Did Squenix get too ambitious, or why FF14 came out so poorly

I saw today's Jimquisition and in a way it makes sense(I'm not sure if I agree with how he puts things though). If you try to do too much at once, you usually can't do anything well. Example, before FF13 versus was finished despite being announced at the same time as FF13, we've got FF13-2 that's coming out.

So how does this apply to FF14?

Creating an MMO is a different beast than making a normal game, and Squenix should have remembered that from FF11. You can't approach it the same way and you need to make sure it has more support. So if you combine this theory (doing too much) with the theory that Squenix didn't know what they wanted to do when they made FF14, and you've got two things which mesh well to the current situation. I mean how can you make a proper MMO if you don't devote the right amount of attention to it because doing too much and you treat it as a normal game and you don't really know what you want to do with it besides making an MMO and end up reinventing the wheel.

Perhaps the best thing for Squenix to do in the future is to make fewer games, like not making 2 spinoffs and a sequel of one of their titles at once, especially considering while that title might have sold well, it wasn't a good game overall.



EDIT: For clarity's sake, I'm saying that it was Squenix itself that was overly ambitious in wanting to make too many titles, not the design of the game.

I don't see ambition in the game all I see is a lot of workarounds to get content done in as cheaply as possible. All the quests work exactly like leves without any thought put into the storyline and the characters lack personality when they talk or move. Shantotto of XIV?

All I see is that player saw through this leve scheme and now they want SE to make a game within XIV for real without using all the cheap tricks.

I've always held the assumption that the game was rushed out as evidenced by the poorly balenced systems, the minimal amount of features, the cut and paste terain, the lack of definite goals, and having only 5 mostly empty regions.

Character design and technical graphic detail seem to have taken the most time and the quality of them shows.

The signs were there that it was going to fail badly. There just wasn't enough voice of reason during the entire development.

FFXIV wasn't an ambitious title.

The armory system and the crafting system were the only really appealing aspects, but those weren't 'ambitious' in the least. Not in the sense that they were pushing new boundaries.

You look at ArcheAge, TERA, Blade&Soul, and even GuildWars2 and you see real ambition. Those are games that wanted to take the genre to a new level. In ArcheAge you can plant trees and grow crops (something never really to be seen in an MMO on such a persistent scale). In TERA you have a new combat style never to be fully realized in an MMO before (or since). In Blade & Soul you again have a new combat style. In GuildWars2 you have a new questig dynamic.

What do you have in FFXIV?

Graphics aside, you have nothing. There is no aspect of FFXIV where you can so "oh wow, they pushed the genre forward."

FFXIV was more or less a cheap FFXI knock-off which pandered to the complaints of the masses, but with a few redeeming qualities like the armory system and the crafting classes, and also really good graphics.

No. There will be no Nobel prize given to SquareEnix for advances in the MMO industry.

I think some of the things SE wanted to implement (like "market combat system", Company Housing, Company Ships etc) would have been ambitious if they had created the game with a definitive philosophy behind it. But in the case of FFXIV, there was a lot of partially constructed and half-hearted philosophies competing for dominance.

On the one hand the game was trying to appeal to the casual non-FFXI player, but at the same time it was trying to attract the FF-enthusiast and die-hard FFXI fan. It didn't know what it wanted. And so now you're left with these extreme wingnuts on either side of the fence saying "this is the game you promised" when in fact what was promised was nothing. Nothing was promised because everything was so loosely tied together with such flimsy guiding principles.

SE was way too morally flexible when they designed FFXIV, and now it's only getting worse with Yoshi in charge.

But back to the topic of competing philosophies. In no aspect of the game is that more evident than in the class system. FFXIV wants to appeal to the role-player hardcore demographic by giving them the freedom of choice and ability to customise their classes, but at the same time leaves them hanging because the game tries to keep one foot in the door of the casual sphere.

It was really unambitious, and it's impossible to be ambitious when you don't even know what you want. Appealing to everyone just means you have to compromise on everything. Compromise is not based on 'playing to a strength' or 'living up to potential'. Instead compromise is about weakening a strength and diluting a potential.

