Final Fantasy

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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby south carmain » Fri Jul 20, 2012 10:50 am

What baffles me is why they decided to give their weakest game 2 sequels, i enjoyed ff13-2 but playing it i could feel the creators had no ambition, also if ff13-3 flops (which is a possibility considering only a 6th of ff13's consumers were interested enough to buy ff13-2 and i can see that number going down for reasons stating above, i personally will get it on sale a year after its release) square will probably shit bricks and start acting irrationally making final fantasy even more distant from its roots that made it so great
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Bluecast » Fri Jul 20, 2012 11:19 am

Bluecast wrote:While back there was a rumor FF VS XIII was just turned into FFXV for next gen systems
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Tuffty » Fri Jul 20, 2012 11:28 am

Segata Sanshiro Jr. wrote:Its a comedy of errors. FF13-2 was better then 13, but it was also worse. Large HD worlds are completely possible, Blue Dragon, Assassin's Creed, Tales of Xillia, theres countless examples of studios making these huge HD worlds with less money (and in the case of Xenoblade weaker heardware) Then theres the circus that is their upper management. Publicly criticizing and sabotaging each other.

We can talk about fans, expectations and money but theres no more excuses. Any flack they get is pretty well deserved now.


I get what you're saying but games like AC reuse a lot of assets and that's not SE's style, where they just have to make each building or environmental asset distinct from the other. It's not the best or cheapest way to go about it, but that's just the way it is with FF which has a history of setting the bar, technically at least, with a new FF game on a new generation of consoles. Was true with VII and X.

I think that all of the hype and excitement around Versus XIII made it sound like too much to ask for. The airship mechanic wouldn’t translate well to open world with real time battles, it was fine on the previous FFs when it was effectively an avatar navigating a map with random battles. You would have to make the open world big enough to require airship travel, this would then impact on the “on foot” gameplay as distances between locations become utterly massive (unless we suddenly decide to squish the game into a more regionalised play area like GTA, Elder Scrolls – thereby negating the usual FF experience of exploring a world and probably give other FF fans a new thing to bitch about).

You COULD restrict all inter town travel to the avatar/map style but then you lose your true open world and would have to resort to turn based battling. Also the mechanic was actually toyed with for Versus XIII but canned. There is probably a reason for this.

Essentially you want a big fat mishmash of ideas, that may not technically work together and may not actually be a good game in itself. Its better to wish for something more focused; like SE to do a retro spin off series where it is 3D sprites walking around a 2D set of renders, with an avatar map and all your desires. Effectively the PSone era FF’s as the structural backbone with no aspirations to translate this into 3D.

I feel sorry for the people working on it. 6 years and really very little to show for it. You get the sense that XIII was a misstep, XIII-2 seems to be proof of that. You can only sense that harsh lessons were learnt and hope that XV (which is likely to be in development now for next gen consoles using the new game engine) will benefit from it.
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Bluecast » Fri Jul 20, 2012 11:35 am

People are freaking out over a Rumor. Also as I keep saying another rumor is that it is just now FFXV. So if that one is true someone didn't hear that one misunderstood and assumed cancelled. Christ people think the world is ending because of a rumor. When the last one no one gave a shit. Do people just like to take the negative and run with it?
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby mue 26 » Fri Jul 20, 2012 12:21 pm

I'm not taking this rumour too seriously, and I'm not really sure why the whole internet is. It's just another unsubstantiated rumour. I would think it's a lot more likely that they might just rename Versus to FF15. But to just throw 6 years of work down the drain seems a little unlikely. I hope I'm right...
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby south carmain » Fri Jul 20, 2012 12:30 pm

Tuffty wrote:I think that all of the hype and excitement around Versus XIII made it sound like too much to ask for. The airship mechanic wouldn’t translate well to open world with real time battles

I don't understand how getting into an airship and flying around would be affected by monsters roaming below? the monsters will just be randomly spawned in the area around you anyway, once you get to a certain hight they will stop spawning and you will see only the major things below while the smaller details are rendered only when you come closer, I think everything they showed and announced is more than possible, but requires a lot of work and testing, after all the possibilities in the video game industry nowadays for someone creative and talented are near limitless
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby AnimeGamer183 » Fri Jul 20, 2012 3:41 pm

kotaku said versus xiii is cancelled huh? I imagine the kotaku staff sitting around a round table having their weekly meeting with no new material thats worth a crap, as they go around asking each employee if they have anything. One person speaks up and says Versus XIII was mentioned in a weird article last week, the circus leader then asks to read the article, does so pauses then troll faces, and says "I've got it we're going to cancel versus xiii" he says, and says some random employee that he thinks will do a good job has to write it. Then the internet explodes the next day.
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Segata Sanshiro Jr. » Fri Jul 20, 2012 5:25 pm

Tuffty wrote:I get what you're saying but games like AC reuse a lot of assets and that's not SE's style, where they just have to make each building or environmental asset distinct from the other. It's not the best or cheapest way to go about it, but that's just the way it is with FF which has a history of setting the bar, technically at least, with a new FF game on a new generation of consoles. Was true with VII and X.

