"Where has the magic gone?"

[AlexiaKidd]

Enix happened the rest is history.

[Demacia]

I think we all know that even being in an older body, we never really grow up. Look into yourself and you still see that child. It's what drives humanity forward. Curiosity and adventure, don't tell me we loose that when we grow up, it's simply not true. We might not be as easily impressed or manipulated, but we still do have the need for all the same things we wanted back when we where a kid or teenager.

We need that new toy, it just changed from a toy car to a real car.

I like the way you think. Well said.

[Seif]

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Lost Odyssey was pretty magical to me. The writing makes XIV walls O' text seem amateurish in comparison.

Why can't they hire talented game designers!?
Character designer is doing Vs. and the director of XIII has nothing but utter failures in his CV ("My life as a King"anyone?) Japan is stock full of genius game designers hire them!

Why don't you hire the directors of previous FF games (other than Sakaguchi) to do new FF titles?

I don't get why they keep hiring these incompetent people to these important roles.

Yoshida's greatest achievments are that he has once played Everquest?! Are you kidding me? Hire the staff of XI they CLEARLY can handle a job like this.

Btw producing a MMO takes more than just reading forums and writing letters. Hire Yoshida to do community management that's what he's obviously good at. Hire a game designer to create a FF title like you have done for 2 decades.

It's not rocket surgery people =)

[rubina]

They removed the FF magic system & jobs and replaced it with a AoE Toggle button and a hodge podge pair of magic-like jobs. At least it looks like they're moving in the right direction. We'll see how the whole game will work out in 8-12 months.

[Atoli]

Curiosity and adventure, don't tell me we loose that when we grow up, it's simply not true.

Until I turned 10, I played in the woods with some friends and all I needed for playing were some leaves and stones. I was happy with them, and in my imagination they turned into whatever I wanted them to be.
If you gave me some leaves and stones today, I'd say something like "I won't even touch that filthy stuff."
Face it, we lose some of that naivety, imagination and how easily we are satisfied.
Some of it, I'm not saying all of it.
Your car example is very good because it shows what I'm trying to say:
We need more and more awesome stuff to satisfy our growing needs. There's no way a game can keep up with all that, especially because people tend to become very diverse when they grow up, so it's even harder to fulfill the wishes of everyone who liked the Fandom as a child.

[Demacia]

Until I turned 10, I played in the woods with some friends and all I needed for playing were some leaves and stones. I was happy with them, and in my imagination they turned into whatever I wanted them to be.
If you gave me some leaves and stones today, I'd say something like "I won't even touch that filthy stuff."
Face it, we lose some of that naivety, imagination and how easily we are satisfied.
Some of it, I'm not saying all of it.
Your car example is very good because it shows what I'm trying to say:
We need more and more awesome stuff to satisfy our growing needs. There's no way a game can keep up with all that, especially because people tend to become very diverse when they grow up, so it's even harder to fulfill the wishes of everyone who liked the Fandom as a child.

I sometimes play old NES-PS1 era games I missed out on as a kid and I can still appreciate how much imagination and effort went into those old games. Shit, I played Xenogears for the first time last year and now it's my favorite RPG. The problem is that game devs suck ass now. Demon's Souls is an exception as that game is awesome. A big chunk of the DS/PSP library is excused as well.

[Kafeen]

Unfortunately that argument is wrong. Coding an "engine" for the SNES or any 2D platform was as complicated since it was mostly done in assembler and no rapid development tools where available in those days.

All the hand drawn animations, sprites and backgrounds are much more time intensive than simple 3D polygons that get textured, lit and rendered.

I give you a simple example. The scaling of the enemies they have done in FF14 can be done with a few simple parameters. Polygons naturally scale to any size and tessalation takes only a mouse click in modern 3D modeling software.

If you would have done that in a 2D game you would have to hand draw all the sprites and graphics again. Something that would take months not days.

The whole argument about 3D beeing more complicated and time intensive is rubbish.
Why you think people that have no experience in game design can use the free editors to make levels that are sometimes superior to the original game?

Fact is, games take a lot longer to develop now and by much bigger teams than what were used back on older platforms. Back in the SNES days, games were often developed by a single person or a small teams, a couple of coders, a couple of artists, nothing compared to the 100 man teams you can see on a large project now. There are some games developed by small teams now, but Final Fantasy certainly isn't one of them.

