New Square MMO anouncement coming soon!

[Exoduso]

Couldn't care less about the MMO, but potentially new FF13 screens might be cool.

[Kaelan]

It's not about the MMO, it's about programming and their new engine. The "MMO announcement omgz!" was just added by the news site to make headlines.

[Exoduso]

Yeah I know, i'm saying I look forward about hearing more about their engine than about their silly MMO. FF13/Versus screens/videos would be a plus too.

Any idea when it's supposed to happen?

[Koga]

Have there been any pics or videos since the conference?

[Kaelan]

If they haven't changed the schedule, it's supposed to start in a few minutes

[Plow]

I might give a shit about this if there wasn't a "new square mmo announcement!!11!!oneasn!@!#!#!!!" like every other week.

I think I'll decide what I think when they have anything remotely resembling a game to talk about.

[Koga]

I might give a shit about this if there wasn't a "new square mmo announcement!!11!!oneasn!@!#!#!!!" like every other week.

I think I'll decide what I think when they have anything remotely resembling a game to talk about.

FF13 looks pretty goddamn sweet. Enough to make me buy a PS3.

Will be buying a PS3 Just for FF13.

[Kaelan]

http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2008/index.php?id=17560

GDC: Tsuchida, Shiraishi Talk Square Enix's New WiiWare Choices

The pair began with a trailer of Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King, featuring the bright colors, petit characters and cheerful palette familiar to fans of Final Fantasy thematics. Unlike previous franchise titles, however, this one's bound for WiiWare, and producer Tsuchida opened the talk.

Tsuchida himself is a 20-year industry veteran, moving from working as a programmer on the first PC-Engine Final Fantasy, to, most recently, battle designer for the in-development FFXIII and producer on My Life As A King. The development process for WiiWare is different than any in his previous experience, he says.

First, however, he began with a discussion of Square Enix's methods and his perception of the company's strengths. "We are good at creating content with a large amount of high-quality CG," he said. "For WiiWare, you can easily download the game, which means that memory is limited. Which means you cannot use high-quality CG as a weapon."

"We couldn't put a lot of development effort to get ROI; we needed to create a game to create light users on the platform," he continued. Accustomed to big budgets and bigger platforms, he said, Square Enix's philosophy needed some evolution for the WiiWare platform. "But we wanted to maintain our strengths," he said. "That was a challenge for us."

In the standard Square Enix development process, he says, plot, characters and art are created first to set the world. Next come battle systems, field maps and cutscenes. The workflow is then created around technical restrictions, and from there the team develops graphical quality benchmarks. When the pipeline is established, the team mass-produces the content in a more efficient way.

200 people can engage in development of traditional Square Enix days -- 100 of them for over 12 months. "With this process we can only develop certain types of games, but if we are limited... we are probably not able to meet customers' needs, and the developer cannot fulfill his potential. I am always worried about it," he said.

With that in mind, says Tsuchida, the idea of retooling the standard process for WiiWare was appealing. Next, lead programmer Shiraishi took the podium. He was server and system programmer for Final Fantasy XI, having been with Square for nearly seven years. "During that time I built up quite a wish list," he said. "Being a server programmer, you really don't get to be part of the fun. I also wanted to try some new technologies that would be difficult in some of the larger teams. I also wanted to try making a game that did not rely on [data] volume... to think of ways to entertain with less data. As a result of these things, I wanted to try a smaller-size project with a smaller team."

That opportunity came in 2006. When Shiraishi first heard about Nintendo's WiiWare goals, he wrote a proposal the following day. Within days, he was at work on the Wii hardware. With no concrete information and prior to WiiWare's official announcement, Shiraisi says, "we had to assume a lot of things."

"In our current project, we knew we couldn't use our standard model. So we basically had to go back to the basics." First, he says, they decided on a target price and memory size, and then went back to some older assets for ideas. Once a basic pipeline was established, new assets could be added.

Development was scheduled for seven months, with a maximum of eight people. This time, the team started with the game concept rather than with visual assets. It's about building a world rather than exploring one, so the need for extensive concept art and new assets was minimized. "Unless you can show something that's truly compelling, we think it's better to leave things to the imagination," Shiraishi suggested.

Because the game design was somewhat new to the team, they chose Squirrel, a lightweight programming language that would allow for plenty of last-minute changes."We asked [the designers] to limit their scripting to the fairly minimal," Shiraishi explains. "At Square Enix, we don't have a culture of using other people's codes. But I thought Nintendo Ware would be a good fit. I think gone are the days when developing everything in house is a good idea."

Division of labor lines were also blurred -- the game designer also created menus and visual effects, and everyone contributed to the design.

Next, Shiraishi showed a demonstration of the gameplay, in which a diminutive king must handle affairs within his small, walled city, understanding the needs of the heroes and deciding what to build and invest in. It's a colorful "kingdom simulation" that still manages to retain the traditional Square Enix aesthetic.

So the team did struggled with narrowing the target audience, keeping cost low and meeting a quicker and lighter schedule -- for example, they spent months on a battle system only to scrap it entirely, and development took about a year, not the original seven month schedule. Nonetheless, it looks as if the developer of traditionally gigantic and CG-heavy projects was able to successfully retool its design process specifically for Wii Ware, and learned many things in the process.

"I didn't plan to make a 'Square Enix game'," Shiraishi concluded. "But we ended up with a game that's unmistakably Square Enix."