And Yoshi talks about fixing FFXIV's foundations. Well I don't see him doing that. Autoattack was not the weakness in this game's foundation. What was loose in this game's foundations was the incompatible and oftentimes conflicting concepts upon which the game was built. Such competing ideas are still very prevalent, and there's enough evidence in his articles (i.e., his very diplomatic speech patterns and Public Relations talk) to suggest he is still trying to cater to a range of opposing ideals.

Maybe FFXIV released with a loose foundation, but not recognising the real issues makes me think there's just a screw loose in yoshi's brain.

And FFXIV will never be ambitious because of that. It will always be hampered by the two sides pulling it one way and then the other.

Sief, Gramul, a company wide ambition too release more games than they could do a good job with might explain things. They didn't want to spend another year making the game because they wanted to free up the developers and needed the income for a new project now. Thus in order to make the deadlines so new titles could be announced, funded, and developed, things had to be rushed.

Giftforce, it isn't the title that's too ambitious, it's the company.

Not to mention the fact that there seems to be a "take the easiest and cheapest route whenever possible" rule at SE.

We obviously don't have good servers. We don't have seemless worlds. You could fill an entire page with the things we don't have but should have.

Sure you can say "it's good enough" not having basic features like jump, a User-interface, proper servers, story-telling techniques, voice-overs, an expansive world, and ... well, content. But it's certainly not ambitious.

Maybe the things Tanaka promised like Player-run companies and Ships and such things could be considered ambitious, and a PvP-server he once mentioned could be seen as showing initiative and market-awareness, but insofar as the product we actually received, and the one now promised to us under Yoshi's regime, that is by no means ambitious. Not in the least.

FFXIV came out poorly because of a (poor) managerial decisions to release the game in it's current state to match fiscal quarterly forecasts (despite player outcry, as well). This created the mess we see today. It was not ambition, but monetary reflections of the company that drove us to this point.

Tanaka proceeded to be used as a scapegoat, the game got a no-name producer, and now we are slowly getting a cookie-cutter themepark MMO.

A company is meant to be ambitious. They certainly threw enough money into FF14 from all financial records.

They simple put the wrong people in the wrong places without checks and balances.

Day to day operations on FF14 must have been a wreck to produce FF14. No one curbed stupid ideas, No one quality checked said bad ideas, no one crunched numbers to keep the time table on track, and no one tried to subject their work to peer review.

Sure they may have been a lot of brain draining (No matter how badly run the FF14 project was, some ideas and implementation were truly novice-grade-novice-lower then intern level)

But badly run projects have a way of magnifying faults.

Stupid ideas+letting stupid ideas flourish+lack of management on implementation of stupid ideas = Truly can not be saved stupidity.

"For every title that Square-Enix brings to a tradeshow like E3 or TGs that only consists of a vague cutsceney trailer, Yoichi Wada must take a kick up the ass with a really pointy steel-toed boot..."

/signed & /dated

maybe ffxiv is poorly, but i feel ffxiv have great potencial becuase is diferent and have many things to do

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Originally Posted by Belial

Tanaka proceeded to be used as a scapegoat, the game got a no-name producer, and now we are slowly getting a cookie-cutter themepark MMO.

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Yes, he should have been fired sooner rather then later. There's no way the person in charge isn't responsible. Even a figurehead leader is still a leader. Leaders that don't make their charges work, is as bad as the people that let that leader do stupid things.

On all levels it goes in a circle. If I put you in charge of cleaning the bathroom, it's still cleaning the bathroom. Whether I give you superior cleaning supplies or a toothbrush.

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Originally Posted by kukurumei

Yes, he should have been fired sooner rather then later. There's no way the person in charge isn't responsible. Even a figurehead leader is still a leader. Leaders that don't make their charges work, is as bad as the people that let that leader do stupid things.

On all levels it goes in a circle. If I put you in charge of cleaning the bathroom, it's still cleaning the bathroom. Whether I give you superior cleaning supplies or a toothbrush.

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Yes, and If I tell you "A toothbrush is not enough to have this bathroom cleaned adequately in the time allocated." In which you proceed to open the grizzly bathroom doors for service, despite being warned of the implications, then publicly saying "Hey, it's this guy's fault... we're gonna remove him from this restroom, and give you a new guy instead!" Yea... that's not a scapegoat.

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Originally Posted by kukurumei

A company is meant to be ambitious. They certainly threw enough money into FF14 from all financial records.

They simple put the wrong people in the wrong places without checks and balances.

