any questions?

[Rydin]

At the end of the day... the main goal of this game is (And always has been) to bring a Final Fantasy MMO to the masses that appeals to all the people who buy the offline numbered titles
Everything that was done (or wasn't done) was to this end...

Gift is asking a bunch of subjective questions, but I must say, it would be extremely interesting to see Yoshi P answer them....

Honestly though, we don't know how much pressure was (is??) put on the design team.
I bet this is what it sounded like during development

Yoichi Wada: Hey Tanaka, Final Fantasy X is up to 8 million in sales... FFXII did 3 million in the first week.... How many subscribers did FFXI have?

Hiromichi Tanaka: like half a million, but here's the thing... thats not bad numbers for an MMO. People are hesitant about paying monthly fees to play a game

Wada: You're right... no MMO has millions of subscribers.... OH WAIT.....

Tanaka: Very funny.... But I'm just saying... you can't even play FFXI on a slim PS2. It got a bad rep...

Wada: Whatever... look... FFXIII just did 2 frikkin million sales in its first week... IN JAPAN ALONE.... and we let interns write the story.

Tanaka: Well work on FFXIV is proceeding beautifully. The tech demo was very well received.

Wada: That's all well and good.. but I swear to God, you give me FFXI-2 and the next game you'll be working on is "Game Designer Sepeku"

Tanaka: This one will be different. You will see... Come Fall 2012, the world will be blown away

Wada: Yea... about that... I was thinking we should bump that up... to say... Spring 2011.

Tanaka: But Crystal Tools was designed for PSgl, not directX. The networking API is brand new. These things take time..

Wada: You know what I'm hearing from you T-Knocker, Excuses. PSGL, DirectX, MS-DOS 5.1... its all the same shit.. And I know I'm no computer guy... but can't you just use the networking API from the FFXI engine?

Tanaka: No, not at all... even if it wasn't owned by someone else, it was based around much smaller bandwidth needs. This new one was developed by our staff in China

Wada: Yea, whatever. Just get me an MMO that millions of people will buy, and have it ready by Spring 2011. And I am so serious.. If I see an FFXI clone, You're going to be the new custodian at the Beijing office

Tanaka: Fine, it will be released well ahead of schedule and it will not resemble FFXI.

Wada: You know what... make that Fall 2010... I'm feeling generous

[captainpicard]

...

I particularly like the "staff in China" part. No doubt there was some BPO involvement in this title as illustrated from the use of Chinese in the game.

[Tsukino]

I particularly like the "staff in China" part. No doubt there was some BPO involvement in this title as illustrated from the use of Chinese in the game.

You people are morons who don't know anything about Japanese or Chinese language and believe everything you read on some guy's blog. A guy who purposefully uses the language barrier to make his BS seem credible.

[captainpicard]

You people are morons who don't know anything about Japanese or Chinese language and believe everything you read on some guy's blog. A guy who purposefully uses the language barrier to make his BS seem credible.

Actually I just believe their investor relations information.

Asia Holdings
----------
SQUARE ENIX (China) CO., LTD. January 2005 Digital entertainment in China and Asia
HUANG LONG CO., LTD. August 2005 Sale and management of online games in Asia

http://www.square-enix.com/eng/ir/li...0corporate.pdf

Final Fantasy XIV, previously codenamed Rapture (ラプチャー) was first mentioned in August 2005. Notice the establishment date of SE China, and the acquisition date of HUANG LONG CO.

I think they said this sucker was in development for what 5 years.. I dunno do the math.

[Tsukino]

Actually I just believe their investor relations information.

Asia Holdings
----------
SQUARE ENIX (China) CO., LTD. January 2005 Digital entertainment in China and Asia
HUANG LONG CO., LTD. August 2005 Sale and management of online games in Asia

http://www.square-enix.com/eng/ir/li...0corporate.pdf

Final Fantasy XIV, previously codenamed Rapture (ラプチャー) was first mentioned in August 2005. Notice the establishment date of SE China, and the acquisition date of HUANG LONG CO.

That's because they were going to release the game in China, in Chinese, to expand into that market. Those holdings would be responsible for adapting the game for China, and the former is responsible for publishing their games there in general. They didn't and do not develop anything for Final Fantasy XIV or any other title in the series.

