Well no matter what June is going to be make or break for a lot of people. Right now all Yoshida has done is minor changes/content so he'll need something big next month.
Well no matter what June is going to be make or break for a lot of people. Right now all Yoshida has done is minor changes/content so he'll need something big next month.
Nice to see they posted an update on the June patch today
SE is riddled with bad management, that is why this is such a clusterfuck of a game. They can say w/e they need to say to help themselves sleep at night but the truth is nobody did any research on what modern MMO's are like, what works and doesn't work. Management over the XIV basically just said "we're SE, fuck it, lets do it live!"
This game would have been so much better under the proper management, they could have been using XI as a platform to be testing new innovative ideas to see what would work and what wouldn't work. XI should have become a guinea pig, a playground for XIV developmental ideas while XIV was in development.
Arrogance in company management is why XIV is a failure, they can't just rely on the brand name anymore to carry them. SE is still living in the early 2000's in term's of innovation, I cannot even fathom why the server software doesn't support mailboxes or an auction house still at this point in XIV.
I be trolling / sarcastic
I don't even think it's research that was needed since most of XIV is considered a step back from XI. I don't think they cared much. They figured a pretty, poorly optimized, engine could sell a game and that's what they went with. I don't know, do BR's work yet? Because they were pretty broken at launch and the fact they took you out of combat was retarded.
Combat system was / is in shambles at launch. Stuff didn't work, stats don't work, ect.. I know it's beating a dead bush, but i don't think any research could of helped the game since it seems like they just didn't care. One thing that blew my mind is that if you didn't want to have to select "AoE on/off" for each spell you had to make a macro.. that was horrible and whoever thought of that idea should of never been allowed on the dev floor.
I think you're mistaking the game being severely rushed with "not caring." When you have 10 days to do 300 days worth of work... you have to prioritize something. My guess is Tanaka's priorities landed with making screenshots of the game look as good as they could for marketing reasons while they scrambled to actually make the game work after the fact.
I agree with Katlan on the engine part. You can't not optimize your shit before it gets out. Not that Rift is the best game out there, but it's clean as a whistle - perhaps too clean, but that's off-topic. Anyway, I remember going through each phase of the beta and feeling the game run better and faster with each test, without me having to change a thing. It was never un-smooth; shit just ran faster and looked better as time went on.
XIV was clunk from the start and clunky at the finish. I never once felt like clunkyness was improving in the alpha or beta. Don't use an engine if you have no idea how it works, especially if you're going to purposefully put delay into the game in some lame-brained attempt to keep people from hacking and shit.
Edit: This takes me back to August - October. Mioko stalwartly defending the game from the pitchfork-wielding masses.
Yes, because when the project officially started on a whiteboard in some office 5 years ago, it was full-bore, 100%, fully-funded go-time until the day it was released.
I know they've been floating around with this "rapture" concept for a long time, and they were probably taking their sweet time since then, making it look nice and pretty, thinking XI would continue to dump free moneys in their lap for years (remember the other continents they planned for XI?). I bet after the massive amounts of cash they dumped on FFXIII, they realized XI wasn't quite funding their projects as well as they hoped, along with the up-coming competition of numerous "next-gen" MMORPGs... so, they turned to XIV team and told them to hurry up and release it so they could start getting paid via subscriptions of FF-hungry fans.
I wouldn't go as far to say "they didn't care." I think its more about the arrogance inside of the company where they thought the brand alone would carry the game while they slowly trickled out the patches. Bad management is behind the root of all of this because some suit in the company said this game had to go out by X-date even though they weren't even close to having the game up to par.
They had big time communication break-downs some where in between management and development teams.
Exactly. They are usually smart enough to know that Final Fantasy is their precious baby, but this was one of the times they thought the name could keep it afloat while they fixed it up after the fact... since this is the few opportunities they could do such a thing, as it's a patch-able game.
I just don't know why they didn't learn from XI's rocky start in Japan... only this time they blew it internationally.
I always thought such a trainwrek game can't be made into existence just "because u suck".
I'm sure behind closed door a lot of other things happened.
Pick your favorite : "Rapture" wasnt meant to be FF14, the game launched so fast because of fiscal revenue reasons, Tanaka was the source of all evil and so on and so forth.
This is just another part of the larger issue of Japanese developers as a whole being 5-10 years behind western devs. While it's not a coverall for the multitude of "mind full of fuck" decisions that went into making this game, it does explain a lot of the retarded ass gameplay mechanics.
SE has some of the best brand recognition coming out of Japan so they have weathered the storm longer than most, but then they pull dumb shit like "hurr we can't put towns in our games any more because it's too hard, durrr". People are getting sick of their tired ass shit and are mostly now buying their games out of nostalgia, and hope that it'll be as good as the games that they used to make.
I can tell you that I would have had a much different opinion/tolerance of ff12 and ff13 if they had had a different name. I'm not a big fan of Elder Scrolls or Fallout series games, but other western devs are coming with sick heat these days, and it won't be long before people get tired of buying FF's hoping this next one will be their comeback.
You talk like XI is a main / substantial source of their revenues. XI is a tiny fraction of what the company makes and had no bearing on the development costs of XIV
When did miokomioko turn from the FFXIV white knight to FFXIV bandwagon basher? Not disagreeing with the points made just when they were made earlier you definitely didn't agree with them previously.
The only way FF14 could have survived its piss poor launch is if they gave everyone 6 months free + shut down the servers and did a serious overhaul, fine tune + added content and was re-released 6 months after launch. In addition should have gave those who purchased the game an additional neat in game item that seems semi-useful. Lastly, initially listening to the feedback during the beta would have been a good start.
You guys chill out. Tomorrow we will all rage and speculate. Possibly just rage.
Tomorrow will be game changing news!