Off Topic Discussion Megathread

[Larirawiel]

I watched him back when I played WoW and started watching again when he began ARR.
It's pretty funny how his attitude has gone from '' this is going to be awful and a weirdo weeb game '' to '' it's the best RPG I've ever played ''.

True. But it is also somehow a fault of the SQEX's marketing, that the people thought this. The streamers showed the crowd how the game really is.


Cheers

[Caurcas]

Computer parts are expensive. Feels Bad Man.

[Kolsykol]

True. But it is also somehow a fault of the SQEX's marketing, that the people thought this. The streamers showed the crowd how the game really is.


Cheers

Not sure what you mean honestly.
Even so tho, I think the marketing is quite honest for what the game is.
Mostly I think people just make assumptions '' cuz Japan '' and because it's not Western.

People are kinda shallow about it tho, a lot of people will look at a game like Guilty Gear Rev 2, Skullgirls or Blazblue and think '' weeb game '' but then they'll look at Mortal Kombat as the '' real and mature hardcore fighting game ''.
Anyone who has played these games know how full of shiet that take would be and it seems to mostly be a Western mentality.
Somehow Smash gets more acceptance too.

It's the same with stories in games, I just can't sympathize with people who will write games like the Drakengard games and Nier Replicant and Automata off because of the character designs.
To me it's just kinda sad if someone needs the presentation to be like The Last of Us or something in order to take it seriously and very limiting to the media.
People are obviously entitled to like and dislike what they want but when they act like their personal opinions means something about the game and that there's nothing to it then I think they're kinda just being stupid.
Or like if someone can take the story in Mortal Kombat seriously regardless of the constant retcons every game and with the marketing 99% revolving around comedic levels of gore some of which was literally conceived through crayon drawings as the original concept.
But then they can't take FFXIV or Automata seriously, to me that's pretty ridiculous and sad.

I think a lot of people are just yelling '' weeb game '' because it's '' different '' and they're pretty intolerant and close-minded to things even just a little out of their comfort zone.

[Larirawiel]

Not sure what you mean honestly.
Even so tho, I think the marketing is quite honest for what the game is.
Mostly I think people just make assumptions '' cuz Japan '' and because it's not Western.

I mean, the SQEX's marketing department should notice this, that many people thought, that FF14 is a weeb game. In this case, they should have start some countermeasures against it. But they did nothing. Maybe they did not notice it or they did not care or they thought, that the game trailers are enough. But in all those cases it was a fault. I bet, Asmongold alone brought more new players to the game than SQEX's marketing department.


And the game is not very different. I came the first time in contact with the game in the ARR beta. And i did not like it because it was way too similar to WoW WotLK, which i also did not like. And i hated the long GCD. So i thought, that SQEX has created another WotLK clone (and there were maaaany WoW clones at the time) and i was not interested anymore.

I came back with Shadowbringers because the game reviews were very good.


Cheers

[Kolsykol]

I mean, the SQEX's marketing department should notice this, that many people thought, that FF14 is a weeb game. In this case, they should have start some countermeasures against it. But they did nothing. Maybe they did not notice it or they did not care or they thought, that the game trailers are enough. But in all those cases it was a fault. I bet, Asmongold alone brought more new players to the game than SQEX's marketing department.


And the game is not very different. I came the first time in contact with the game in the ARR beta. And i did not like it because it was way too similar to WoW WotLK, which i also did not like. And i hated the long GCD. So i thought, that SQEX has created another WotLK clone (and there were maaaany WoW clones at the time) and i was not interested anymore.

I came back with Shadowbringers because the game reviews were very good.


Cheers

Oh I see what you mean now.
Yeah I honestly dunno what they can do about it, I think big Streamers playing the game and loving it was the best advertisement they could've gotten in that regard.
Especially when big WoW Streamers with very negative opinions on it went in and tried it and ended up loving it.
There's quite a lot of people who only play military FPS games and think that anything fantasy is '' cringe '', FFXIV being Japanese and not a gritty European medieval simulator is an even further step.