While scaling polygons is a simple process there's a lot more to a modern game than that. The hand drawing done on 2D games is still needed to create textures that go on these useful polygons. Where as with a 2D game, you knew how it was going to be viewed, with a 3D game the player could be a lot closer, pushing right up to a wall for example. This means you either have a nasty pixelly mess, or nice high resolution textures that take a lot longer to create. There's also a lot more required than there used to be. A simple wall texture now is likely to be much bigger than the entire sprite sheet for a 2D character. On top of the textures, there's a lot more that has to go in to modelling and animating the character.

Then we have the world, collision is a much bigger process than what is needed in 2D, there are a lot more places that players can get to, the collision has to be robust enough to ensure that players aren't going to get suck on terrain or fall right through.

You're right that a lot of things are simpler to do now than they were in the past, but a lot more is required now.

[Blitz0309]

A big issue now a days is that game developers focus so much on how a game looks that they often skip over how it plays. Graphics are the first thing you notice, but that's not what keeps you playing a game. Sure ffxi looks pretty (as long as you don't go out and about and see the same thing over and over).. but its boring as hell to play. Its backwards. Make a game thats enjoyable, then garnish with nice graphics. Don't blow all your time on an engine that runs like crap but looks pretty, then try to make the game play bareable.

I'd rather break out an emulator and play the original final fantasy than play ffxiv. At least in that game my warriors could have an axe or a sword and still whoop ass. Sure the game's 8-bit graphics aren't as pretty, but at least the game play is solid. Though the whole not being able to buy more than 1 item at a time was a PITFA.

Hell, the other day i hooked up my old ps2 and put in ff7. And the first thing i thought was "damn, i could of sworn the game looked better"... but after about 5 minutes of playing i didn't even notice the graphics anymore.

I even had a month when i went back and recreated a FFXI account and started over. Leveling jobs that i'd done before, i still had fun (even though it was really easy since they changed the exp)... well up until you get to the point where everyone wants to do abyssea non stop and levels have no meaning. Then i canceled my account again.

I wish developers would stop thinking "next generation" means you have to max hardware just to run a game.

[Reaux]

They removed the FF magic system & jobs and replaced it with a AoE Toggle button and a hodge podge pair of magic-like jobs. At least it looks like they're moving in the right direction. We'll see how the whole game will work out in 8-12 months.

So the solution is to wait 1 year after a games launch to see if it is in "working" order at minimum? Nobody see's a problem with that? Many of the Alpha/Beta ppl have reach that mark and they can also tell you that from that time the gameplay itself has not changed much if at all. Mostly tweeks here and there but nothing significant. We are still at the concept stage of this game. They have no REAL direction, just things they are testing out on us. With the exception of moving from leves as the sole focus for ranking up, they seem to not know what they want.

We are getting significant patches of dabbling to see if these concepts work...but much of these things should have been tested and conceptualized well prior to launch.

[Reaux]

A big issue now a days is that game developers focus so much on how a game looks that they often skip over how it plays. Graphics are the first thing you notice, but that's not what keeps you playing a game. Sure ffxi looks pretty (as long as you don't go out and about and see the same thing over and over).. but its boring as hell to play. Its backwards. Make a game thats enjoyable, then garnish with nice graphics. Don't blow all your time on an engine that runs like crap but looks pretty, then try to make the game play bareable.

I'd rather break out an emulator and play the original final fantasy than play ffxiv. At least in that game my warriors could have an axe or a sword and still whoop ass. Sure the game's 8-bit graphics aren't as pretty, but at least the game play is solid. Though the whole not being able to buy more than 1 item at a time was a PITFA.

Hell, the other day i hooked up my old ps2 and put in ff7. And the first thing i thought was "damn, i could of sworn the game looked better"... but after about 5 minutes of playing i didn't even notice the graphics anymore.

I even had a month when i went back and recreated a FFXI account and started over. Leveling jobs that i'd done before, i still had fun (even though it was really easy since they changed the exp)... well up until you get to the point where everyone wants to do abyssea non stop and levels have no meaning. Then i canceled my account again.

I wish developers would stop thinking "next generation" means you have to max hardware just to run a game.

I agree. This "evil" of games taking huge teams and money is just something bigger companies use as an excuse when a game does poorly. Plenty of RPG franchises and Indie developers make much more fun and engaging games that don't have as complex graphical designs, but they gameplay is fascinating. Capsize on Steam is awesome, I just started replaying Xenogears, Fragile Dreams on the Wii, the Disgaea series is still 2D sprites and is amazingly complex and addictive.