Patch 1.18 release date announced! July 21

[Kiote]

People need to stop bad mouthing Tanaka so much.. The man is a Game Development Genius. One failure doesn't discredit his 20+ hits.. I can pretty much Guarantee you Corporate was to blame for this games release, not Tanaka.

[Capita]

People need to stop bad mouthing Tanaka so much.. The man is a Game Development Genius. One failure doesn't discredit his 20+ hits.. I can pretty much Guarantee you Corporate was to blame for this games release, not Tanaka.

Agreed. Tanaka is an excellent developer. He was likely just forced to rush due to Cataclysm.

[Kiote]

Pretty close yes. Though the 21st is ~2/3 of July though. I think early July is = 1st-9th, mid July = 10th-19th, and late July 20th-31st. Like i stated he should have stuck to his guns about time frames.

Technically 1-7 would be the beginning and 25-31 would be the end.. So while its the end of the middle, it's still the middle. ~.^v

[SuzakuCMX]

Pretty close yes. Though the 21st is ~2/3 of July though. I think early July is = 1st-9th, mid July = 10th-19th, and late July 20th-31st. Like i stated he should have stuck to his guns about time frames.

Early = 1-12, Mid = 13-23, Late = 24-31st.

[Kiote]

I suppose we could go one step further and say, 1 is the begining and 31 is the end and Yoshi P. gets a pretty big window.. lol

[SuzakuCMX]

I suppose we could go one step further and say, 1 is the begining and 31 is the end and Yoshi P. gets a pretty big window.. lol

It's all mid July.

12:01 AM July 1st is early, 11:59 PM July 31st is late, everything in between is Mid-July :O

[Malakhim]

If Tanaka didn't do a "bad job"(I agree that he was forced to rush out as well), then Yoshi P wouldn't be frantically trying to fix all the underlying code and we wouldn't see posts on "fixed enmity algorithms" and such.

Obviously I'm not a game developer, but when posts like that come out it makes you think.

[Xatsh]

I would not say Tanaka is a bad developer his track record honestly proves otherwise, what I think Tanaka was, was out of touch with the modern era of mmo gamers, that combined with him being rushed to release the product. So in the end we got a product with a complete lack of content, the content we had was not the standard, and it was all incomplete and buggy.

Honestly I blame the higher ups more then Tanaka on the games current condition. Who knows how the game would of been if they game him another year to develop it.

[Capita]

If Tanaka didn't do a "bad job"(I agree that he was forced to rush out as well), then Yoshi P wouldn't be frantically trying to fix all the underlying code and we wouldn't see posts on "fixed enmity algorithms" and such.

Obviously I'm not a game developer, but when posts like that come out it makes you think.

That's the thing, though. During early stages of a game, certain formulas are still being experimented on for balance purposes. When a game is rushed, developers don't have time to tweak the algorithms. It's not entirely Tanaka's fault that the game's formulas were all retarded. They were probably still trying to work out things like damage formulas and stuff before being given the release date deadline, which forced them to rush out some kind of random formulas to things like enmity and the early SP gain system just for some semblance of completion.

[Chezen]

Agreed. Tanaka is an excellent developer. He was likely just forced to rush due to Cataclysm.

I've been thinking about this...

I think they really did mean to release FFXIV that way.

The top complaints about this game from reviewers were UI and tutorials or directions on where to go. I've been playing FFXI lightly for a couple of weeks (for the first time), and it's even worse. Maybe FFXI players are so used to it, they don't realize how it is for a new gamer (or maybe they all have controllers). I'm not surprised by how FFXIV was released now, because even the UI at FFIV's opening was easier than FFXI's.

In FFXI, one NPC told me how to get outside the city, but only because I walked up and talked to him. I found my first quest by accident. Nothing shows where anything is. Even the map is hard to understand. I still haven't figured out if I can warp back to town. It's a long walk.

After some internet research, I figured out how to regain HP from fighting and how to hand in quests. You can't just talk to the NPC, you have to actually trade the item they want from you.

Compared to that, FFXIV's UI was a cakewalk at start. WoW (and other mmos) is fairly self-explanatory, because everything is drag and drop. But here, I guess to make it controller friendly, everything is click. It took me time to figure that out. Seems easy now, but when you have no idea whats going on... that alone will make you not want to play.

I'm not saying that UI is the only problem, but it was probably the biggest one keeping people from even trying this game. If you are confused and frustrated from the start, it doesn't make you want to continue and get emotionally invested in the game.