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

[odette]

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

[kukurumei]

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.

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.

[Belial]

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.

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.

[Winterclaw]

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.

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?

[Cendres]

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.

[Winterclaw]

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

Why did I just suddenly think of DNF?

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.

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?)

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.

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.

[Cendres]

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?

[zaviermhigo]

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

[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.

[kukurumei]

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.

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.