huge price differentials where reverse-importing really could become a serious problem (why do you think Japan was put in the same DVD region as Europe, rather than the rest of Asia?).
Most companies, particularly Sony, have, I think, now realised that this is a pipe-dream. No matter the price-point, they are not going to get mass-sales in those markets. In China in particular, you're up against consumers who would rather be "patriotic" and support a domestic pirate-merchant than a foreign corporation. Once this pipe-dream has evaporated, there's relatively little point in not doing away with a system that drives up your manufacture costs and annoys consumers for no other useful purpose.
Nintendo, I suspect, cling to region locking because it is something that fits well with their corporate ethos. They like control. They like to be able to say "Japan can have this, but we don't think those nasty Americans or Europeans are clever enough for it". And that really, really winds me up.
The 3DS is region locked. First handheld ever to be so. Every Nintendo home console since the year dot has been region locked. Sony ditched region locking for games on the PSP and PS3. The 360 has region locking, but while it used to be mandatory for certification, MS leave it up to the publishers these days and most of them don't use it. Earlier handhelds such as the Gameboy, GBA and DS were probably not region locked because it was simply too much hassle to put the extra gumpf needed for it into the handhelds at the time while keeping size etc down. And not only does Nintendo region lock, but they also have a paternalist, authoritarian approach to which games can come out in which regions - witness The Last Story getting locked as Japanese-only, despite the success of previous Mistwalker games in the west.
I have no particular brief for MS. I own 360, a PS3 and a Wii (as well as a PSP, a 3DS and a high-end gaming PC). I like my 360 - and I like my PS3. Admittedly, Sony are in my bad books at the moment because I've just had to change my credit card thanks to them (which does tend to grate a bit). I don't tend to beat-up on them in the long term, though, because there are always plenty of others to do that. While at the same time, Nintendo do a lot of other things that are really, really bad (and if you are in Europe, then region locking is really, really bad) and generally seem to get away unscathed - indeed, with a little halo.
I've also got no idea why on earth you think that I just want games full of space marines. A quick glance at my posting history will show that games I've written nice things about lately include Valkyria Chronicles and Ar Tonelico Qoga, both of which have a distinctly non-space-marine aesthetic. In fact, Halo bores me rigid (though I do have a soft spot for Gears of War, largely because it's just so ridiculously over the top).
The absence of a browser in the 360 is an oddity, I'll admit. I've never really understood why they never put one in, given that the Wii and PS3 both have them (though the Wii's is borderline unusable and the PS3's is only marginally better). But to be honest, a browser is pretty low on the list of things that most people want from their consoles. Decent online multiplayer functionality tends to rank a bit higher on the list - and has yet to appear on any Nintendo console.
There's this strange perception around some parts (particularly around here) that Nintendo are somehow "more ethical" or "consumer-friendly" than the other console manufacturers. This overlooks the fact that Nintendo are the people who normalised console region locking (and who are still trying to push and extend it even now, when Sony and MS have decided they're not interested any more), cracked down on homebrew whenever they can and put out consoles which don't even give so much as a tiny whiff of an "OtherOS" or "PS2 Linux kit" walled garden. In fact, going off their track record, they'll even try to sue you if you have a job they don't approve of and make a post on your blog saying you like one of their games (though I seem to remember they did apologise to the young lady in that particular case after it sparked an outcry).
Ok, they've probably got a way to go until they beat the Sony CD-rootkit fiasco (which didn't actually stem from Sony's gaming division anyway). But in pretty much every other respect, it's hard to say that they're any better than Sony - and I'd personally say that they're more anti-consumer than MS's gaming division (who don't seem particularly evil these days, even if they do occasionally do "inept" or "stupid" over something like Games for Windows Live).
I suspect Nintendo get a free pass from many due to a combination of nostalgia and the fact that they were the industry's underdog for two console cycles. One could perhaps draw parallels with Apple, if one really, really wanted to burn karma. It's not always correct to assume that the underdogs are any more ethical than the.. erm... overdogs. Reflexively and uncritically back the underdogs in every case and you may find yourself in a very uncomfortable position when they actually break through (feel free to insert Egypt/Libya comments here as appropriate to your own political persuasion).
The most "recent" of the consoles-that-never-were in TFA is the Phantom. The reasons behind its failure are too many and varied to list here (and probably too well known to be worthwhile). Certainly, Infinium Labs did absolutely everything it could to appear incredibly dodgy and untrustworthy. Even if it hadn't been for that, it was clear that they were designing a product that their target market (regular console and PC gamers) were not interested in.
However, I wondered at the time and still wonder now whether there wasn't actually a market for a Phantom-style console - just not in the general consumer market. I mean, the thing was designed to be built with cheap PC components and to run what were essentially PC games, distributed digitally. Back then, of course, there wasn't the kind of broadband penetration in homes that has enabled Steam to get as big as it has in the interim. Even without that problem, the prospect of a cheap, but non-upgrable and fully locked down, box capable of playing current PC games (but probably not future ones given the way that PC gaming specs evolve over time) was a pretty poor pitch to make to Joe Public.
Where they might have had more success, I suspect, is in trying to push the console to the hospitality sector, airlines and other corporate customers. I can imagine that hotels might have liked the idea of a simple, cheap games console that could have been stuck in a sealed cabinet and allowed visitors to play games in their room (possibly on a pay-for-play basis) without any messy physical media sitting around to be stolen. A lot of airlines already use (crappy) in-flight games systems, but the Phantom sounded as though it had the potential to do somethng significantly better. Certainly, with the hardware they were talking about at the time, a single machine would have been able to run "simple" games for a large number of passengers. There were plenty of other venues where machine like that might have been useful.
