FINAL FANTASY XI Roadmap for October 2011 – March 2012 (10/20/2011)

[arus2001]

Nevermind old servers being around for them to retask for it if it isn't Atomos itself.

Either way, my "bias" is rooted in the interest of SE treating its customers as people of value they're gracious to be serving, and not people they're stringing along with vague and distant promises that may never come to be with sub-par service when it does. Honestly, I feel like we're a step away from hearing the game gets outsourced to India because it'd be even cheaper for them then. But hey, fuck the consumer, it's all about the producer's bottom line.

[Hyan]

Honestly, I feel like we're a step away from hearing the game gets outsourced to India because it'd be even cheaper for them then.

As previously mentioned, for a 9-year-old game they are still quite far from that. On the other hand games like SWG are run by the power of community rep and his fellow monkey, literally.

We could look at something like AoC's 6 month timeline/producers letter and aside from the differences in emphasis, it all boils down to the same quantity pretty much. Except AoC just doubled it's revenue and before that it was also run by producer fluff even though the playerbase was not exactly tiny at least when compared to XI. The man is talking about a feature meant to be implemented 4 years ago but just now they are getting into last stages of development.

Companies making games like AoC, WAR, LOTRO, DDO seem to focus more on providing the best cash shop ever for their F2P title than making actual content. How long was the drought for LOTRO's players when Turbine was preparing their F2P model? I think we are talking about a year at least, without anything substantial. Maybe their playerbases were much, much lower? Either way F2P can be quite profitable, but it still doesn't show in content provided to those who pay. CCP literally screwed up with EVE when the updates stopped coming and they lost 20% of subs in almost no time, just to finance 2 F2P MMO's they were working on simultaneously. When the whole company's future lies on the stability of one game and the playerbase drops so sharply they've seriously done fucked it up, even if they were prepared for some lost subs.

Anyway, I'd like to hear more about "vague and distant promises that may never come to be". Stuff might get delayed but what makes you think they will be dropped altogether? I hope they've learned that much from ToAU. Maybe your bias is just rooted in fantasyland instead.

[Lordender]

I always felt bad for people who've had an active sub for XI for the entire time of 8 years because lets face it, prior to abyssea SE mailed it in, no expansion should of lasted 3 years. It looks like they might of mailed it in again post-abyssea, I bet when the proc systems find themselves into nyzul, salvage people are going apeshit.

Reading these posts the voice is pretty clear, the customers feel like they're being lowballed and voidwatch concerns are not being addressed. All they've commented on is "well, newer tiers will have higher drop rates, tough shit on being able to add loot to the pool so when your buddy gets that loot you're 0/20 on you'll have a dandy ol time!" thats not what people wanted to hear, that sounds extremely half-assed, we mailed it in, second rate full of status-quo. The only thing we really know is that the dev team tasked with XI is a small one and the budget seems smaller for XI because of either age to the game or XIV2.0 development.

As for the actual roadmap:

None of us know how that dungeon crawling or last stand is going to turn out, but heres my prediction, its going to either be very good or very bad because SE doesn't know middle ground. I also think the 99cap seems sorta lackluster, would have been nice if they could of found a way to release some new lands to go along with it but I guess thats not going to happen until PS2 support gets axed. I say lackluster because we always expected 99 cap to be this epic shit when we were all level 75 and saw everything hidden in the dats, I guess thats just my disappointment though.

[Toth]

They recently said that PS2 limitations are a myth and more zones are coming.

As to customers feeling low-balled, well, they released these roadmaps months in advance so people would know what was happening. You may not have liked their choices but they were upfront of what they were planning to do. I do not miss the days that SE was super secretive about everything.

I do not care for their Voidwatch stance but in the end I realize it is pointless to argue about these current tiers since we all know 99 is coming soon and any gear from higher level tiers will most likely be better than what is currently in place. As long as we can get decent abyssite (like we are to be able to) and rare items we can trade to each other/ sell (ie. heavy plates) from existing tiers, the system will work itself out as we climb up the ladder.

[Greatguardian]

They recently said that PS2 limitations are a myth.

No, they didn't. They said that the PS2 was not preventing them from adding new zones, which everyone should have already known ages ago. Abyssea zones and WotG zones counted as entirely new zones anyways, so all of the reskin-mania has very clearly been a matter of time/effort/manpower rather than a matter of technical limitations.

That release from Camate pretty much said nothing at all. I don't blame him for it, but it's really not that exciting.

[Byrthnoth]

Well, it does tell us that we're getting new areas. They're probably referring to The Last Stand and Neo-Nyzul though, rather than large story areas like Grauberg.

[Kaisha]

If they can't recycle it, or construct it out of 6-8 land geometry tiles, they won't budget the means for a new zone.

I'm honestly expecting Last Stand to be the latter, just as WoE and almost every other end-game zone for each expansion was.

[Greatguardian]

Well, it does tell us that we're getting new areas. They're probably referring to The Last Stand and Neo-Nyzul though, rather than large story areas like Grauberg.

This is pretty much what I'm expecting. I'd love to see a completely new region similar to how ToAU expanded the game, but I feel like I'll only be disappointed if I get my hopes up for it. I highly doubt they have the budget to have someone sit down and design new "Overworld" zones from scratch.