PS2 Devkits: Are the Devs still keeping an eye out for more machinery?

[Stompa]

Which is a shame, because that goal will be wasted because said projects will bring in less money than if they had made the effort to keep FFXI going.

I would love to know what goes through the mind of those people when they think about this. You know they do. They have their little round table meetings and discuss things.

It isn't just SE though, there is a battle within the videogame culture as a whole, between those who see videogames as legitimate works of Art, and those who see videogames as a disposable and purely commercial venture.

The mainstream trend is that games are purely commercial, they are not works of Art. It is normal to just cannibalise the best parts from previous games, and put them into a new one.

This is the result of the high rate of change in game technology over the last 30 years, tech is almost immediately obsolescent and self-devouring, and somewhere along the way, game developers assumed that this must always apply to software too.

Novelty is good, new games are good, remakes of old games are good. But there needs to be a point when we collectively stop and say "wait a moment, this is no ordinary game, this particular game is a Masterpiece, it is something very special and unique." This is what happens in all other forms of entertainment, especially painting, music, movies. We need this recognition of Masterpieces in videogaming too.

FFXI is a Masterpiece, a classic, a true work of Art. It was created by geniuses. It should be treated with great respect, and preserved for future generations.

If you look at how Masterpiece paintings are treated and restored, everybody has to wear white gloves and respirators, and treat the masterpiece with almost holy reverence. And nobody says "hey we've got these new 2015 pictures from Photoshop now, so lets just burn all those old Masterpieces by Monet and Picasso, they are so old!"

[Mithlas]

People love to say "but multi-million dollar company!" I hope you guys take into account how much has to be spent to pay employees, their benefits, taxes, maintenance of their own infrastructure as well as the utilities to keep their locations operating, etc. It's not cheap. Yes, they are a multi-million dollar company, but decisions have to be made for the better to keep the company growing and pursuing future interests. You always want to have a profit - you don't want to break even and you definitely don't want to have a negative ROI from something. They can't hold on to a dated piece of software and keep it growing for such a smaller market.

There has to come a point in time where, no matter how loved the game is and how respected it is by fans, that they simply need to move on.

[Alhanelem]

If you look at how Masterpiece paintings are treated and restored, everybody has to wear white gloves and respirators, and treat the masterpiece with almost holy reverence. And nobody says "hey we've got these new 2015 pictures from Photoshop now, so lets just burn all those old Masterpieces by Monet and Picasso, they are so old!"

Those masterpieces don't need content updates and feature changes to continue existing or being appriciated, though. It's a poor analogy.

[bungiefanNA]

It's a huge risk to keep FFXI going because the competition and market tastes have changed, and old MMOs don't attract new players much over time. WoW, the most successful MMORPG ever, is fading and having trouble keeping new subscriptions. The population that joined the game at launch gradually ages and has less free time to play, which causes server populations to drop, which causes more people to leave. The big draw of an MMO is that you may have frieds that play, or you make friends when you start, and you stick with the game for them. If enough of the group leaves for something else, most of the rest of the group will follow. Attracting attention to something so old, that is obviously old, is a hard thing for marketing to do. You'd have to invest a ton of money on a regular basis to rework and relaunch the game every so often to keep it fresh and looking new for new players. Knowing that, it's easy to see why they didn't take the actions we wish they did.

[Stompa]

Those masterpieces don't need content updates and feature changes to continue existing or being appriciated, though. It's a poor analogy.

Actually it was not an analogy. It was a description. I am describing videogames as an Artform, no different to other Artforms. In all forms of Art there are Masterpieces. Those works are protected and cherished as valuable Human Achievements. I consider high-quality videogames to be both an Artform and a Human Achievement.

Infact many Masterpieces do have updates, paintings are restored and maintained, old music classics are reworked with digital technology, classic books are released again as Second Editions, often with alterations and improvements. A broken dusty vase is not displayed as such, it is restored as much as possible, so that people can appreciate the Mastery that went into that piece.

And this is so that future generations can continue to appreciate them, to use your phrase.

Obviously videogames are different, and it would be pedantic to demand that every Art medium has to have identical functionality, just to make descriptive statements about relative Quality and Masterpiece status.

[Roja323]

Except they already did that, it was called FF14 v1.0, and it wasn't as popular as direhard fans had hoped.