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/02/finalfantasy.html

February 22, 2008 - Taku Murata, General Manager of Square Enix's Research & Development division, just gave a presentation at this year's GDC titled "The Technology of Final Fantasy." Most of the information given at the conference was more on the technical side of things, dealing with the company's various engines and experiences with actual development. However, towards the end of the show, we were treated to a few bits of information that should be interesting to Final Fantasy fans.

First, Square Enix's "White Engine," the companywide technology platform, has been renamed Crystal Tools (and is designed for use with the PS3, 360 and PC). Also, Murata mentioned that a scaled down version of Crystal Tools will be implemented for the Wii. Intriguing indeed. This technology is being implemented in the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Soon after these details were given, an old trailer was promptly shown. It's been a while since we've seen a trailer from the upcoming Final Fantasy titles, but we'll break it down for you again.

The trailer was for Final Fantasy XIII, and began with the now recognizable shots of a cybernetic train snaking through highly science-fiction inspired environments. The following flashed quickly, but it looks like a monster, reminiscent of series favorite Ifrit, runs down a highway environment and attacks Lightning, the game's blonde-haired main character. Using a series of highly stylized acrobatics and martial arts techniques, Lightning dispatches the monster with her sword (that seems to double as a gun).

Another element that definitely intrigued us was a few scenes, both cinematically and in "real-time," that depict Lightning using some sort of time manipulation weapon. Casting her hand out to throw a grenade, a blue field exploded outwards and froze enemy soldiers in place, giving the agile warrior a few precise moments to take everyone down.

More scenes of the twin Shiva-looking creatures were shown, mixing an appearance of magic and technology in a very cool way. Also, there was a large ship swooping down from a clustered sky, releasing platoons of armored troops that jetted down to the ground below. They clearly outnumber Lightning, who eyes the group quietly with a look of satisfied aggression. Before the troops open fire, a blonde man with a bandana rides a motorcycle into the scene, screeches to a halt and looks over his shoulder calmly. End trailer.

After the old video, nothing overly important was noted, though we should mention that despite talk of cross-platform software, the trailer explicitly displays "For PlayStation 3" before cutting to black. This looks to continually insist the game's exclusivity for the Sony platform.

Lastly, Murata noted that Crystal Tools will be used in conjunction with the development of a new MMO that Square Enix is working on. Whether this is an entirely new project or the previously mentioned MMO is uncertain.

So, mostly technical stuff in the presentation (as expected), not a whole lot of anything new. There's only a few bits of info that might interest most people: they want their engine for these and future games (XII, versus XII, the MMO and who knows what else in the future) to be cross-platform. PC, PS3, XBox and Wii - every single platform out there. According to the information, XII is still exclusively PS3, so that means....they have something else they feel needs something as powerful as the White Engine and they want that on all platforms. Either they're doing all this just for their MMO(which would suggest plans for something at least as big, if not bigger than FFXI), or they're hiding more stuff from us they haven't annouced yet. Shame there weren't any new images.

[Natallon]

Found some new pics of the Crystal Tools engine that was from the presentation.

http://www.ff-xiii.net/images/misc/238ctools1.jpg
http://www.ff-xiii.net/images/misc/238ctools2.jpg
http://www.ff-xiii.net/images/misc/238ctoolslogo.jpg

[Akiyama]

Found some new pics of the Crystal Tools engine that was from the presentation.

http://www.ff-xiii.net/images/misc/238ctools1.jpg
http://www.ff-xiii.net/images/misc/238ctools2.jpg
http://www.ff-xiii.net/images/misc/238ctoolslogo.jpg

I don't see anything. I just see "Image" D:

Now they work. For some reason, Firefox didn't want to show them at first. -.-

[Natallon]

hmm, odd they show up on my screen..

anyway the link was at
http://www.ff-xiii.net/

right at the top

[Akiyama]

Yeah. I got it. Firefox refused to show them unless I loaded them in another window first for some strange reason.

[Aerin]

Those first two pictures are really awesome, I like the GUI a lot.

I read the second article on rpgfan and I felt really sorry for the team that was working on the battle system for several months only to scrap it, ouch x.x;;

Also find it a little interesting that they said they got the Unreal engine for The Last Remnant to appeal to western audiences more. I really like the fact that they made their own engine for the FF series; "The decision to go with a proprietary engine for Final Fantasy XIII was based on the desire to create a tool capable of reflecting the culture of Square Enix's developers."

[Enot]

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/u...es/196901.html

If that's really from the new MMO looks like Ivalice.

[Falisa]

Look at the date of the video.


(it was an april fools joke by Allakhazam)

[Senoska]

You guys can bitch about SE's customer service all you want, but SE doesn't do it. It's SOE (Sony Online entertainment.)

[Krandor]

Unless I missed a memo since I quit, they stopped outsourcing to SOE in 2006.

And, 6 month old thread yadda yadda.

[Lampoon]

I won't play another MMO if the company owns my toon. I paid for Software and monthly fee. That shit should be mine to with as I please without going behind Co. back and try to sell it in back alley.

[Elvis]

HELLO KITTY ISLAND ADVENTURE

[Darus Grey]

If they have another MMO that has the job system, hell I'd settle for DRESS SPHERES...I'm in. It's the single most awesome feature no other MMO has copied and for the life of me I don't know why.