In the model I have in my mind, the Phantom wouldn't have been competing with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo - it would have been opening up a new market, albeit not a particularly public-facing one.
Oh well, it's probably all just pointless speculation - in all likelihood there was never actually a product to market to these industries anyway. But sometimes it's fun to speculate on what might have been.
On a side note, the first console listed in TFA - the Sega Neptune - has gained a strange sort of posthumous recognition. A "moefied" anthropomorphic version of it is the main character in the Japanese RPG "Hyperdimenson Neptunia". It's just a pity that the game in question is without a doubt the single worst title I have ever (however briefly) inflicted upon my PS3 (to the extent I found myself feeling sorry for a piece of Sony hardware).
You're probably right about the tastes of the hardcore Japanese market - though I would add that I actually really enjoyed FF10.
Is that info about the FF12 main character reliably sourced? I've not heard it before, but it would certainly explain a few things. Vaan starts out as the game's main character, but by the half-way point, he's pretty much reduced to a spectator. In fact, there was a point towards the end of the game when I really did start to wonder why they were still letting him tag along. Ashe or Balthier always felt like more natural main characters.
I loved the free roaming stuff in FF12. I particularly loved that if you did some fairly short power-levelling early in the game, you could essentially switch yourself onto a different gameplay track, being fed with new and interestingly designed super-bosses via the hunts system as you went through the game. I think if anything hurt FF12 outside of Japan, it was the fact that the gambit system was never particularly well explained and understood. It was a much more sophisticated system than the likes of Penny Arcade were preaching at the time, but a lot of people were put off it before they actually understood it. One good step might have been to make all of the conditions available from the start of the game, rather than making people purchase them as the game went on - put some of that depth up front for players to experiment with early on.
I think whether Nintendo screws up the core concept varies a lot from franchise to franchise. I personally felt that Mario Kart Wii was a disaster - and I know a good few people who agreed. It put too many karts on the track at once, with too many weapons available and saw the exit of the last vestige of "racing" from the series in favour of weapon spam and random chance.
Super Smash Brothers came through ok on the Wii, and so did Mario via the Galaxy games - but even those aren't feeling particularly fresh and need a revamp to get rid of some of the more irritating elements (like having limited lives in Mario, plus the fact that the controls never felt quite right on the Wii). Zelda... really does feel like the same thing over and over again by this point. And Okami did it better anyway.
The sad thing is, Japanese game development hasn't always been inward looking. As recently as 10 years ago, it was the Japanese developers who were at the forefront of most genres (aside from the fps and RTS, which has always been Western things). Western developers were adopting mechanics from Japanese games like crazy as they rushed to catch up. Then just as the West started to draw level... the Japanese developers just gave up and started to focus exclusively on a slice of the domestic audience where they just didn't have to try as hard.
At risk of going off-topic, there are parallels with the course of the anime industry in recent years. After the whole bubble and burst in the middle of the last decade, and particularly the US anime industry crash, we saw fewer and fewer anime series that aimed for mainstream appeal - certainly fewer that you could use to introduce interested friends to anime. Instead, the focus shifted towards fanservice laden series with little to no plot and next to no wider-audience potential, but a hardcore fanbase willing to buy the DVDs and figurines at any price.
Over time, Japan's shifting demographics (ie. the aging population) will turn this into a dead-end. Japanese game and anime developers alike need to recognise this before it's too late.
Agree, save that Nintendo are NOT the exception to the rule. All they do these days is hope that their latest hardware gimmick gets traction (DS and Wii did, 3DS looks like it won't) and remake the same few games - primarily Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time - with a different label on the box. Except on the 3DS, they aren't even going to bother changing the label on the Zelda box.
But yes, the mid-series Ultima games (up to and including 6) were massively influential on the development of JRPGs as a genre. Now, these were great games in their day, but they do feel like curious historical artifacts now.
It does feel like once a Japanese gaming company has a major success, they try to freeze time at that point. So Nintendo have never moved on mentally from the days of the SNES. Square-Enix is still stuck in the mid-90s when Dragon Warrior ruled the roost (given that the company is more Enix than Square these days) and Sega has only recently and reluctantly started to move on from Sonic (and would dearly love to go back if they could). Nippon-Ichi stopped innovating the moment the first Disgaea became an unexpected international success. The list goes on and on...
Yes, absolutely right. Spirits Within should be remembered as one of the greatest disasters in the history of the entertainment industries.
And yes, Square continued to put out great games for a while after the merger. Kingdom Hearts 2 was probably the best game of the PS2 console generation. FF12 is probably my second favorite installment in the series (behind FF7, and a little bit ahead of FF6 and FF10). But I suspect that those games had a lot of their development work done pre-merger, or in the immediate aftermath of the merger before corporate identities had really come together.
If you look at the pre-merger Enix, you see a lot of the behaviours that Square-Enix manifests these days. Grind-heavy, innovation-light games with underwhelming technical standards, aimed primarily at a hardcore Japanese market, with little understanding of what the international market (or even the mainstream Japanese market) wants out of a game.
In any sensible world, a merger between the two companies would not have seen the limited-appeal (and long-term dead end) Enix methodology come out so comprehensively on top. However, given that Squaresoft basically had to beg for a rescue, it was perhaps inevitable that their risk taking wouldn't survive.
