Letter from the Producer Live Part IX (10/19/2013)

[Rionel]

I don't think people realize the amount of work that goes into this stuff for new "content".

As an animator, I've learned to appreciate the length process of preproduction and so on.

Obviously there's doing the initial concept work, which determines the overall look and feel of a character and or location and or items.

For character stuff like new enemies and etc, there's actually modelling it while staying true to the actual art work, then rigging (determining how the character's physics and overall model movement limitations) which sure as hell can be a huge pain in the ass as many, many things can go wrong when dealing with programming the rig. Then there's also things like hair and cloth and special effects animation too, another thing to consider... Plus texturing and lighting.

Then there's also building maps and rendering/modelling the new dungeons as well. Plus balancing mechanics for said dungeon by themselves and making sure that they fix as much as possible before it's released for public download and play. And there's ALWAYS a bug that they have to fix after words.

Plus there's the issue of having to convert all this stuff to make sure it works on PC, PS3 and soon PS4 once everything is "done".

I mean, yeah SE is a big-ish company, but in exactly what time frame are we expecting content to be released while maintaining the standard of quality that we won't bitch about later? Knowing the reputation of how Japanese gaming companies work, the employees there probably work ridiculous hours ontop of probably not that great pay as compared to here in North America.

I don't want to be the guy to be the white knite here but just... Try to consider all these factors before passing judgment. Like, what do you guys expect major patches to be done in? A month? 2 months? I'm just confused as to where people get this idea that 3 months for new content built from the ground up is supposed to be "unacceptable".

[Tyrath]

You missed the point. People are asking for smaller patches more frequently rather than huge patches every 3 months. I don't think anyone is deluded enough to expect a huge patch every month or something.

[Qeomash]

Smaller patches still requires large amounts of preproduction. Unless you like reskinned enemies and cookie-cutter zone layouts.

[Lucavi]

I'm not asking them to speed anything up. I'm simply asking them, and those defending them, not to get upset when people roll out like they did with countless other titles before them due to running out of content and long production cycles. SE doesn't have a 10 million sub buffer to keep them afloat while they stretch out dev. cycles. Obviously they're sitting on a nice influx of cash due to the initial 1.5 mil subs fees for the first month or so, but yeah, that's the first month or so.

I really don't want to see any F2P transitions (not gonna happen with SE's in-house team) or team reshuffling/downsizing (entirely possible and has happened in the past) over this kinda stuff.

[Arelian]

Smaller patches still requires large amounts of preproduction. Unless you like reskinned enemies and cookie-cutter zone layouts.

Guild Wars 2 exemplifies this amazingly well. They roll out "smaller" patches every 2 weeks and 90% of said patches are reskinned enemies, maybe one new armor skin or some cheaply-thrown together weapon skins and uninspired content. Not to mention no inclusion of new zones. So you pick your poison, small patches every few weeks that make the game feel stagnant and gives the impression of lazy developers, or a big patch every 3 months or so that has a bulk of content to digest.

[Voyage1970]

You're also working under the assumption that all the content they are adding is brand new. Crystal Tower from what I understand was supposed to be at launch but due to balancing issues (read: not because they lacked the resources for enemy models and what not) they delayed it. Extreme Mode Primals may have new mechanics to them but it's not like they are building them from the ground up, and it's not like SE is above reusing older models in palette swapped form (or hell not even bothering to palette swap them, just a rename). Hard Mode dungeons are built on from their normal forms. Just seems like for our first major content patch it's just a bunch of stuff they couldn't fit in time for release and if that's the case why couldn't they release it in smaller batches?

[Kirbyprime]

Bigger companies / teams have it fairly hard trying to get content in a short time frame. Different teams working on various content off different subversion branches which overlap with one another. You could spend days if not weeks just trying to patch back everything together especially with office politics and so on.

[Lucavi]

In the meantime, though, it wouldn't have hurt to tweak the dungeon XP numbers as a place-over. I'd have been satisfied for another month just being able to level my jobs outside of FATE grind spamming. That's just me, though.

