In this case, it's surprisingly true. If you look at the stuff they're adding, its not that advanced. It's basic functionality. Like searching for items ala an auction house, rather then clicking on every store trying to see if what you want is even for sale. Oh, and scrolling the map, and replying to messages.
No serious company would release a game with basic stuff like that missing... which shows you how seriously Square takes this game on the PC. You're buying a beta test for the PS3 version, nothing more.
Having played this game and read the list of "updates", they don't have a prayer. The "updates" are more like basic features and UI stuff that no serious MMO would launch without.
- They're adding a way to "search retainers in a ward for specific items." aka: Functionality like an auction house. It's good that they're adding this. It's not good that they launched the game with a system that was so completely and fundamentally broken at the design level that it never should have been let out of alpha. Seriously, someone thought it was a good idea to make players wander around from retainer to retainer in the hope of finding item that they need, in a game where crafting is heavily dependent on player made inputs? Have these people ever played a MMO?
- They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly. Which is good, since you can't right now. Again, who ever heard of a MMO where you can't reply to messages? This isn't rocket science, it's the most basic chat functionality on the planet. (While they're at it they should make message size limits something slightly larger then a twitter message.)
- They're adding a way to let you scroll the map with the mouse. Seriously. Go read it yourself. You can't scroll the map with a mouse. In a PC game. I can't make shit this stupid up.
These are just some of the changes. They're also hitting the broken targetting system (target, pick a spell, then... target again? For real? Who thought this up?). Hopefully they do something about the poor performance and terrible stability of the client. But it won't matter.
You only get one chance to make an impression in the MMO market. Recovering from the perception that you've got a bad game is extremely difficult after the fact. This game has nothing going for it except that it's pretty (if you spend enough on a computer that can actually run it with acceptable performance). In basically every other area, it's inferior to that other game that has 12 million players and just happens to have an expansion launching at the same time as the patch that will add basic functionality to FF 14.
And if you get past that, shortly after there's some Star Wars MMO coming out. Between those two games, a buggy PS3 port with the worst UI a MMO has ever seen has no chance of recovering. It'll be running at 80,000 subs (if they're lucky) in 6 months. Fortunately for them, it's really meant as a PS3 game anyway and on the PS3 the competition is much weaker.
Considering this "article" also rails on people for not using a different password on every website, I don't know what he expects people to do with them.
When you throw 100 passwords at people and want to enforce "strong" passwords on all of them (which he also complains about), what option do people have but to store them somewhere? Paper is a useful media for this purpose.
This article is bullshit, really. Some of the things he complains about are the direct cause of other things he complains about. Make up your fucking mind.
How do you fix stuff like "no mailbox or AH" soon? They put this retainer nonsense in to replace those. It's a fundamentally bad design decision, not a bug.
Until someone beats Square with a clue-by-four, these problems won't get fixed. The fact that it got out of beta in such a state says all that needs to be said.
But it's a fair comparison. Nothing will come out as polished as WoW is now, but stuff also has the benefit now of learning from what Blizzard got wrong (and what they got right).
But they don't. FFXIV is a lot like XI. Which might have been okay, back in 2003. It's not acceptable for a modern MMO to have a UI this bad, a patching system this slow, or basic things not functional like ALT+TAB.
The developers need to ask themselves "Why would people play this instead of WoW?" Square's answer is obviously "because it's Final Fantasy" and has nothing to do with gameplay. Because as a game, XIV is terrible.
If they're selling it, then it's ready for a review. If it needs more time in development, they shouldn't be asking for $15/month to play it.
This is a buggy mess with one of the worst UIs the genre has ever seen. Nothing more. Six months in development won't fix it because they don't seem to understand just how terrible the UI really is.
Someone needs to buy Square a copy of World of Warcraft so they can grasp what a decent UI actually looks like.
The W3C is a running joke at this point. They didn't even want HTML 5 in the first place. Now they're telling people to shy away from it for a few YEARS?
I don't know what Internet these guys are on, but it's not the same one that the rest of us inhabit.
The game industry is the western world's remaining sweat shop. One of my best friends works in the industry. During the last few months of development he tends to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. This goes on for months, and applies to the entire company. Why?
Because schedules in the game industry don't even pretend to be realistic. Marketing decides when the game will be out, and everybody works insane hours to make it so. It's not an exceptional thing, it's routine in the industry and based on game release dates I pretty much know when I'll stop hearing from him for a while. People get forced to do it because most of them are easily replaced due to a lot of other people who think "wouldn't it be cool to make games?"
It's not. He can't even enjoy the games he makes because working on them is so soul-crushing that it's impossible to have fun playing them. Hell, he doesn't even get paid overtime!
So if you really want to be in the game industry, make sure you're a loaner without a family who doesn't like to sleep very much.
A better bet is to get a CS degree, get a job working for some boring company or the government, and mod games as a hobby. Modders get to do it because they love it, on their own schedule.
Because getting the user to say yes to installing things is hard now? There's no fancy OS stuff to avoid when an administrator user on the computer opens the front door in order to see the dancing cat video.