I've wondered about this for years myself. A remade FF7, for PS3 and 360, with modern graphics, a few user interface tweaks and possibly a bit of bonus content on the side (like a new optional dungeon or something) would be an absolute gold-mine. Unfortunately, I remember some comments that came out of them last year, to the effect that it would simply be too expensive to remake FF7.
I'm not sure I can understand how this could possibly be. In terms of size and scale, the game isn't particularly different to other JRPGs. Lost Odyssey, which came out a few years ago now for the 360, had a perfectly acceptable level of current-gen graphics. Factor in that FF7's cutscenes are on the short side compared to those in... say... FF13 and it's hard to see how the price could truly be that prohibitive. I can only assume that S-E were thinking that if they were to remake FF7, they'd need to quadruple the length of all of the cutscenes, adding in a bunch of new Advent Children-style fight scenes and whatnot. That in itself illustrates a good chunk about why the company is going wrong.
Agreed. I've heard of plenty of attempts at resurrecting an MMO that's had a poor start and so far as I can tell, these have a 0% success rate. The PS3 version won't save it - particularly not in the aftermath of the PSN leak fiasco, which is going to make people particularly cautious about online gaming on the PS3.
The game's a failure - abject and total. At this point, keeping it going is doing nothing bar drawing resources from more promising endeavours. If there are any players out there who actually like the game (and I can't say I've come across any, even when logged into it myself), then it's a bit rough for them, but you're always going to back a loser once in a while.
I suspect the biggest reason why S-E haven't killed it already is pride. To have a main-series FF game acknowledged as a failure that could not be redeemed will be a huge blow to morale, likely not just for executives but throughout the company. It's never happened before; Final Fantasy is part of Square's mythology, with the first title having famously saved the company when it was on the verge of failure (the "Final" in the name was because they expected it to be the last game they ever released). Even the games which have been seen as underwhelming with hindsight (probably 5, 9 and 13) have sold well enough that the company could reasonably present them as successes. 11 was the most successful full-subscription MMO going, until World of Warcraft hit the scene and smashed all previous records. S-E have only themselves (and their cheap Chinese subcontractors) to blame for 14, but that isn't going to make them feel any better about it.
Square-Enix's problems mirror, to a large extent, those that have afflicted the wider Japanese gaming industry (including, once you discount early Wii hardware sales, Nintendo), during the current console cycle.
At the heart of this is a failure to evolve their games and franchises to reflect changing times and tastes. If often feels like the modern Japanese games industry doesn't recognise anything between "no change at all" and "total ground-up redesign". It's instructive to compare how the most successful Western developers have managed franchises and general gaming concepts over this time. If you look at the likes of Bioware, Bethesda, Bungie, Blizzard, Valve, even some of EA's own internal development efforts, you can see a pretty ruthless evolutionary approach to design. When a game comes out and the studio begins development either on a sequel or even a new property, the first thing that seems to happen is a look at what people liked and didn't like about the previous game, with this being factored into the development of the sequel.
Take Bioware as a case-study here. Baldur's Gate came out in 1998 and was pretty successful. However, it was the sequel, which came out a couple of years later, that really revolutionised Western RPGs. Why? Because Bioware had evolved the franchise, removing aspects of the original game that had been "a bit too pen and paper" for CRPG players (such as no-pausing-on-the-inventory-screen mechanics and large amounts of wilderness crawling) and had expanded the areas that had been well received (adding further complexity to the casting system, expanding character dialogue trees and so on). Once Bioware moved on from the Baldur's Gate series, they continued releasing RPGs that very clearly had BG in their DNA, but which shed some of the pricklier aspects of the old series, while borrowing popular elements of Japanese RPGs (such as the "active party" system). Then having reached a point where they faced a serious conflict between hardcore RPG gamers and the more casual crowd, they essentially "fork" their games, with the Dragon Age series pitched for the hardcore and the Mass Effect series for the action demographic. That isn't to say that Bioware don't make mis-steps - Dragon Age 2 feels very much like a mis-step, and Jade Empire can probably be seen as one with hindsight - but an evolutionary approach like this makes it much easier to get back on track after a wobble.
Then compare Square-Enix's management of its premier RPG property - the Final Fantasy series. There's no evidence of a planned evolutionary approach to the development of the series - just an odd mixture of clinging to past certainties combined with random-throw-of-the-dice leaps into the dark. There are elements of the Final Fantasy series on show in FF13 which feel like products of another era. Random encounters (and I'm sorry, but making them visible on the field map doesn't make them any less random encounters) have been pretty much entirely ditched in the West. Our developers have figured out that - surprise surprise - gamers don't like spending a couple of hours runnng in circles in a dungeon just to level up. Yes, levelling up is part of RPGs, but any Western RPG worth its salt these days ensures that it is done via interesting sidequests and subplots. And yet there they are, still at the centre of the flagship Japanese RPG series (and pretty much every other JRPG).
The throw-of-the-dice element seems to come in the way that Square-Enix completely changes its battle and level up systems (and often even wider mechanics) for each installment in the series. At times, this has been a strength. It does keep the games from feeling a bit too samey. But when the throw of the dice produces a result that people actually like, it inexplicably never seems to get developed any further. So, for example, FF12's move towards more open-world gameplay was pretty widely welcomed, even by people who didn't like much else about the game. Yet then FF13 comes out and is basically a 30 hour tunnel for the player to
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Yes, all of the stuff that made DN3D so great is missing here. They've taken the worst cliches of modern shooters and stuck them onto something that looks superficially like Duke Nukem, while leaving out all of the good stuff from modern or classic shooters.
