Yo guys - shut the fuck up. Don't derail this again.
Last warning.
Yo guys - shut the fuck up. Don't derail this again.
Last warning.
IGN gave Xenogears a 9.5
http://psx.ign.com/articles/152/152230p1.html
DO you just randomly make shit up?
Cata beta may well be a buggy mess (being improved every day), but at least they didn't announce the release date before beta started so that they could push it back if and when they needed to.
This is what SE should have done. The first few weeks of FFXIV closed beta were a HUGE mess, and I'm not sure they ever really recovered from that testing time gone.
And while Alpha's combat system may have been slow, it's weird how I found the leve system much more enjoyable in Alpha ~_~
I think we have the upper end of SE (that has very little to do with FFXIV) to blame for this. It seems obv to me that they've taken a look at FFXIV and said to the team 'WTF have you been doing for the past five years?! You've spent all this money and got barely anything to show for it! Release it NOW' just so they can start to make a return / kick the teams ass into gear. I'm sure if the XIV devs had their way the game wouldn't be out yet.
Still, the question stands, WTF has taken 5 years. Only the graphics are up to that standard, and even then the zones are copy/pasted.
Anyways, the reviews are a lot kinder so far then I thought they'd be. I will enjoy seeing them slowly realise what a pile of crap XIV is and watching the review scores slide as well :D
What he says makes sense to me. Although it is not meant to be a "punishment" for the developers, that's just fucking stupid lol. They want to start making money with the game, no matter it's current condition. That's not something the devs get to decide.
Also, 5 years dev time is simply speculation at best. They didn't really start conserving on XI dev costs before WoTG and that came out at the end of 2007. Would make sense that the development started on full force at that time.
That's the whole problem with every game development. The developers want a game that works, that people will like, etc. They want it perfected and wholly realized before it's even revealed to the public. It's never up to them how much money they get to hire people and it's never up to them how much time they get. It's the assholes in the suits upstairs that ruin games because they are completely separated from the process.
Big Wig: Hey, you done with that game yet? We want to ship it out in October.
Developer: What? No. Not even close, we haven't had the time to do ______. Give us more time, or more staff.
Big Wig: Doesn't matter, just polish up what you've got, we're doing a demo in a week.
Surely most people can relate to having a boss that is completely ignorant to the process that is your job and makes entirely unrealistic demands causing your output to look shoddy because you are too little spread too thin. This is the real world, chumps.
Square-Enix, the corporation, not the independent developers/artists/programmers/designers/writers, only have obligations to their stock holders. I'm sure you can understand the problem with the system.
It's much much worse with MMO's, because there is always the "you can keep updating the game after release anyway" excuse. SE also has the "worked with XI, will work with XIV" excuse too. Developers can't do shit about it.
But what really ruins MMO's is when immediate profit is expected the moment you release a product like that to the market, and when it won't happen for obvious reasons, the company runs out of money needed to make the game what it could have been. It's really not a business for smaller companies that depend on making profit from the beginning, because the odds are always against them.
Maybe if there were no version updates the games could do better than that.
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But what really annoys me is when the corporation decisions are made to be the fault of the developers. You can't name any game that would have been good if it needed X years to fully develop and was rushed out of the door in X-2 years. There is no developer that could make such a miracle.
Blizzard's policy is obviously to polish the shit out of their games and release them when they're ready. SE's policy is to release the game when it is good enough to start generating revenue and develop the rest of the game during the first few years, while also being very cost-effective. It has nothing to do with the developers but the corporations behind them that decide these things. It is easy to guess in which company you'd have a better time/reputation as a developer.
Although on the other hand I don't think Blizzard gives their devs as free hands to do whatever they want with the game as SE does.
Makes me wonder which would be better in the end for SE. Because their policy is quite the opposite from everyone else (don't copy from others), they basically require feedback from the players to steer them in the right direction. If the game was released in a year-2 years from now it would no doubt be a more polished product, but still many times worse than the current game will be in few years because they would have had no player feedback to learn from during the development process. At that point it would be too late to change anything drastically either, since the game would be essentially "ready", aside from smaller adjustments and shaping the future content differently than the original (rotz vs toau).
Of course assuming SE keeps developing the game on full force like they have for the past 3-5 years even now that it's released. It would be stupid not to, but again that's not for the developers to decide.
Did you just repeat my post in a long winded way, which you disagreed with a few post earlier?
@Hyan, I wouldn't say its "punishment". If you feel an employee has been slacking as you've given them a relativity open ended time frame, you then set them a specific time/date to work towards, to make sure they get in gear.
I'm sure that's exactly what happened in the last few months, but it wouldn't be a surprise if that meant 16h work shifts and no holiday weekends for a long time. That's the "crunch" period anyway.
Since it's SE, I'm fairly sure they just had to do more with less too. The teams were divided to two after all, probably helping each other out when needed even, so I doubt they were that large before close to the release.
They would have probably done well hiring someone with expertise on how to design a proper UI, but was probably waste of monies according to Tanaka&the big wigs :D.
You seem to think that the developers/designers/artists are simply slacking and that they would still take forever even if they had all the funding/staffing they could dream of. You also seem to think that the executives intended specifically to "kick their ass into gear" by setting the release date too soon. Both of these things are not true and I did not support either of them in my post.
So... how about those reviews?
I agree haha. At least the JPs are normally hardcore enough to be ok with those 16hr shifts
IGN have updated their review. Pretty much a menu rant but I imagine we all agree with them
Edit: Heres a review... well, its about reviews anyways, from everyone *favourite* website: http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/1...14-players-38/
And once again Artefact acts upon his butthurt grudge against Square Enix. He posted two anti FFXIV articles in the same day this time. I think he posts more about that than anything else recently.
You guys should find a picture of this guy just to see what we're dealing with haha. I'd show you but I'm at work and anything related to that guy is NSFW.
"Made in China" rofl