It's gotten even worse. While the stories in FF games have always been linear, in the past you had things like towns, world maps, and confusing levels to let you believe you're playing a game with some exploration and interesting things going on.
FF 13 is literally a corridor simulator. You go straight. That's it. There are no towns. No misdirection. You might find a five second detour off the main path that leads to a chest, but it's never more then a few seconds. There's nothing like a town, and really nothing that requires much thought. Even the combat system is given out in dribbles and isn't very interesting most of the game.
Someone posted the maps from the first half of the game, and every single one is a straight line. You could have a controller that only has "up" as a functional direction and still beat this game. Previous games in the series weren't anywhere near this bad.
Final Fantasy XIII is the best example of the problem. That game "innovated" by removing everything interesting and creating the worlds most graphically advanced corridor simulator.
X was terrible, XI was okay by 2003 standards but is completely destroyed by anything after WoW came out, X-2 was terrible, and XIV plays like it's stuck in 2003 (and is buggier then all hell). The track record here is pretty bad.
But really, I don't think his comments were even aimed at Square. They make a lot of mistakes, but except for XIV it's not really the same game every time. A company REALLY guilty of that is someone like NIS, where every game they develop is Disgaea with a different paint job.
That's what I came here to post. I can't believe the editors continue to post crap from Gartner. They're excellent at making very bad predictions, or in this case absolutely meaningless ones. They have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to this market in four years.
Where the comments section would be, we get this instead: "I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own. "
Or in other words: "I have absolutely no fucking clue what I'm talking about and really don't like being corrected."
Mcafee has lots of corporate drones who think it's a good idea to install Mcafee on everything, including database servers. When Mcafee then decides randomly to start terminating Oracle as a virus, they do great business blaming someone else.
(Yes, that did just happen to me. No, I don't know why it was on the database server. Sounds like a very poorly thought out corporate policy though.)
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, it's surprisingly true. If you look at the stuff they're adding, its not that advanced. It's basic functionality. Like searching for items ala an auction house, rather then clicking on every store trying to see if what you want is even for sale. Oh, and scrolling the map, and replying to messages.
No serious company would release a game with basic stuff like that missing... which shows you how seriously Square takes this game on the PC. You're buying a beta test for the PS3 version, nothing more.
Having played this game and read the list of "updates", they don't have a prayer. The "updates" are more like basic features and UI stuff that no serious MMO would launch without.
- They're adding a way to "search retainers in a ward for specific items." aka: Functionality like an auction house. It's good that they're adding this. It's not good that they launched the game with a system that was so completely and fundamentally broken at the design level that it never should have been let out of alpha. Seriously, someone thought it was a good idea to make players wander around from retainer to retainer in the hope of finding item that they need, in a game where crafting is heavily dependent on player made inputs? Have these people ever played a MMO?
- They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly. Which is good, since you can't right now. Again, who ever heard of a MMO where you can't reply to messages? This isn't rocket science, it's the most basic chat functionality on the planet. (While they're at it they should make message size limits something slightly larger then a twitter message.)
- They're adding a way to let you scroll the map with the mouse. Seriously. Go read it yourself. You can't scroll the map with a mouse. In a PC game. I can't make shit this stupid up.
These are just some of the changes. They're also hitting the broken targetting system (target, pick a spell, then... target again? For real? Who thought this up?). Hopefully they do something about the poor performance and terrible stability of the client. But it won't matter.
You only get one chance to make an impression in the MMO market. Recovering from the perception that you've got a bad game is extremely difficult after the fact. This game has nothing going for it except that it's pretty (if you spend enough on a computer that can actually run it with acceptable performance). In basically every other area, it's inferior to that other game that has 12 million players and just happens to have an expansion launching at the same time as the patch that will add basic functionality to FF 14.
And if you get past that, shortly after there's some Star Wars MMO coming out. Between those two games, a buggy PS3 port with the worst UI a MMO has ever seen has no chance of recovering. It'll be running at 80,000 subs (if they're lucky) in 6 months. Fortunately for them, it's really meant as a PS3 game anyway and on the PS3 the competition is much weaker.
Young people feel invincible. This has been true for a long time. Most people don't get cautious until they get torched.
Considering this "article" also rails on people for not using a different password on every website, I don't know what he expects people to do with them.
When you throw 100 passwords at people and want to enforce "strong" passwords on all of them (which he also complains about), what option do people have but to store them somewhere? Paper is a useful media for this purpose.
This article is bullshit, really. Some of the things he complains about are the direct cause of other things he complains about. Make up your fucking mind.
How do you fix stuff like "no mailbox or AH" soon? They put this retainer nonsense in to replace those. It's a fundamentally bad design decision, not a bug.
Until someone beats Square with a clue-by-four, these problems won't get fixed. The fact that it got out of beta in such a state says all that needs to be said.
But it's a fair comparison. Nothing will come out as polished as WoW is now, but stuff also has the benefit now of learning from what Blizzard got wrong (and what they got right).