I still can't believe they went for a 2 weapon limit, given the extent to which DN3D was about playing around with loads of cool and eccentric weapons. They even have the cheek to have a "joke" in there where Duke takes the mickey out of Halo power armour. Hate to break it to you, Duke, but you have only 2 weapons and a recharging shield bar. I'm no fan of the Master Chief, but the modern Duke looks like nothing more than a hanger on to his coat-tails.
Now if they'd wanted to do a decent Halo joke, they'd have confined the player to a pistol and shotgun up to that point, then put the third gun next to the Halo power armour. When Duke went to pick up the third gun, he could have got the "hold X to swap guns" message, but on pressing it, he'd just add a third gun and say something like "Two gun limits? Who the hell do you think I am?" That would have been a neat jab at Halo - and would have made for a better game to boot (especially when he later went on to pick up 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc weapons as well).
I hadn't spotted the PCGAMER review. That was a good, decent thing they did there, giving DNF 80%. They've sent out a nice clear signal that I should absolutely never let any of their reviews factor into a purchasing decision. Good of them to give me a warning like that, wasn't it? Refreshingly honest, in a curious way.
This is not an 80% game. Five years ago, it might just about have been a 50% game. In fact, even that's generous. Resistance: Fall of Man is a vaguely similar fps which launched with the PS3 around 5 years ago and it is infinitely superior to DNF in every conceivable way.
You know what? Under other circumstances I'd agree with you.
However, having actually played through the "alien hive" level mentioned in the review, I can't actually think of a better description of it. As the Ars Technica review states, that level made me feel almost physically dirty. Not in a good way, like after making an uncomfortable neutral or "dark side" choice in one of the better RPGs, but rather in a "I really wish I had never had to play that and never want to play it again" way.
Yes, IGN with a 5.5 seems to be one of the more generous scores - and IGN tend to "mark high" anyway. That's not a criticism of IGN - their scale is internally consistent and I know that a 5.5 from them is actually really quite bad.
I've posted my own review of DNF in my journal and basically agree with the overall consensus - that this is a really bad game.
I see comments below a lot of the reviews on the major sites defending the game, claiming that the reviewers are holding it up to unfair standards due to its development time. This isn't true. It's just a bad game which is not fun. If you compare it to any current major fps, it is horribly lacking. If you compare it against the better fpses from 5 years ago, it is horribly lacking. In many ways, it is horribly lacking compared to its own predecessor; Duke Nukem 3d.
Interesting to note that the console versions are being slammed even more than the PC versions. The Eurogamer "face-off" comparison made it clear that there is a clear hierarchy to the versions. The PC version is the best, though still desperately ugly. The PS3 version lacks some of what passes for graphical polish in the PC version. The 360 version is horribly, horribly broken. That's extremely unusual for an Unreal engine game, where the 360 would normally be expected to outperform the PS3.
Don't forget that in a world where console manufacturers were forced to make their consoles accessible to people with disabilities, there basically wouldn't be a Wii (or PS Move, or Kinect).
Until a few months ago, a friend of mine was dating a girl who worked as a therapist in a centre that helped people recover after "life changing" accidents or surgery - in other words, people who found themselves suddenly lacking (or at least lacking the use of) an arm, a leg or more. They didn't take younger kids - that's a field that requires its own specialism, apparently - and the largest single category of their patients was elderly stroke victims. But they did get a fair number of teenagers and young adults - and "does this mean I can't play video games from now on" was apparently a common question.
I don't know whether they used modified controllers of the sort talked about in TFA, but they did have a few gamers on the staff (including the young lady in question) who compiled lists of games that could be played using one hand or with limited motor control. There were apparently plenty of examples on the "normal" consoles (PS2, PS3, Xbox, 360) and PC, but next to none for the Wii aside from a couple of very basic kiddy games. What they were after were games like the Forza Motorsport games or Bayonetta, which can be configured with assists and the like to allow for entirely 1-handed play.
So, in a world where developers were required by law to make their products fully accessible, it's likely that a large portion of current games wouldn't exist - along with an entire platform (the Wii). And besides, where do you want to define "accessible"? Playable with 1 hand? Playable with no hands? Wanting to make products accessible is a worthy goal, but there does, in any sensible world, come a point at which the opportunity cost is just too great.
Yeah, I can see the differences - it was just the whole "viewscreen on the controller" thing - I'll always associate that with the Dreamcast.
Amen to that. The first thing I thought on seeing this was "hmm... it looks a litte like the Dreamcast controller". Which is fitting, really, given I fully expect this thing to be the next Dreamcast.
Nintendo could find themselves in big trouble in 18 months time. I can't see this thing having the mass appeal of the Wii - or drawing the hardcore away from their PS3s, 360s and PCs. And while saying anything nice about Sony is unfashionable around here, the Vita looks like a far superior piece of kit to the 3DS, which is going to launch with a decent games lineup at the same price as the 3DS. I fully expect the knowledge that the Vita is coming to further dent the 3DS's already-poor sales over the coming months.
If Nintendo find themselves with a Dreamcast and a Virtual Boy as their current generation hardware, then it's squeaky-bottom time for the,
But that's the whole point with WoW. Most WoW players never go anywhere near the cess-pit of the official forums. They simply log in and play with a bunch of friends - either people they met in game or, in a great many cases, people they know in real life.
This is why WoW was successful - when it launched, it got a kind of "watercooler momentum" that I've never seen for any other game. The only comparator from the gaming world was the launch of the Wii. I remember the office I was working in when WoW launched - it was anything but a nerdy office, with a roughly even gender balance and, I would estimate, at least half of the staff over 40 and very, very few of them gamers. And yet for a month or two after WoW launched, it was the main topic of conversation in the cafeteria. I'm sure that not everybody who started playing it then carried on playing it for all that long - but quite a few did, and they drew in people that they knew in real life as well.