Day to day operations on FF14 must have been a wreck to produce FF14. No one curbed stupid ideas, No one quality checked said bad ideas, no one crunched numbers to keep the time table on track, and no one tried to subject their work to peer review.

Sure they may have been a lot of brain draining (No matter how badly run the FF14 project was, some ideas and implementation were truly novice-grade-novice-lower then intern level)

But badly run projects have a way of magnifying faults.

Stupid ideas+letting stupid ideas flourish+lack of management on implementation of stupid ideas = Truly can not be saved stupidity.

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Fair points. What I'd like to suggest though is there is ambitious and there's overdoing it. Yes good companies are ambitious and like a good challenge. But when you start to forget about reality, you are overdoing it. I don't discount the wrong people in the wrong places argument, as I believe it at least in part. However there is also being set up to fail. There is also not laying a proper foundation.

It's those last two things that I think that Jim (from the video) was hinting at. Let's take Jim's version of Wada as a kid in the candy store with no self control. If that were the case, instead of managing what he's able to do at best with a little bit of challenge to his people he says we are going to do this and this and this, etc. you've soon got a company who's resources are being overtaxed.

When I was posting earlier in this forums after SE made them, one of the things I was trying to get at back then is part of the problem of FF14 is a bad corporate culture which has led the the worsening of SE's products overall. In my imagination, what the video said makes sense. If your company is being led by someone who wants to release more products than he can do well or do justice to, you've got a big problem. When you've got a guy who puts 4 FF13 products into development (and has only released one so far) what does that tell you? I mean part of the company story of FF13-2 is they are fixing some of the problems with the first game (...) and they haven't even released the other two titles yet, what does that tell you?

Besides having a really bad case of sequelitus?

Hi OP, yes I think SE went too far in their plans. I wasn't overly optimistic about the Fabula Nova Crystallis series, it sounded like too large of a project for SE, maybe had it been another company it would have been properly ambitious but SE has a history of taking their sweet time in their development cycles. It would have been far healthier for all those games IF they had just picked ONE to work on. Perhaps had they kept their idea of the series but just focussed all their teams on the one title maybe FF13 would have had a better story and more branching adventuring going on instead of this insanely focused and boring path they led us on.

FF14 I think is just a by blow of some really bad managing habits and I am hoping FF13 AND 14 are the last kick in the pants SE needed to wake up and realize that they need to really concentrate on fewer projects but make sure they have a little something we like to call content and better quality. Wada wants SE to push out more titles faster but if these titles end up being sub par to what other popular companies are doing, he is harming his company quite a lot.

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SE has a history of taking their sweet time in their development cycles.

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Why did I just suddenly think of DNF?

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Originally Posted by Cendres

It would have been far healthier for all those games IF they had just picked ONE to work on. Perhaps had they kept their idea of the series but just focussed all their teams on the one title maybe FF13 would have had a better story and more branching adventuring going on instead of this insanely focused and boring path they led us on.

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While I think FF13 overall would have been better with more development involved, I don't think the linearity of the game in itself is a bad thing. FF4 was pretty linear and I liked it. FF10 was pretty linear and it's my favorite game in the series. If a game has good content and a good story, it can get away with being linear.

Most people love Shakespeare, however I rarely see people arguing that he should have written branching storylines for Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. I don't see people saying Lucas should have written multiple endings for Empire and 2 Jedis, one for each ending (Vader is luke's father in one, Vader isn't luke's father in the other).

A harem game probably needs multiple storylines, as well as any one in which a single decision or two makes a huge impact on the story (different tone, different events following that decision, maybe a totally different final boss). After that, I think multiple storylines has become a substitute for having a good story that lasts long enough for the player or makes him want to play again on his own.

I mean look at FF14, it has 3 opening storylines but not enough content (story) for any single one of them to be good. (Over ambitious company strikes again?)

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Originally Posted by Cendres

FF14 I think is just a by blow of some really bad managing habits and I am hoping FF13 AND 14 are the last kick in the pants SE needed to wake up and realize that they need to really concentrate on fewer projects but make sure they have a little something we like to call content and better quality. Wada wants SE to push out more titles faster but if these titles end up being sub par to what other popular companies are doing, he is harming his company quite a lot.