There is no "Chinese" in the game, nor was there ever. That misconception comes entirely from a crappy blog post on a certain triangular site that shall remain nameless that was widely circulated as legitimate journalism for some reason. Anyone who knows either Japanese (like I do) or Chinese would know that it was all complete BS. The things people said were "Chinese" were just some weird and tiny examples of poetic license gone out of hand - roughly the equivalent of making up pseudo-Latin words in English.

[captainpicard]

That's because they were going to release the game in China, in Chinese, to expand into that market. Those holdings would be responsible for adapting the game for China. They didn't and do not develop anything for Final Fantasy XIV or any other title in the series.

There is no "Chinese" in the game, nor was there ever. That misconception comes entirely from a crappy blog post on a certain triangular site that shall remain nameless that was widely circulated as legitimate journalism for some reason. Anyone who knows either Japanese (like I do) or Chinese would know that it was all complete BS. The things people said were "Chinese" were just some weird and tiny examples of poetic license gone out of hand - roughly the equivalent of making up pseudo-Latin words in English.

Actually that was going to be Shanda Games. It sounds like you are the one who is misinformed.

http://ffxiv.zam.com/story.html?story=23284

Per the Shanda Press Release:

"Our in-house game development team is well-qualified to assist in the localization of FINAL FANTASY XIV to the China market, while our strong sales and marketing capabilities and extensive game operation platform can provide access to the broad audience of Chinese gamers. Since its debut in 1987, the FINAL FANTASY franchise has attracted many devoted fans worldwide and, based on our experience and expertise in the China market, we are confident in the success of FINAL FANTASY XIV as well as other future collaborations with Square Enix. We believe our strategic partnership with Square Enix represents an alliance between leading game companies in Japan and China, and we look forward to broadening our business through this partnership."

Develop the game in China for low cost. Outsource localization and administration to a company that is familiar with doing that type of business within the country. Makes total sense.

Reading through their investor relations docs, they identify "weakness in the development team and project management" as the root cause for this games failure. When you are first working with offshored staff, this is an inevitability.

It would also explain why its taken such great lengths of time to make minor changes to the game code, as perhaps onshore staff has been having to learn the code.

[Tsukino]

Actually that was going to be Shanda Games. It sounds like you are the one who is misinformed.

http://ffxiv.zam.com/story.html?story=23284

Per the Shanda Press Release:

"Our in-house game development team is well-qualified to assist in the localization of FINAL FANTASY XIV to the China market, while our strong sales and marketing capabilities and extensive game operation platform can provide access to the broad audience of Chinese gamers. Since its debut in 1987, the FINAL FANTASY franchise has attracted many devoted fans worldwide and, based on our experience and expertise in the China market, we are confident in the success of FINAL FANTASY XIV as well as other future collaborations with Square Enix. We believe our strategic partnership with Square Enix represents an alliance between leading game companies in Japan and China, and we look forward to broadening our business through this partnership."

Develop the game in China for low cost. Outsource localization and administration to a company that is familiar with doing that type of business within the country. Makes total sense.

Reading through their investor relations docs, they identify "weakness in the development team and project management" as the root cause for this games failure. When you are first working with offshored staff, this is an inevitability.

It would also explain why its taken such great lengths of time to make minor changes to the game code, as perhaps onshore staff has been having to learn the code.

That's the company that would run the servers and help adapt the game to fit governmental regulations and such. The actual SE holdings are for publishing games still in Japanese (this happens in China more often than actual localization) and interfacing with that company and others for Chinese releases. They do not develop Final Fantasy games. They did not contribute writing, planning, art, or anything to FFXIV or any other game.

It's irrelevant to my point anyway though. There is no Chinese in the game and there never has been. It's a bunch of conspiracy theory BS that came from ONE blog post. You don't know either language and have no facts whatsoever that it has any Chinese in it except "someone said so on the Internet."

You also seem to be looking for excuses why the game is bad, and the answers are simpler than some covered-up outsourcing. The entire project was just mismanaged and rushed, and that's it.

[Rydin]

I particularly like the "staff in China" part. No doubt there was some BPO involvement in this title as illustrated from the use of Chinese in the game.

I think they actually ended up acquiring a Chinese networking middle-ware firm...