So it doesn't matter how nasty WoW's official forums are or how obnoxious its most vocal fanboys can be - most of the player base never goes anywhere near that particular world. And that's the kind of thing that most MMO developers would give their right arm for.
Nintendo says that region locking on the 3DS is optional.
Let me be frank...
They are almost certainly lying.
We know for a fact that locking on the 360 is optional. Historically, "home" consoles have been region locked. In the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, all three consoles were region locked. Ok, there were a couple of end-of-cycle Xbox games that weren't, but those were very much the exception. Despite this, when publishers are given the choice, around 75% of 360 games are released without region locking.
Historically, handhelds have never been region locked. As people tend to take handhelds on international trips with them, there is actually a bit of a business rationale for this. And yet, despite this, on the "allegedly" optional-locking 3DS, absolutely every game released to date and every known forthcoming release - including those from publishers that do not lock on the 360 - is region locked.
If region locking on the 3DS is not currently required for certification, I will eat my hat. Nintendo has a track record of lying through its teeth when it suits its purposes and I think this is just another case of that.
At the time I type this, the PSN is actually up and running. Or at least, it's online gaming components are. The Store and other features that require payments are still offline, as they have been since the initial shutdown several weeks ago. But you can, should you feel so inclined, log in and play games online at present. Whether this may change over the next few hours is open to question - while it wouldn't completely surprise me, I suspect that Sony will try to keep the network itself up this time..
What's just been taken offline is web-interface for changing passwords. Now, that's still pretty bad - in fact, given how stupid the mistake in this case is, it's verging on the awful - but I dare say that a lot of PSN users may not actually notice until Sony tells them. Furthermore, just to add a little perspective, stupid though Sony's mistake here is (and it is very stupid indeed and then some), no additional personal information or credit card details beyond what has already been leaked will have been compromised as a result of this - not least because you can't, so far as I know, actually input new credit card details into the PSN yet.
So it's a further embarrassment for Sony and will further undermine confidence in them (do you really, really want to trust them with your credit card details ever again). But unless I'm reading things wrong - and if I am then happy to be corrected- there's not been any actual additional harm done to users this time.
Hey, I was more of a PC gamer and Sega person myself (though I confess that there were some SNES games that turned me green with envy, like Super Mario World).
And it's not as if Sega went on to do anything evil. Well, not unless you want to count pretty much every Sonic game published between Sonic 3 and Sonic Colours (excluding those two titles). I've seen... pictures... of cutscenes... that I would pay a lot of money to be able to forget. Actually, yes, that counts as some of the vilest evil in the history of the gaming industry - but they did put out Valkyria Chronicles, so I'll forgive them.
Yes, I think that's right. Nintendo spent 2 generations as the "also rans" and even in the Wii generation have failed to turn their huge installed base into the kind of cultural dominance that Sony saw with the PS2 (because they targetting the wrong market segments). When your market position is poor, it doesn't really matter how control-freaky you are - to most consumers, it doesn't matter as you have no influence. Apple benefitted from this for years, then suddenly the ipod, iphone and ipad got big and people started to notice (belatedly) that however bad you thought Microsoft were for locking down their OS, Apple were umpteen times worse.
The Sony rootkit thing was completely unjustifiable by any measure. I felt a bit sorry for their gaming division at the time - they clearly hadn't been involved in the rootkit fiasco but the PS3's launch certainly took flak as a result of it. In fact, the PS3 at-launch was a pretty "ethical" piece of kit for a console - easy-to-install OtherOS features, backwards compatibility, no region locking etc. Sadly, Sony seemed to decide that their rootkit guy should be running their games division - hence of those big three pluses that the PS3 launched with, only "region free" is still standing.
And Microsoft - I have serious issues with what they've done on the OS side over the years, but I find it hard to pick on something truly evil that their gaming division has done. Shutting down the Flight Simulator series is the closest I can come. They entered the console market following the lead set by others (eg. Sony and Nintendo region lock, so we will region lock) and have generally tended in a more liberal direction since then, albeit slowly. The RROD was colossal incompetence (and while MS Gaming don't do "evil" as such, they can do "incompetent" as well as anybody else), but they did do a good job of compensating customers, for the most part and at the end of the day, the company itself ended up the only real loser from it.
I think you misread my first line. I said the general direction of travel with sony is *away* from region locking. So we're actually in agreement.
The general direction of travel with Sony is away from region locking. The PS1 and PS2 were fully locked, the PSP and PS3 are not locked for games (besides that one example you name, which I believe was accidental). Sony's preferred HD video physical medium (Blu-Ray) supports region locking and some studios use it, but the proportion of region-free BDs out there is far higher than the proportion of region-free DVDs ever was. I would be very surprised (and cross) if NGP games were region locked.
The rationale for region locking is not strong. The "different languages" issue is just FUD - there's been an international trade in books for centuries and in music for decades and in those cases, buyers have proven perfectly capable of making sure that they buy stuff in the right language. Regional pricing issues within the developed world are also a silly justification; after all, if it costs you more to sell a title in a particular region due to distribution costs, taxes or whatever, then those costs should also apply to consumers importing a product from another region. So, for example, if I import a game from the US to the UK, the price I pay in shipping costs tends to outweigh the marginally lower RRP of the game (depending on where the currencies are) in the US.