[Atomic_Skull]

As far as I understand it's PS2 code in a wrapper. Similar to how most Windows games end up getting ported to Mac and at least part of the reason the game runs like crap even on high end modern PCs (And yes, it does. Try turning on full shadows and maximum settings for everything. Even on a PC made this year, you will still see slowdown in a busy place. By contrast, play any made for PC MMO in recent history and it will play fine, even with far more characters/objects being displayed.) The reason for this is that the game doesn't really use your GPU much at all and makes the CPU do all the work. The game only uses one CPU core and since top CPU clock speeds haven't risen THAT much (Nowadays, performance increases come from faster bus speeds and multiple cores), so its still very easy to see slowdown even today.

Shadows, as well as loading zones and models are much faster when you remove the FPS cap. They fixed a lot of stuff that was previously locked to the FPS (enough that the game can actually run normally with the cap removed) when they did the fishing speed adjustments (fishing ran faster on the PC than on the PS2 for many years) but a few things were left still locked to the framerate apparently to be "fair" to PS2 users.

Hopefully with PS2 support ending they'll change the last few remaining framerate limited things to interrupts. Removing the FPS cap would be nice too (I never expected them to support Xinpit controllers EVER so there's hope)

Maybe they could just ditch DirectX 8 and switch to DirectX 9 as well. I mean just replace DX8 with DX9 so that windows doesn't have to use the DirectX wrapper it uses to support DX8. It's actually not that hard to do, mostly just a matter of replacing DirectX 8 calls with DirectX 9 ones (DX8 and DX8 are very similar unlike DX9 vs DX10 which is a complete change in how the rendering pipeline works)

[rhapsodyXI]

Isn't there some way they could preserve *this* version of the game on PC at least? I know it's a ridiculous idea/countering the profits they could make, but it just feels bad that a mainstream title/numeral game (I dunno if mainstream title/numeral means anything anymore) is just going off the blip and surfacing on mobile (the remakes of other mainstream FF games non-included and some are on PC I believe?).

Couldn't they or someone possibly, maybe not completely rework the game, but just make it function offline? (Not something like a private server but then again idk).

The Trust system at least makes soloing viable for a majority of content and some puzzles and traps that required people to do (like stepping on platforms, stuff like that y'know) just require a key item from a sidequest or mission.

In a year people will probably be playing the mobile version, whatever it may end being like. It'd be a shame that when the games finally shuts down in a few years what fans get is a "goodbye and enjoy the mobile version :^)".

[Alhanelem]

Shadows, as well as loading zones and models are much faster when you remove the FPS cap.

Removing an FPS cap doesn't have any effect if your current FPS is lower than that cap. *head explodes*

[bungiefanNA]

Isn't there some way they could preserve *this* version of the game on PC at least? I know it's a ridiculous idea/countering the profits they could make, but it just feels bad that a mainstream title/numeral game (I dunno if mainstream title/numeral means anything anymore) is just going off the blip and surfacing on mobile (the remakes of other mainstream FF games non-included and some are on PC I believe?).

Couldn't they or someone possibly, maybe not completely rework the game, but just make it function offline? (Not something like a private server but then again idk).

The Trust system at least makes soloing viable for a majority of content and some puzzles and traps that required people to do (like stepping on platforms, stuff like that y'know) just require a key item from a sidequest or mission.

In a year people will probably be playing the mobile version, whatever it may end being like. It'd be a shame that when the games finally shuts down in a few years what fans get is a "goodbye and enjoy the mobile version :^)".

To make the game function offline would either require a private server, or require them to recode the game, because the client doesn't do any calculations or control any NPC actions. The client just displays the graphics and audio and relays our commands to the server. So for the game to function offline, everything the server does must be offloaded to your computer, which means you have to run two applications (and the server application likely isn't on Windows anyway), or they'd have to recode the game application to do all those functions. Also, the servers have much more RAM and CPU power, and it's actually several servers running each world, since monsters are always active even when nobody is in the zone, and the in-game clock is always running, so they'd have to code it to only process certain things instead of every NPC in the game to work on a standard consumer machine. At that point they'd essentially be making the game from scratch, which is what they're doing with FFXI mobile. It's a huge investment, and they make more money just continuing to collect subscriptions.