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I think FF14 might have been a kick in the pants, but as far as I can tell, FF13 shipped 5.5 million units and made them a return of about 120 million. I don't see how that could have been viewed as bad by SE save for criticism.

I don't mind linear gameplay either, pretty much all FF titles are that way, but in FF13 it was just so very annoying, I don't know if I can express exactly why or how, but that was my general feeling. That there wasn't anything to explore on the side is what I meant by branching. You are funneled for a large part of the first half of the game with a tutorial that also takes forever and then you come to a big area that doesn't seem to have a whole lot either. Though I have to say the plains are my favorite part and mark hunting was awesome. In FF13 it seems they concentrated on new and improved combat so much so that the rest of the game like character progression and story suffered. I wonder if they could have pooled more resources these failings would not have been there so much.

Similarly FFXIV focused so much on being different and avant garde they ran out of time for anything else and even then what they had wasn't even complete and they launched it anyway.. Maybe they are being part too ambitious and part too arrogant?

I feel like this game was never genuinely loved by anyone in the development team, maybe not even now. Tanaka love his concepts, and maybe with another year to cook he could of loved the game too. All these people had ideas for what the game should be in 2-3 years, and no idea what the game should be now (the original dev team as stated in some article), they should of found a way to fall in love with the game immediately. Even xi had the same problem the world was graphically great for the time, the character design was cutting edge for the time, but the concepts at the heart didn't work out and some changes needed to be made (only having bazaars first year and such). FFXI was inspired by EQ and a trip to Hawaii, what was FFXIV inspired by a can of beans in Waco TX? jesus

I don't think "ambitious" is the word. The biggest reason I feel FFXIV failed on launch was because it was trying to be too different without having any good philosophy as to why these mechanics of theirs are better than today's "cookie-cutter" MMOs. That and because they put fighting RMTs higher on the priority list than player enjoyment.

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Originally Posted by RabidSquirrel

I don't think "ambitious" is the word. The biggest reason I feel FFXIV failed on launch was because it was trying to be too different without having any good philosophy as to why these mechanics of theirs are better than today's "cookie-cutter" MMOs. That and because they put fighting RMTs higher on the priority list than player enjoyment.

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Well we can attribute that to the lacking the voice of reason. FF14 could have done much better if they hadn't been so secretive, and tried to have people question their motives.

Still, there are some truly dumb things in FF14 that happened no matter the philosophy. Considering all of SE's other projects that was released in the past half decade, we can surmise there is a large brain drain as a whole.

At the very least, it wouldn't have gotten the "made in china" controversy if they had the talent of the old generation.

the only reason this game did poorly is because the creators learnt nothing from FFXI and didnt take anything good from it.
besides, i dont think even mr.Tanaka liked this game. just look at the videos and pictures of him at gamescon. look very grumpy, i bet he knew this was going to flop because of early release.

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Originally Posted by Seif

I don't see ambition in the game all I see is a lot of workarounds to get content done in as cheaply as possible. All the quests work exactly like leves without any thought put into the storyline and the characters lack personality when they talk or move. Shantotto of XIV?

All I see is that player saw through this leve scheme and now they want SE to make a game within XIV for real without using all the cheap tricks.

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This is exactly how I see it. Ambition doesn't even begin to fit.

Someone pointed out how now trends are changing where MMOs release a content patch atleast every 3 months to stay alive. Rift is doing that more often and it's struggling to stay alive. Is SE ambitious enough to stay competitive in an environment like that? I dont think so.

Ambitious as in having way too much on their plate and not giving titles the tlc they deserve and used to get? The kind of quality that made their old games so popular. Yea I can see that.

Also perhaps too ambitious regarding their target audience. Seems like they wanted a bigger piece of the pie than they got with XI, but in the process of trying to draw in a larger variety of players they turned most of 'em off in one way or another. Too casual in some places for the hardcores and not casual enough in others. Too much easy-mode in the wrong areas. Not enough FF for their FF fans.