For years now, the real justification for region locking has been the hope on the part of the entertainment companies that if they can find the right price point (far lower than in the developed world), people in the big emerging markets like China and India will actually buy their products rather than pirating them. This obviously involves the kind of huge price differentials where reverse-importing really could become a serious problem (why do you think Japan was put in the same DVD region as Europe, rather than the rest of Asia?).
Most companies, particularly Sony, have, I think, now realised that this is a pipe-dream. No matter the price-point, they are not going to get mass-sales in those markets. In China in particular, you're up against consumers who would rather be "patriotic" and support a domestic pirate-merchant than a foreign corporation. Once this pipe-dream has evaporated, there's relatively little point in not doing away with a system that drives up your manufacture costs and annoys consumers for no other useful purpose.
Nintendo, I suspect, cling to region locking because it is something that fits well with their corporate ethos. They like control. They like to be able to say "Japan can have this, but we don't think those nasty Americans or Europeans are clever enough for it". And that really, really winds me up.
The 3DS is region locked. First handheld ever to be so. Every Nintendo home console since the year dot has been region locked. Sony ditched region locking for games on the PSP and PS3. The 360 has region locking, but while it used to be mandatory for certification, MS leave it up to the publishers these days and most of them don't use it. Earlier handhelds such as the Gameboy, GBA and DS were probably not region locked because it was simply too much hassle to put the extra gumpf needed for it into the handhelds at the time while keeping size etc down. And not only does Nintendo region lock, but they also have a paternalist, authoritarian approach to which games can come out in which regions - witness The Last Story getting locked as Japanese-only, despite the success of previous Mistwalker games in the west.
I have no particular brief for MS. I own 360, a PS3 and a Wii (as well as a PSP, a 3DS and a high-end gaming PC). I like my 360 - and I like my PS3. Admittedly, Sony are in my bad books at the moment because I've just had to change my credit card thanks to them (which does tend to grate a bit). I don't tend to beat-up on them in the long term, though, because there are always plenty of others to do that. While at the same time, Nintendo do a lot of other things that are really, really bad (and if you are in Europe, then region locking is really, really bad) and generally seem to get away unscathed - indeed, with a little halo.
I've also got no idea why on earth you think that I just want games full of space marines. A quick glance at my posting history will show that games I've written nice things about lately include Valkyria Chronicles and Ar Tonelico Qoga, both of which have a distinctly non-space-marine aesthetic. In fact, Halo bores me rigid (though I do have a soft spot for Gears of War, largely because it's just so ridiculously over the top).
The absence of a browser in the 360 is an oddity, I'll admit. I've never really understood why they never put one in, given that the Wii and PS3 both have them (though the Wii's is borderline unusable and the PS3's is only marginally better). But to be honest, a browser is pretty low on the list of things that most people want from their consoles. Decent online multiplayer functionality tends to rank a bit higher on the list - and has yet to appear on any Nintendo console.
Just saying.
Time to burn some karma, I guess...
There's this strange perception around some parts (particularly around here) that Nintendo are somehow "more ethical" or "consumer-friendly" than the other console manufacturers. This overlooks the fact that Nintendo are the people who normalised console region locking (and who are still trying to push and extend it even now, when Sony and MS have decided they're not interested any more), cracked down on homebrew whenever they can and put out consoles which don't even give so much as a tiny whiff of an "OtherOS" or "PS2 Linux kit" walled garden. In fact, going off their track record, they'll even try to sue you if you have a job they don't approve of and make a post on your blog saying you like one of their games (though I seem to remember they did apologise to the young lady in that particular case after it sparked an outcry).
Ok, they've probably got a way to go until they beat the Sony CD-rootkit fiasco (which didn't actually stem from Sony's gaming division anyway). But in pretty much every other respect, it's hard to say that they're any better than Sony - and I'd personally say that they're more anti-consumer than MS's gaming division (who don't seem particularly evil these days, even if they do occasionally do "inept" or "stupid" over something like Games for Windows Live).
I suspect Nintendo get a free pass from many due to a combination of nostalgia and the fact that they were the industry's underdog for two console cycles. One could perhaps draw parallels with Apple, if one really, really wanted to burn karma. It's not always correct to assume that the underdogs are any more ethical than the.. erm... overdogs. Reflexively and uncritically back the underdogs in every case and you may find yourself in a very uncomfortable position when they actually break through (feel free to insert Egypt/Libya comments here as appropriate to your own political persuasion).
The most "recent" of the consoles-that-never-were in TFA is the Phantom. The reasons behind its failure are too many and varied to list here (and probably too well known to be worthwhile). Certainly, Infinium Labs did absolutely everything it could to appear incredibly dodgy and untrustworthy. Even if it hadn't been for that, it was clear that they were designing a product that their target market (regular console and PC gamers) were not interested in.
However, I wondered at the time and still wonder now whether there wasn't actually a market for a Phantom-style console - just not in the general consumer market. I mean, the thing was designed to be built with cheap PC components and to run what were essentially PC games, distributed digitally. Back then, of course, there wasn't the kind of broadband penetration in homes that has enabled Steam to get as big as it has in the interim. Even without that problem, the prospect of a cheap, but non-upgrable and fully locked down, box capable of playing current PC games (but probably not future ones given the way that PC gaming specs evolve over time) was a pretty poor pitch to make to Joe Public.
