Thread: Garuda 1.0

Originally Posted by ReplicaX

Ah yes, 1.0 Tanaka:



Source

I'm surprised it took that long to post that.



That's something he said to save face, but he was held responsible for a reason.

Originally Posted by Alukah

but he was held responsible for a reason.

What reason was that?

Chances are that the higher ups at SE sacked him in that position because it's easier than blaming themselves for pushing it out early.

Five years, that's not what I'd call early.

How come it took Yoshida so much less to improve 1.0 when he took lead?

Many 1.0 players assume the higher ups used Tanaka as scapegoat, but I'm thinking it was more of Tanaka trying to pass the blame on the team.

Originally Posted by Roris

Because exactly of those 5 years. Much of the work was already done and was completed to a certain extent, Yoshida just gave the go to salvage and finish as much of it as they could hence the faster time, everything was already there. Even late 1.X stuff like Hamlet was planned since the very early 1.0 days, and arguably it showed, companies too either Grand or Free if not both were also planned under Tanaka's direction.

It would be incredibly unwise to throw out everything and start anew. Using existing assets ideas was the smart thing to do to keep the costs of salvaging down.

Because it it exactly the same team, I keep bringing it up because some people make it seem like the game is radically different when it really isn't, because much of its core base is still there. Sure 1.0 was a failure for a lot of reasons even if 1.23 did salvage it up and ARR did it even more, but the core ARR base is exactly the same as 1.0 except under a different direction. Some people should at least be aware of that instead of dismissing 1.0 in its entirety, since much of that entirety is still present to this day.

Sure, Square isn't going to fire the entire team and hire new people. That would be cost prohibitive and they would have lost a lot of good people with solid game design and development skills. But the people they did replace were tasked with directing those people how and where to apply those skills. The people leading are incredibly different, and that's important. One good leader is all a team needs to transform itself into a completely new dynamic.

The issue here is that nostalgia and the garage band syndrome are kicking in. The former is easy, and I think someone needs to create a Wall of No for ARR that we can copy-pasta in when someone starts with claiming 1.0 is better than 2.0 (hint: it wasn't, subscription numbers prove that).

It does - ARR got lucky that WoW had no updates for an extremely long time and it had 1.x to build off of, because the 2.0 exclusive content would have cause that, as well to be a massive failure as the only thing 2.0 offered was the main storyline (and a handful of exclusive dungeons to arr) and binding coil of bahamut. This is ignoring the already existing open world dungeons being retooled into instanced dungeons.

So as much as you want to try to say this, ARR only survived because of 1.x (which was actually going to become 2.0 if they didn't downgrade everything to mimick WoW.) Heck ARR woulda launched with less content than even the most mass produced Korean grinder lol, so Roris isn't incorrect, 1.x was the main saving grace for ARR as it provided more than enough assets unreleased and released to offer a great launch.

How on earth is copying what's proven to work and then refining it "downgrading it"? Sure you don't like WoW, fine, but it's hard to argue with the success it has had, and LoTRO proved that a well done quest hub MMO can succeed in a post WoW era. Also, there's more to ARR's success than the length of time between the release of 5.4 and 6.0. For ARR to succeed, WoW does not have to fail.

Originally Posted by Delily

It would be incredibly unwise to throw out everything and start anew. Using existing assets ideas was the smart thing to do to keep the costs of salvaging down. Sure, Square isn't going to fire the entire team and hire new people. That would be cost prohibitive and they would have lost a lot of good people with solid game design and development skills. But the people they did replace were tasked with directing those people how and where to apply those skills. The people leading are incredibly different, and that's important. One good leader is all a team needs to transform itself into a completely new dynamic.

Oh for sure, the new direction is certainly different from 1.0 and most FF games, but it's not really that new in itself especially in the MMO market, because at its core it's just your average post WoW themepark with chocobos and moogles at the end of the day. The new direction is all about saving costs as much as they can so it also makes even more sense to keep as much of the old team as they did, plus they already had experience with the assets and code and had a lot of concepts and ideas already preplanned and in advanced stages of implementation.