Everyone I know irl is kinda like that honestly, I think most who play games and the average joe so to speak.
The showrunners for Game of Thrones get memed on a lot because they said that they diminished and cut a lot of the magic in the show because they wanted to appeal to '' football players and moms '', but they're not entirely wrong I think most ppl at least in the West are quite close-minded to fantasy.
If Game of Thrones had been more book accurate then in all honesty I think it wouldn't have become as big, a lot of people would've just tuned out before it truly got going.
And then when you add a foreign element to it too it only adds to that.

The GCD is actually something I see referenced a lot too and I honestly dunno what they could do about that either, it's a bit like the story '' it gets good later ''.
It's hard to prove that to people.

[Kolsykol]

I really wish BDO didn't have forced PvP, the game is a lot of fun but I don't like having to deal with people who have no-lifed it or used their credit card and are totally overpowered against you .
I'd actually really enjoy a singleplayer offline version of the game a lot.

Also something I saw recently.
Loool, someone got banned from PSN for a week for posting a pic from the model viewer of Baiken in Guilty Gear Strive.

It's so hypocritical and tiresome at the same time, it reminds me of the Google and Apple stores where literal pixels of cleavage gets tagged for censorship by their automated systems.
Not just in game ads either but also in ads for other products, I've seen stick figure-esque art get taken down because of it ( just those one color simplistic figures often used in ads ).
I remember there has was an onion ad that was taken down too because the system registered the onions as naked breasts rofl it's so stupid ( it's also solely targeted against womens bodies, never seen this happen the other way around you can have half-naked guys and it's just fine ).

On PSN you can post actual nudity from games like Cyberpunk and extreme levels of gore from MK11 and TLOU2.
But Baikens ingame model is too much?????????????
Dear lawd this stupidity fml, I hate it so much.

[Raoabolic]

Loool, someone got banned from PSN for a week for posting a pic from the model viewer of Baiken in Guilty Gear Strive.

It's so hypocritical and tiresome at the same time, it reminds me of the Google and Apple stores where literal pixels of cleavage gets tagged for censorship by their automated systems.
Not just in game ads either but also in ads for other products, I've seen stick figure-esque art get taken down because of it ( just those one color simplistic figures often used in ads ).
I remember there has was an onion ad that was taken down too because the system registered the onions as naked breasts rofl it's so stupid ( it's also solely targeted against womens bodies, never seen this happen the other way around you can have half-naked guys and it's just fine ).

On PSN you can post actual nudity from games like Cyberpunk and extreme levels of gore from MK11 and TLOU2.
But Baikens ingame model is too much?????????????

It also stinks when it happens to imported media as well. Something too risque or might be too offensive? Time for a localization! I agree that there are elements that are hard or downright impossible to translate from one region to another but it feels like 9 times out of 10 the term localization gets interchanged with translated when they are two different approaches to one task.

[Kolsykol]

It also stinks when it happens to imported media as well. Something too risque or might be too offensive? Time for a localization! I agree that there are elements that are hard or downright impossible to translate from one region to another but it feels like 9 times out of 10 the term localization gets interchanged with translated when they are two different approaches to one task.

I think that FFXIV is a fantastic example of how to do it right, I think that the localizers for FFXIV just work way closer with the dev team too than usual.
I mean Koji Fox even helps developing the lore it kinda helps having people who are that invested and not just a third party who are handling the work of people they don't even know and had no hand in creating.
They also don't change or erase content in the game either.

Whenever localizers change or erase content it's always extremely frustrating and bad imo, only time I can understand it is if we're talking about some really touchy stuff that enters questionable legal territory too like minors being depicted in certain ways.
But that's totally different than an adult character.
Whenever I hear '' appeal to a Western audience '' too I just dunno how they can say this when the responsive is always so overwhelmingly negative.
It feels like people who went to school for marketing and bring in all of these weird ideas from other industry and are still stuck in the '' family values '' era.
And it's also not their job to care about the quality or vision of the game, all they care about is making it sell as much as possible even if it means compromising the product ( which I think more often than not results in less sales not more ).