I think that all of the hype and excitement around Versus XIII made it sound like too much to ask for. The airship mechanic wouldn’t translate well to open world with real time battles, it was fine on the previous FFs when it was effectively an avatar navigating a map with random battles. You would have to make the open world big enough to require airship travel, this would then impact on the “on foot” gameplay as distances between locations become utterly massive (unless we suddenly decide to squish the game into a more regionalised play area like GTA, Elder Scrolls – thereby negating the usual FF experience of exploring a world and probably give other FF fans a new thing to bitch about).

You COULD restrict all inter town travel to the avatar/map style but then you lose your true open world and would have to resort to turn based battling. Also the mechanic was actually toyed with for Versus XIII but canned. There is probably a reason for this.

Essentially you want a big fat mishmash of ideas, that may not technically work together and may not actually be a good game in itself. Its better to wish for something more focused; like SE to do a retro spin off series where it is 3D sprites walking around a 2D set of renders, with an avatar map and all your desires. Effectively the PSone era FF’s as the structural backbone with no aspirations to translate this into 3D.

I feel sorry for the people working on it. 6 years and really very little to show for it. You get the sense that XIII was a misstep, XIII-2 seems to be proof of that. You can only sense that harsh lessons were learnt and hope that XV (which is likely to be in development now for next gen consoles using the new game engine) will benefit from it.


First off thats completely untrue, S-E re-uses assets with the best of em, going so afar as to reuse textures and even music across multiple games ie "Bahamut!" appears in FF 7 and FF8 as an action theme. Heck FF7 started off as an N64 remake of FF6, and Cait sith's model was originally going to be used for one of the summons. Heck they went so far as to write 13-2 in a way where it was the same on both consoles(which also means taking into account the weaknesses of both consoles). S-E reuses assets, they have for 25 years and they always will because thats how you make games.

Actually Dragon Quest 8 solved that issue. A bunch of games have big sprawling world maps that have useful air travel, I mean come on man you played Tales of Vesperia, you know damn well good open worlds and air travel can be done together and if making something action based is too hard, don't do it. Make it so that enemies spawn in the sky and if you run into them the player warps to the bow of the ship and you fight them, then when they're dead you warp back to the bridge or something, or maybe put the bridge near the fight area in any case in can be done.

In any case theres an easy answer to any questions about large RPG worlds. Xenoblade.

and yea it might just be a rumor, or it might be true, dumber things have happened (Megaman legends 3)
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Bluecast » Fri Jul 20, 2012 5:32 pm

yeah XB is massive and pretty seamless. No load screens and such.
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Tuffty » Fri Jul 20, 2012 6:54 pm

Segata Sanshiro Jr. wrote:In any case theres an easy answer to any questions about large RPG worlds. Xenoblade.


Which was achievable to do because it was on the Wii and thus, no HD assets, making it cheaper to develop. Again, I can't make myself any clearer than I have done here in the past and that I am already, I'm not knocking Xenoblade, far from it. But that is fact. And I'll hazard a guess at saying that if you were to make Xenoblade, for all the scale that it has, using HD assets, then it would take way too much time and money to make. And if you want to prove me wrong, then name me a JRPG on the 360/PS3 that is like that. I ain't talking about world maps either. I mean huge, massive scale environments you can go between one and the other like in Xenoblade. Not saying it's impossible, just pretty damn difficult to do on the 360/PS3.

I've been trying to articulate for 10 mins how I can explain this. But I realised there's no point in it. All I'm saying is, DQ8 is a great example, but that was then. This is now. The cost of making an RPG like that for the 360/PS3 would cost a lot of time and money, and we all know SE likes to raise the bar and piss money when it comes to how FF games look. It took them 4 years to get FFXIII out for Christs sake, what would make you think they could do any better for a game with the ambition of Versus XIII? And people still think a VII remake is coming...

I do think there is mis-management aplenty. Just thinking of the resources spent on Versus XIII could have been better spent on something like a sequel to TWEWY. Could have had a bitching 3DS or WiiU title. But then SE were the ones to take the risk in the first place and it didn't sell well, so maybe it's the fault of the gaming masses for not supporting a new and original IP from SE after they bitch and moan about FF/JRPG's being 'stagnant' for so long.
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Segata Sanshiro Jr. » Fri Jul 20, 2012 7:36 pm

Ok lemme break it down.

