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

[Winterclaw]

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.

[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.

[Gramul]

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.

[kukurumei]

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

[giftforce]

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.

[Winterclaw]

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.

[giftforce]

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.

[Belial]

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.

[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.

[Verecund]

"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