[Arelian]

Do we know if they have to pay for PSN patches like most companies, or did they work out a deal?

[Qeomash]

In the meantime, though, it wouldn't have hurt to tweak the dungeon XP numbers as a place-over. I'd have been satisfied for another month just being able to level my jobs outside of FATE grind spamming. That's just me, though.

I've leveled my WHM almost soley in dungeons because FATE grinding is so mind-numbing and I wanted the practice healing. Dungeon EXP buff would help this a lot, so at least the time spent in dungeons was at least comparable EXP/time wise.

Maybe give the "new to this dungeon" bonus for each job instead of just a person.

[Lucavi]

I mean, that's just literally numbers. That's not re-coding or adjusting placement or anything else. Its doing what, adjusting the XP percentages of mobs by like 20% or something. Come on. It would help.

[Cichy]

I've been lvling a mule and I completely agree. If they increased it by 20% like Lucavi said I'd run dungeons all the time instead of fates. Simple fix that they could include in one of those maintenance they have every other day.

[Arelian]

Except they likely have to pay a not insignificant amount of money to throw a patch out on PS3, so smaller patches literally aren't worth the money.

So once again, lolplaystationlimitations.

[Voyage1970]

Except they likely have to pay a not insignificant amount of money to throw a patch out on PS3, so smaller patches literally aren't worth the money.

So once again, lolplaystationlimitations.

I thought the entire reason XIV didn't come out on Xbox 360 was because of this and their other various patching rules. I assume they had cut a deal with Sony to some degree for XIV in particular, much in the same way Minecraft has a deal with Microsoft for their regular patches.

[Selamis]

I thought the entire reason XIV didn't come out on Xbox 360 was because of this and their other various patching rules. I assume they had cut a deal with Sony to some degree for XIV in particular, much in the same way Minecraft has a deal with Microsoft for their regular patches.

I remember reading something along the lines being the issue was because Microsoft demanded that access to the game require Gold subscription in addition to the monthly subscription to SE and SE didn't want to force people into that situation, claiming that they should use the same model used for XI, which you could play with a Silver account, but MS didn't want to do that. Maybe I have part of that wrong, but I thought that was the case.

[Niiro]

We've already got PS3 limitations, I won't want to imagine the clusterfuck we'd have if they had to develop for the 360 to.

[Kensaki]

I remember reading something along the lines being the issue was because Microsoft demanded that access to the game require Gold subscription in addition to the monthly subscription to SE and SE didn't want to force people into that situation, claiming that they should use the same model used for XI, which you could play with a Silver account, but MS didn't want to do that. Maybe I have part of that wrong, but I thought that was the case.

That and also MS doesn't want game servers to communicate outside live ergo the xbox version would have to have its own set of servers which yoship didn't want.

[Qeomash]

I mean, that's just literally numbers. That's not re-coding or adjusting placement or anything else. Its doing what, adjusting the XP percentages of mobs by like 20% or something. Come on. It would help.

The only complication I can see to this would be the scalability of the servers. If they were to raise the EXP gained from all dungeons to outpace FATE numbers, more people would do dungeons. Depending on how they have implemented the instance dungeon servers there may not be enough servers to support the sudden influx of players moving from FATE grinding to dungeon grinding. Servers lag or crash, people complain.

Not disagreeing with you--it should be an easy change that should have been done already.

[Alkar]

That and also MS doesn't want game servers to communicate outside live ergo the xbox version would have to have its own set of servers which yoship didn't want.

This is actually the real reason as we still don't have confirmation about PS4 and PS+ requirements (as far as I know). Although I'm sure they'll work out a deal with Sony to make it not require Plus but it doesn't seem to be an issue for SE either way.

Anyway isn't it a little bit early to assume that all the new content will be "shit"? Extreme Primals alone could offer gear that is as good as/slightly better than Allagan/AF2 and we really don't know where the new dungeons will be in terms of difficulty.

[Qeomash]

I also wonder where King Moggle Mog will fall in terms of loot. Equal to Titan HM weapons, but easier to obtain, maybe?