Where they might have had more success, I suspect, is in trying to push the console to the hospitality sector, airlines and other corporate customers. I can imagine that hotels might have liked the idea of a simple, cheap games console that could have been stuck in a sealed cabinet and allowed visitors to play games in their room (possibly on a pay-for-play basis) without any messy physical media sitting around to be stolen. A lot of airlines already use (crappy) in-flight games systems, but the Phantom sounded as though it had the potential to do somethng significantly better. Certainly, with the hardware they were talking about at the time, a single machine would have been able to run "simple" games for a large number of passengers. There were plenty of other venues where machine like that might have been useful.
In the model I have in my mind, the Phantom wouldn't have been competing with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo - it would have been opening up a new market, albeit not a particularly public-facing one.
Oh well, it's probably all just pointless speculation - in all likelihood there was never actually a product to market to these industries anyway. But sometimes it's fun to speculate on what might have been.
On a side note, the first console listed in TFA - the Sega Neptune - has gained a strange sort of posthumous recognition. A "moefied" anthropomorphic version of it is the main character in the Japanese RPG "Hyperdimenson Neptunia". It's just a pity that the game in question is without a doubt the single worst title I have ever (however briefly) inflicted upon my PS3 (to the extent I found myself feeling sorry for a piece of Sony hardware).
You're probably right about the tastes of the hardcore Japanese market - though I would add that I actually really enjoyed FF10.
Is that info about the FF12 main character reliably sourced? I've not heard it before, but it would certainly explain a few things. Vaan starts out as the game's main character, but by the half-way point, he's pretty much reduced to a spectator. In fact, there was a point towards the end of the game when I really did start to wonder why they were still letting him tag along. Ashe or Balthier always felt like more natural main characters.
I loved the free roaming stuff in FF12. I particularly loved that if you did some fairly short power-levelling early in the game, you could essentially switch yourself onto a different gameplay track, being fed with new and interestingly designed super-bosses via the hunts system as you went through the game. I think if anything hurt FF12 outside of Japan, it was the fact that the gambit system was never particularly well explained and understood. It was a much more sophisticated system than the likes of Penny Arcade were preaching at the time, but a lot of people were put off it before they actually understood it. One good step might have been to make all of the conditions available from the start of the game, rather than making people purchase them as the game went on - put some of that depth up front for players to experiment with early on.
I think whether Nintendo screws up the core concept varies a lot from franchise to franchise. I personally felt that Mario Kart Wii was a disaster - and I know a good few people who agreed. It put too many karts on the track at once, with too many weapons available and saw the exit of the last vestige of "racing" from the series in favour of weapon spam and random chance.
Super Smash Brothers came through ok on the Wii, and so did Mario via the Galaxy games - but even those aren't feeling particularly fresh and need a revamp to get rid of some of the more irritating elements (like having limited lives in Mario, plus the fact that the controls never felt quite right on the Wii). Zelda... really does feel like the same thing over and over again by this point. And Okami did it better anyway.
The sad thing is, Japanese game development hasn't always been inward looking. As recently as 10 years ago, it was the Japanese developers who were at the forefront of most genres (aside from the fps and RTS, which has always been Western things). Western developers were adopting mechanics from Japanese games like crazy as they rushed to catch up. Then just as the West started to draw level... the Japanese developers just gave up and started to focus exclusively on a slice of the domestic audience where they just didn't have to try as hard.
At risk of going off-topic, there are parallels with the course of the anime industry in recent years. After the whole bubble and burst in the middle of the last decade, and particularly the US anime industry crash, we saw fewer and fewer anime series that aimed for mainstream appeal - certainly fewer that you could use to introduce interested friends to anime. Instead, the focus shifted towards fanservice laden series with little to no plot and next to no wider-audience potential, but a hardcore fanbase willing to buy the DVDs and figurines at any price.
Over time, Japan's shifting demographics (ie. the aging population) will turn this into a dead-end. Japanese game and anime developers alike need to recognise this before it's too late.
Agree, save that Nintendo are NOT the exception to the rule. All they do these days is hope that their latest hardware gimmick gets traction (DS and Wii did, 3DS looks like it won't) and remake the same few games - primarily Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time - with a different label on the box. Except on the 3DS, they aren't even going to bother changing the label on the Zelda box.
But yes, the mid-series Ultima games (up to and including 6) were massively influential on the development of JRPGs as a genre. Now, these were great games in their day, but they do feel like curious historical artifacts now.
It does feel like once a Japanese gaming company has a major success, they try to freeze time at that point. So Nintendo have never moved on mentally from the days of the SNES. Square-Enix is still stuck in the mid-90s when Dragon Warrior ruled the roost (given that the company is more Enix than Square these days) and Sega has only recently and reluctantly started to move on from Sonic (and would dearly love to go back if they could). Nippon-Ichi stopped innovating the moment the first Disgaea became an unexpected international success. The list goes on and on...
Yes, absolutely right. Spirits Within should be remembered as one of the greatest disasters in the history of the entertainment industries.
And yes, Square continued to put out great games for a while after the merger. Kingdom Hearts 2 was probably the best game of the PS2 console generation. FF12 is probably my second favorite installment in the series (behind FF7, and a little bit ahead of FF6 and FF10). But I suspect that those games had a lot of their development work done pre-merger, or in the immediate aftermath of the merger before corporate identities had really come together.
If you look at the pre-merger Enix, you see a lot of the behaviours that Square-Enix manifests these days. Grind-heavy, innovation-light games with underwhelming technical standards, aimed primarily at a hardcore Japanese market, with little understanding of what the international market (or even the mainstream Japanese market) wants out of a game.
