Did squenix make a mistake by investing too much in graphics and not enough in

[Nakiamiie]

I was just watching the Jimquistion on pc gaming (NSFW) and I was wondering, did sqaure make a mistake by over investing in graphics instead of gameplay and content?

Jim makes a great point. Consider Eve. It's one of the older MMOs (people are still playing UO and EQ though) and despite its age, it's still growing and save for server lag, runs well. Or take the old infinity engine games (all 9000 of them), despite looking old, those games are still fun to play. People still love planescape and I was even thinking of playing the BG games again for the nostalgia of the glory days of bioware... before they turned to the dark side... before they joined EA.

Yes, some PC games can benefit from hardcore gfx, but a lot of them (doom, ultima 4 which is free on GoG, retticlear, the two MOO games, the earlier civ games, etc) don't look all that great anymore. But who cares? They are fun and you can still play them.

Aren't they investing in gameplay and content now? We'll have both graphics and gameplay/content soon. The best of the best.

[Evangela]

I don't think it's a mistake

Good graphic is not a mistake

They need to create a game with good graphic and good gameplay

[Bigcatman]

I think people are judging the current team too harshly. Think about it: the old dev team made an ENTIRE GAME. The new dev team needs to fix the ENTIRE GAME the old dev team made. Although it seems as though they should be "getting on the ball", we've got to cut them slack, they're basically remaking the game at this point.

If YoshiP was there at the start, we'd probably be much better off since he knows how to communicate with his player base and implement their ideas, instead of playing the "boss" card the old dev team played. What's the point of even having beta testing if you are set in your ways?

[Ilean]

I think people are judging the current team too harshly. Think about it: the old dev team made an ENTIRE GAME. The new dev team needs to fix the ENTIRE GAME the old dev team made. Although it seems as though they should be "getting on the ball", we've got to cut them slack, they're basically remaking the game at this point.

If YoshiP was there at the start, we'd probably be much better off since he knows how to communicate with his player base and implement their ideas, instead of playing the "boss" card the old dev team played. What's the point of even having beta testing if you are set in your ways?

Agree. I don't blame the current team that much, I barely blame the old one for the technical issues. Obviously crystal engine was not production ready when they started working with it, 5+ years later it's already outdated and pointless by today's standards. I've been forced to work with immature frameworks before, the results are always the same.

Whoever decided that the game should be built upon untested and unfinished technology, and whoever approved it are to blame.

[Coldfire]

At least they didn't use UDK like everyone else... man that would have been bad :P

[Fensfield]

Nah.

Crystal tools turns out a certain level of graphical fidelity and needs a certain level of artistic investment to work. Given the issues surrounding the engine's optimisation, and a number of graphical cut corners such as with environmental shadows and entity shading, I'd sooner imagine they actually diverted resources away from graphics insofar as was possible given what CT requires to work acceptably, to use in other areas.

If you ask me, the graphics suffered just as much as any other element of the game from being rushed out/limited development time, we just don't notice as much because, well, it's the graphics. They still look pretty nice, and people just don't get as worked up over graphical problems as they do gameplay, since 90% of the time, graphics either work for your machine and you're okay with them, or you don't play the game at all.


Also, on the EVE Online point...

You might remember CCP were turned away by a number of publishers before Atari picked them up because their investment in graphics lead to assumptions they were pulling a scam; it was assumed PC's of the time just weren't able to render the things v1.0 EVE did in realtime at the time of its creation. Further, they replaced the entire game engine only a year or two back; Trinity 2.0/Carbon is not an old engine (in some ways it's more modern and technologically advanced than the implementation of Crystal Tools used by FF XIV) and given the way EVE is being developed and iterated on, it certainly oughtn't be ranked alongside other games that endured since a while ago by developing content for effectively the same technology they started with.

No, what EVE has over Final Fantasy XIV and similar games isn't that it diverted resources away from graphics and onto gameplay and such (indeed, a major complaint about the early versions of EVE was that it had nothing in it, even less than FF XIV had at launch and not even enough to be called player-driven). EVE's advantage is it's a persistent sandbox. I don't like to say it, but until they switch to a gameplay model based on a persistently dynamic, player driven world rather than a world that can only change meaningfully when the developers burn resources to add or alter things, mainstream MMORPG's like Final Fantasy XIV will continue to struggle to produce enough content for their playerbases and operate within predictably limited lifespans. EVE Online may be in difficulty at the moment, but the potential remains for it to last decades. The same cannot be said of World of Warcraft, the biggest and most successfully implemented game of the MMO-subgenre to which Final Fantasy XIV technically belongs.

[PrettyPrincess]

I'm no expert, but I believe the design of systems comes first before they are actually developed, as in the graphics are one of the last things to be added.

[Roaran]

Thinking long-term, investing in graphics is a good idea.

Thinking long-term, releasing the game early and allowing player feed back is a good idea.

They did the same thing in FFXI, they're just looking at the big picture.

[unnameduser]

Considering that the environment is made up of rehashed textures and we are playing a 2010 release w/o dx10 or dx11 I'd say that they did not even spend enough time on the graphics.

[Coldfire]

They only spent time on the graphical design but not on the graphical engine. The bad lighting and weird tree behaviour with DoF enabled are just two examples for that. For an MMO the stability of the engine is the most important thing imo.
DX11 brings more stability than DX9 if used properly. Especially if the game uses complex rendering. If anyone plays this game on XP speak now! xD