First Xenoblade WAS developed in an HD environment, thats what happens games are developed with incredibly high poly models which are compressed heavily and thus lose quality. Even running Max Payne 3 on pc with the same filters and forced to the same speed it would look better because its a 40GB file that has completely uncompressed models. to make things trun and have them fit on disc, stuff gets compressed. So when you run Xenoblade on Dolphin it looks AMAZINg at HD resolutions because it re-renders the models already there and they don't lose any quality. You also don''t need a supercomputer to do it. Glossing over all of that, The Witcher 2 exists.

Now when it comes to money,thats no excuse, DQ8 came out what 7 years ago, and re-rendering it and plopping it at a resolution higher then 640x480 it looks better then some new games and thats sad. The costs of doing the exact same thing haven't gotten greater they've gone down. Flat out, studios are wasting money doing less with more. FF13 didn't take years because it was hard to make, ff12 didn't take years because it was hard to make. There are DOCUMENTED and PUBLIC issues OUTSIDE of development.

Which brings me to Versus 13, you know how great it looks? Well a small centralized team made all that, while being pulled to work on third birthday, and being pulled to work on 13-2, and being pulled to work on type-o and being pulled to work on 13, and being pulled to work on birth by sleep, and being pulled to work on tech demos and losing more and more members every year. It still looked great despite all of this because even though making games is hard its not as hard as they keep saying. I bitch up a storm about the stories, but there have been 4 HD Tales games. If it takes 8 years to make a game, its because you're doing something wrong. Its not money, its not difficulty, its because they're not doing a good job.

As for "raising the bar" well

When FF1 looked like this: http://imgur.com/JkmN3
Phantasy Star Looked like this: http://imgur.com/b7pn7

Every area was more populated with more scripts, the sprites were bigger the game did more colors and had things like shading and form that was not completely modular.

Look at Wild Arms which came out a few months before FF7, was made by a waaay smaller studio and had less development time: http://imgur.com/kwaVC

in the early 90s Tengai Makyou had cutscenes that look like this: http://imgur.com/sdagG

I love Final Fantasy, they've never been a series of invention but rather popularization.

Game development is a long costly process, but AAA development is hopelessly fucked in terms of budgeting.
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby south carmain » Fri Jul 20, 2012 8:05 pm

btw segata what exactly causes developers to spend so much time developing a game and use so much budget? the first time I started experiencing with 3d design, animation, coding etc it struck me that it really isn't as complicated as they make believe, even to create games by todays standards, it's more of a matter of patience and understanding.

is it the bureaucracy and testing, debugging etc that adds so much time and budget to it, due to the constant change of team members you mentioned does this cause them to have a lack of understanding towards each others work causing issues such as gameplay bugs and longer times to adapt?
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Bluecast » Fri Jul 20, 2012 8:19 pm

Ys had great cutscenes and VA before FF. So did Grandia. Also they are making DQX witch is an MMO for Wii & WiiU.
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby Segata Sanshiro Jr. » Fri Jul 20, 2012 8:21 pm

south carmain wrote:btw segata what exactly causes developers to spend so much time developing a game and use so much budget? the first time I started experiencing with 3d design, animation, coding etc it struck me that it really isn't as complicated as they make believe, even to create games by todays standards, it's more of a matter of patience and understanding.

is it the bureaucracy and testing, debugging etc that adds so much time and budget to it, due to the constant change of team members you mentioned does this cause them to have a lack of understanding towards each others work causing issues such as gameplay bugs and longer times to adapt?


Everything is simple compared to programming. When creating a texture if you want to change a color you change a color, but you can add one line of code to a simple system and change how everything works. So yea debugging and programming makes things take a lot longer but many studios try to skip a step. They'll just start making assets, creating music, writing a story rigging up some animation, without having a prototype that works or even knowing what kind of game they're really making. I've seen some really pie in the sky type design docs, and when someone says "I can take two stick figures throw it into Visual basic and prove thats a stupid idea" they get ignored. so then a few million dollars later after an HD mockup has been made it urns out it sucks and everything has to be redone and the game has to be redesigned and the story has to change all over the course of a week so its crunch time and people are going home once a week.

another is that most large studios don't value peoples time the way they should. Plus most suits just want something done even if its low priority. Its also really hard to get what you need, theres also people in positions that they shouldn't have. I once worked with a person whose job was to send emails, she'd come in and just sit down and play angry birds on her phone, or pop her head in the door and say "heeeey guys" she never actually did anything. If i had a problem with somthing I'd just walk the 90-100 feet to ask about fixing it, but she insisted I send her an email so she could send an email and this was "the system" thats actually how the company was run. This overpaid person (she got paid more then my whole team combined) sat around and made communicating with other departments more difficult
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Re: Final Fantasy

Postby south carmain » Fri Jul 20, 2012 8:40 pm

interesting, it seems the industry has management issues and is incapable of putting people who understand it fully in management roles, but then again this is the problem in a lot of jobs nowadays, talent gets wasted due to no one able (or willing) to recognise it and would rather give it to people they know or fuckbuddies well in your case anyway (not your job but that women)
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