It leads to so much dumb crap too in other industries like movies where they literally have swear quotas and movie directors are forced by the studio to censor their movies to lower the rating.
It's just really frustrating how a lot of media gets compromised because of idiots who shouldn't have any creative say whatsoever.

I think there's so many amazing games that could become the new big thing but are just never allowed to.
I am not a big Mortal Kombat fan, but like I can't imagine a new Mortal Kombat happening today especially not under a big publisher.

But yeah I dunno, I know a lot of people don't care but I just kinda find it sad in a way.
Because people are essentially putting up with worse products, if people were more unified about it then the market would have to adapt.
Instead people just shrug it off there's just something depressing about that to me like we could have a better movie if people just raised their voices a bit.
Peoples indifference is kinda rotting the industries and making it worse.

Edit: Damn Koji has been with them for 20 years it has been such a long time and he has worked on other FF games too.
Dude is awesome.

[Shibi]

...Whenever localizers change or erase content it's always extremely frustrating and bad imo, only time I can understand it is if we're talking about some really touchy stuff that enters questionable legal territory too like minors being depicted in certain ways.
But that's totally different than an adult character.
Whenever I hear '' appeal to a Western audience '' too I just dunno how they can say this when the responsive is always so overwhelmingly negative.
It feels like people who went to school for marketing and bring in all of these weird ideas from other industry and are still stuck in the '' family values '' era.....

SE are not innocent in this. Neutering, and eventual kill off of that major Heavensward Character was completely a mess-up of not wanting to offend the "English speaking audience".

Koji is no longer working directly on FFXIV and has been sent over to work on FFXVI instead.

Yeah, all of Shadowbringers and Endwalker I do believe they said.

[Kolsykol]

SE are not innocent in this. Neutering, and eventual kill off of that major Heavensward Character was completely a mess-up of not wanting to offend the "English speaking audience".

If you're talking about the character I think you're talking about I dunno?
The reaction to his death I've seen has been overall positive, not because people disliked the character tho.
Imo I think the character is severely overrated and turned into a meme tho.

I don't really trust SE as a publisher I just trust the devs for FFXIV.
SE as a publisher is a typical greedy AAA publisher who have strange ideas.

I am not entirely sure the exact and precise details and context of the whole Tifa situation for example, and I do think people per usual went completely overboard when they acted like she was '' nerfed ''...
However when I heard them refer to an '' ethics department '' in relation to a female characters breasts it did kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I do think that there was people on both ends who went too far per usual, people who said she had been '' nerfed '' and then also people who still seem'd to believe that but tried to minimize it and go the whole '' who cares you *insert insults here* '' route.

Which I mean... I think it'd be perfectly valid to find the notion of a womans chest size or attire being turned into an '' ethical issue '' distasteful and offensive, that's like some weird and backwards morality police bullshit.
It's really strange to see so many people who still believed it was about that and still choose to defend it.

Ultimately I think it was more about the ratings and as opposed to what some people believe Japanese ratings are actually a lot stricter than in the West.
But I don't really like the idea of an '' ethics department '' micromanaging content like that and scouring through content in games and I think being against that is perfectly justified.
Only time I can understand it is if there's some legal issue or what I mentioned in the post before.

Koji is no longer working directly on FFXIV and has been sent over to work on FFXVI instead. This is his replacement, who participated in one of the recent lore Q&A sessions:

https://twitter.com/fabulafatua

Yeah but Koji was around for most of the time he has definitely had a pretty huge hand in the game compared to other localizers and translators.
I didn't even know this until recently but he co-wrote a lot of the songs too which is pretty cool, it's very clear that he cares deeply about FFXIV.
I dunno who Kate is but I imagine she has probably been mentored by Koji too.