In any sensible world, a merger between the two companies would not have seen the limited-appeal (and long-term dead end) Enix methodology come out so comprehensively on top. However, given that Squaresoft basically had to beg for a rescue, it was perhaps inevitable that their risk taking wouldn't survive.
I've wondered about this for years myself. A remade FF7, for PS3 and 360, with modern graphics, a few user interface tweaks and possibly a bit of bonus content on the side (like a new optional dungeon or something) would be an absolute gold-mine. Unfortunately, I remember some comments that came out of them last year, to the effect that it would simply be too expensive to remake FF7.
I'm not sure I can understand how this could possibly be. In terms of size and scale, the game isn't particularly different to other JRPGs. Lost Odyssey, which came out a few years ago now for the 360, had a perfectly acceptable level of current-gen graphics. Factor in that FF7's cutscenes are on the short side compared to those in... say... FF13 and it's hard to see how the price could truly be that prohibitive. I can only assume that S-E were thinking that if they were to remake FF7, they'd need to quadruple the length of all of the cutscenes, adding in a bunch of new Advent Children-style fight scenes and whatnot. That in itself illustrates a good chunk about why the company is going wrong.
Agreed. I've heard of plenty of attempts at resurrecting an MMO that's had a poor start and so far as I can tell, these have a 0% success rate. The PS3 version won't save it - particularly not in the aftermath of the PSN leak fiasco, which is going to make people particularly cautious about online gaming on the PS3.
The game's a failure - abject and total. At this point, keeping it going is doing nothing bar drawing resources from more promising endeavours. If there are any players out there who actually like the game (and I can't say I've come across any, even when logged into it myself), then it's a bit rough for them, but you're always going to back a loser once in a while.
I suspect the biggest reason why S-E haven't killed it already is pride. To have a main-series FF game acknowledged as a failure that could not be redeemed will be a huge blow to morale, likely not just for executives but throughout the company. It's never happened before; Final Fantasy is part of Square's mythology, with the first title having famously saved the company when it was on the verge of failure (the "Final" in the name was because they expected it to be the last game they ever released). Even the games which have been seen as underwhelming with hindsight (probably 5, 9 and 13) have sold well enough that the company could reasonably present them as successes. 11 was the most successful full-subscription MMO going, until World of Warcraft hit the scene and smashed all previous records. S-E have only themselves (and their cheap Chinese subcontractors) to blame for 14, but that isn't going to make them feel any better about it.
Square-Enix's problems mirror, to a large extent, those that have afflicted the wider Japanese gaming industry (including, once you discount early Wii hardware sales, Nintendo), during the current console cycle.
At the heart of this is a failure to evolve their games and franchises to reflect changing times and tastes. If often feels like the modern Japanese games industry doesn't recognise anything between "no change at all" and "total ground-up redesign". It's instructive to compare how the most successful Western developers have managed franchises and general gaming concepts over this time. If you look at the likes of Bioware, Bethesda, Bungie, Blizzard, Valve, even some of EA's own internal development efforts, you can see a pretty ruthless evolutionary approach to design. When a game comes out and the studio begins development either on a sequel or even a new property, the first thing that seems to happen is a look at what people liked and didn't like about the previous game, with this being factored into the development of the sequel.
Take Bioware as a case-study here. Baldur's Gate came out in 1998 and was pretty successful. However, it was the sequel, which came out a couple of years later, that really revolutionised Western RPGs. Why? Because Bioware had evolved the franchise, removing aspects of the original game that had been "a bit too pen and paper" for CRPG players (such as no-pausing-on-the-inventory-screen mechanics and large amounts of wilderness crawling) and had expanded the areas that had been well received (adding further complexity to the casting system, expanding character dialogue trees and so on). Once Bioware moved on from the Baldur's Gate series, they continued releasing RPGs that very clearly had BG in their DNA, but which shed some of the pricklier aspects of the old series, while borrowing popular elements of Japanese RPGs (such as the "active party" system). Then having reached a point where they faced a serious conflict between hardcore RPG gamers and the more casual crowd, they essentially "fork" their games, with the Dragon Age series pitched for the hardcore and the Mass Effect series for the action demographic. That isn't to say that Bioware don't make mis-steps - Dragon Age 2 feels very much like a mis-step, and Jade Empire can probably be seen as one with hindsight - but an evolutionary approach like this makes it much easier to get back on track after a wobble.
Then compare Square-Enix's management of its premier RPG property - the Final Fantasy series. There's no evidence of a planned evolutionary approach to the development of the series - just an odd mixture of clinging to past certainties combined with random-throw-of-the-dice leaps into the dark. There are elements of the Final Fantasy series on show in FF13 which feel like products of another era. Random encounters (and I'm sorry, but making them visible on the field map doesn't make them any less random encounters) have been pretty much entirely ditched in the West. Our developers have figured out that - surprise surprise - gamers don't like spending a couple of hours runnng in circles in a dungeon just to level up. Yes, levelling up is part of RPGs, but any Western RPG worth its salt these days ensures that it is done via interesting sidequests and subplots. And yet there they are, still at the centre of the flagship Japanese RPG series (and pretty much every other JRPG).
The throw-of-the-dice element seems to come in the way that Square-Enix completely changes its battle and level up systems (and often even wider mechanics) for each installment in the series. At times, this has been a strength. It does keep the games from feeling a bit too samey. But when the throw of the dice produces a result that people actually like, it inexplicably never seems to get developed any further. So, for example, FF12's move towards more open-world gameplay was pretty widely welcomed, even by people who didn't like much else about the game. Yet then FF13 comes out and is basically a 30 hour tunnel for the player to