Just a lot of awkward decisions all around. That gets me wondering where the line is between "this is the result of rushed mediocre work" and "they were just way off on what they thought the players would want". Hard to tell which is which sometimes.

that video was great, they really do need to screw off with all the bragin b4 the game is done.

i think this is a good reason why the game has failed http://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

also this http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

and theres this, so many devs posted lol even other company devs http://ealouse.wordpress.com/

“We will make our customers conform to our vision for what they want; what they actually want doesn’t matter.” lol this was one of the most interesting parts i read that came from gw dev

i'm thinking alot of these things though ea, completely different company. these are probably the problems with the game, they were pushed to launch i'm sure, they took our box sale money, weather they trying to fix it or not, these problems are probably going on up there on the dev side. lol maybe se devs will make a post like this and speak the truth too. /wink /wink lolol.

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Originally Posted by Cichy

Someone pointed out how now trends are changing where MMOs release a content patch atleast every 3 months to stay alive. Rift is doing that more often and it's struggling to stay alive. Is SE ambitious enough to stay competitive in an environment like that? I dont think so.

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Well another problem with Rift as reported by most players is that it's an experience almost entirely derivative of WoW, and if somebody wanted to play WoW, then they'd play WoW.

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Originally Posted by Malakhim

Well another problem with Rift as reported by most players is that it's an experience almost entirely derivative of WoW, and if somebody wanted to play WoW, then they'd play WoW.

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Not entirely true. A lot of WoW clones exist and they have their fair share of players. Not that it's WoW level, but you don't need to be WoW level to be successful.

Rifts has a problem that it wants to be WoW without the resources to be WoW.

That's still leagues better then FF14, so can't really compare a failure to a fail successor.

Well my point was in relation to Rift's troubles, not FFXIV, which obviously has it's own share. The way I see it personally, the one thing FFXIV DOES have going for it is that the dev team isn't trying to turn it into WoW, or at the very least a shameless ripoff.

As for too ambitious? Well companies are always trying to expand their brands in new ways, so I can't really fault them there. Of course they DID announce 3 games at the same time, 2 of which are HD, all while developing a new development toolset, so it can probably be said that they spread their talent and resources far too thinly.

Simple answer to this whole thread.

Wada

/thread

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Originally Posted by Belial

Yes, and If I tell you "A toothbrush is not enough to have this bathroom cleaned adequately in the time allocated." In which you proceed to open the grizzly bathroom doors for service, despite being warned of the implications, then publicly saying "Hey, it's this guy's fault... we're gonna remove him from this restroom, and give you a new guy instead!" Yea... that's not a scapegoat.

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Get handed toothbrush to clean bathroom.

Spend years developing a toothbrush system. (Crystal Tools)

Outsource it to china.

(The Horsebird goes Kweigh)

The cake was a lie.

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Originally Posted by Joeking

Simple answer to this whole thread.

Wada

/thread

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^ This is the right answer.

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Originally Posted by Malakhim

Well another problem with Rift as reported by most players is that it's an experience almost entirely derivative of WoW, and if somebody wanted to play WoW, then they'd play WoW.

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While I tend to agree with that, Bioware is doing the wow clone thing for KOTOR. Part of me thinks that will hurt the game because people would rather play wow another part of me wants to say with SW and bioware, derivative gameplay is something that you can get away with in that case. The only problem would be you won't get the people who are burned out by WoW's gameplay to stay for long.

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Originally Posted by Winterclaw

While I tend to agree with that, Bioware is doing the wow clone thing for KOTOR. Part of me thinks that will hurt the game because people would rather play wow another part of me wants to say with SW and bioware, derivative gameplay is something that you can get away with in that case. The only problem would be you won't get the people who are burned out by WoW's gameplay to stay for long.

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Personally as a Star Wars fanboy, I came back from the E3 TOR videos feeling pretty worried. They keep saying that they're hyping up the audio, and yet I thought the voice-acting was cringe-worthy, the graphics themselves looked very last gen early-Xbox almost, and the gameplay looked pretty off. Not terrible, and it might have just been the visuals, but it definitely looked off.

It's said that they decided to rush out FFXIV like they did. From where I'm standing, the only real competition it may have outside of the WoW juggernaut looks to be Guild Wars 2, and I only say that because I haven't actually seen that much of GW2 yet.

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Originally Posted by Phenidate

Get handed toothbrush to clean bathroom.

Spend years developing a toothbrush system. (Crystal Tools)

Outsource it to china.

(The Horsebird goes Kweigh)

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You forgot the part where they try to sell it back to china for double the profits.

There's some die hard Tanaka fans crawling around when he's probably the worse producer to hit SE given the job description of a Producer...very odd.