But they don't. FFXIV is a lot like XI. Which might have been okay, back in 2003. It's not acceptable for a modern MMO to have a UI this bad, a patching system this slow, or basic things not functional like ALT+TAB.
The developers need to ask themselves "Why would people play this instead of WoW?" Square's answer is obviously "because it's Final Fantasy" and has nothing to do with gameplay. Because as a game, XIV is terrible.
If they're selling it, then it's ready for a review. If it needs more time in development, they shouldn't be asking for $15/month to play it.
This is a buggy mess with one of the worst UIs the genre has ever seen. Nothing more. Six months in development won't fix it because they don't seem to understand just how terrible the UI really is.
Someone needs to buy Square a copy of World of Warcraft so they can grasp what a decent UI actually looks like.
Given how much of the US budget is borrowed money, maybe he's simply going to work for the people who are actually paying the bills.
Well good. If we save even one person from that hell, then it was worth it.
This.
The W3C is a running joke at this point. They didn't even want HTML 5 in the first place. Now they're telling people to shy away from it for a few YEARS?
I don't know what Internet these guys are on, but it's not the same one that the rest of us inhabit.
The game industry is the western world's remaining sweat shop. One of my best friends works in the industry. During the last few months of development he tends to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. This goes on for months, and applies to the entire company. Why?
Because schedules in the game industry don't even pretend to be realistic. Marketing decides when the game will be out, and everybody works insane hours to make it so. It's not an exceptional thing, it's routine in the industry and based on game release dates I pretty much know when I'll stop hearing from him for a while. People get forced to do it because most of them are easily replaced due to a lot of other people who think "wouldn't it be cool to make games?"
It's not. He can't even enjoy the games he makes because working on them is so soul-crushing that it's impossible to have fun playing them. Hell, he doesn't even get paid overtime!
So if you really want to be in the game industry, make sure you're a loaner without a family who doesn't like to sleep very much.
A better bet is to get a CS degree, get a job working for some boring company or the government, and mod games as a hobby. Modders get to do it because they love it, on their own schedule.
Because getting the user to say yes to installing things is hard now? There's no fancy OS stuff to avoid when an administrator user on the computer opens the front door in order to see the dancing cat video.
Since you mentioned that you can't get any swag from publishers, here's the answer: get your reviews on metacritic.
That score determines a lot of things and you're much more likely to be bribed if you can make it look good.
More people have been killed by vending machines falling on them then by lawn darts. Ban Vending Machines! Why won't you think of the children!?
It's gotten even worse. While the stories in FF games have always been linear, in the past you had things like towns, world maps, and confusing levels to let you believe you're playing a game with some exploration and interesting things going on.
FF 13 is literally a corridor simulator. You go straight. That's it. There are no towns. No misdirection. You might find a five second detour off the main path that leads to a chest, but it's never more then a few seconds. There's nothing like a town, and really nothing that requires much thought. Even the combat system is given out in dribbles and isn't very interesting most of the game.
Someone posted the maps from the first half of the game, and every single one is a straight line. You could have a controller that only has "up" as a functional direction and still beat this game. Previous games in the series weren't anywhere near this bad.
Final Fantasy XIII is the best example of the problem. That game "innovated" by removing everything interesting and creating the worlds most graphically advanced corridor simulator.
X was terrible, XI was okay by 2003 standards but is completely destroyed by anything after WoW came out, X-2 was terrible, and XIV plays like it's stuck in 2003 (and is buggier then all hell). The track record here is pretty bad.
But really, I don't think his comments were even aimed at Square. They make a lot of mistakes, but except for XIV it's not really the same game every time. A company REALLY guilty of that is someone like NIS, where every game they develop is Disgaea with a different paint job.
Since the web page for each one has a big link to the other one? Almost certainly.
Nintendo is also the publisher on quite a chunk of those games, giving them 100% of the sale price instead of a much smaller fraction.
No, he just works for Gartner.
That's what I came here to post. I can't believe the editors continue to post crap from Gartner. They're excellent at making very bad predictions, or in this case absolutely meaningless ones. They have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to this market in four years.
Maybe it'll turn out to be a good game, and thus people who like good games will care about it?
Not everything HAS to be a sequel to sell. See Gearboxes last game: Borderlands.
Well, people also believe that Hindus are trying to build a mosque at ground zero. Morons will believe anything. (http://www.causes.com/causes/512295)
Where the comments section would be, we get this instead: "I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own. "
Or in other words: "I have absolutely no fucking clue what I'm talking about and really don't like being corrected."
Muslim? I thought it was the Hindu mosque we needed to stop at ground zero.
http://www.causes.com/causes/512295
(Yes, there really are people this stupid in the US. Unfortunately, they're allowed to both breed and vote.)
Mcafee has lots of corporate drones who think it's a good idea to install Mcafee on everything, including database servers. When Mcafee then decides randomly to start terminating Oracle as a virus, they do great business blaming someone else.
(Yes, that did just happen to me. No, I don't know why it was on the database server. Sounds like a very poorly thought out corporate policy though.)