Originally Posted by Delily

(hint: it wasn't, subscription numbers prove that).

Well considering 1.0 never really had a sub in the first place until late December 2011, for sure. Even then 1.X did have its fair share of subscribers, enough to fund ARR's development and grant enough people Legacy status. Also that 2.5 million adventurers number that keeps being thrown around for ARR? Those are simply registered accounts, not subscribers. They also don't make a distinction whether they're all ARR accounts or ARR accounts mixed with past 1.0 accounts, because 1.0 did have its fair share of accounts created since its beta. Unless they've recently updated their actual subscriber figures, the last time they straight up mentioned actual subscribers was a bit after ARR's launch at around 500k, but sure, even then that would still be more than the subs 1.0 had by the end.

Originally Posted by Duelle

Tanaka was in charge of 1.0.

Game development is rarely that simple let's just say that.

None of us know the exact reasons that FFXIV 1.0 was the way it came out, could it have been all on Tanaka? Sure it damn well could have. But there is just as high a chance that Tanaka had the blame shoved on him from above and little is even his doing. The "5 years dev time" could mean anything, it could mean that they worked on XIV 24/7 for 5 years or his team could have been split up for 5 years working on multiple projects within Square Enix, in and out of FFXI, and any other number of projects SE was working on at the time.

Remember this is a "5 years" in where the company was working on a massive number of projects at once many of wich have yet to even see release dates until recently. During this time Square was working on.

FFXIV 1.0
FFXI expansions and content updates
FFXIII (And possibly XIII-2-3)
FFXV (Known as XIII Versus at the time)
FF Type 0

Likely the Crystal tools engine was forced upon him and his team and that layed the groundwork for a poor development scenario. It wasn't built for MMO's and it showed when anything that the development team tried to do before or after Yoshida Stepped in seemingly broke the game and was scrapped. Yoshida was on record multiple times saying "Sorry we can't do that with the current game structure"

Tanaka has no control over this kind of thing, he may have begged and pleaded with the bean counters that he needed a more powerfull platform and servers to work with and may have been denied.

While I say all this it's also possible Tanaka came into work everyday and threw darts at a board to decide wether things like "Fatigue" was a good idea. Laying the blame on him alone is just a bit silly to me, I'd rather put a bit of faith into the guy who previously brought us nothing but blockbusters.

So quoting "5 years, 5 years" is a useless statement as anyone who knows anything about the game world knows that it's not always 100% focus. Look at things like Duke Nukem Forever or more recently The Last Guardian. Games that have been in development hell for years if not stretching into decades. The ammount of time from start to finish means nothing.

Originally Posted by Jynx

snip

Which is why I have always blamed the Company as a whole. I observe everything in those 5 years, not just the Team & it's Development Cycle.

PR for XIV 1.0 was a total mess and misleading (hype). This would mainly focus on Tanaka (Producer, face of the game, past history of success & accomplishments) the perfect model to use, Legal/PR/Community teams as well as Upper Management.

2 examples:
- "We learned so much from XI as a whole and the limitations it had." (XIV brought us limitations, limit of characters on screen being one of biggest)
- E3 2009: "The game will be released in 2010, with a 3 month beta prior to release"(roadmap was in place, Cataclysm wasn't leaked or rumored.)

The other issues of the 5 year period, you somewhat touched on Jynx. The foundation of the game. It's core was a mess and filled with bugs. Toss content aside.

The design perspective over these 5 years on core elements.
- Fatigue system
- UI & server structure issues (coding)
- Class decisions (Exp: GLA shield stance mechanic)
- Crafting system and it's absurd recipes. (Consumable ammo, tied in with Class Decision, before the recipes were changed. 3 crafting classes required to make it entirely, with multiple steps within each.)
- Market Ward system
- 1K polygons and 150 lines of shader code into a flowerpot.

You combine everything together within the project, it was a mess. Add in everything else going on at SE at the time, chaos. Add in the decision to go gold on it's current build with so much feedback against it's current build with a patch it later attitude, a calamity.

Details, inner workings of SE, who did what. Who cares, the Company failed.