I would love for them to do like an Octopath style FF mainline game but they probably wouldn't do that. Hell I'd even settle for like an HD low poly game sort of like the style (but better art direction than) FFXV in all honesty.
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Why Can't Square Develop a Mainline Final Fantasy Without Issues?
- Thread starter SOLDIER
- Start date
Management was bad at Square till pretty recently.
I think FFXV is the last of the games that has suffered from that, however.
I am confident that what comes next will have a better overall production.
I am sincerely confident on the dev teams and what they will show us next.
I think FFXV is the last of the games that has suffered from that, however.
I am confident that what comes next will have a better overall production.
I am sincerely confident on the dev teams and what they will show us next.
How fast? As in "almost 6 years after being announced". That is certainly not fast in my book...
It was Wada and the spectacularly ill-thought out Crystal Tools/Luminous engine development.
Wada became the CEO of Square Enix with absolutely no background in software development. He wasn't a long-term employee. Rather, he worked in other industries and in government before joining Square and immediately becoming CEO of Square Enix after the merger. He gutted the entire classic Square development culture and reorganized the company even prior to merger.
So, the top management of Square Enix were inexperienced in the realities of software development. They then hit on the idea of simultaneously creating Crystal Tools alongside the upcoming Final Fantasy games, which was a resounding failure that had a disastrous effect on the development of FFXIII, FFXIV, and FFXV. Delays and problems with the development of Crystal Tools held up the development of all of the games that were supposed to use it. Likewise, the engine wasn't well suited to the games that were being made, especially an MMO like FFXIV. The Luminous Engine ended up being almost as big of a managerial failure.
It is clear that the problems behind FFXII onwards are the result of fundamental company cultural and organizational flaws that persisted throughout Wada's tenure as CEO.
Wada became the CEO of Square Enix with absolutely no background in software development. He wasn't a long-term employee. Rather, he worked in other industries and in government before joining Square and immediately becoming CEO of Square Enix after the merger. He gutted the entire classic Square development culture and reorganized the company even prior to merger.
So, the top management of Square Enix were inexperienced in the realities of software development. They then hit on the idea of simultaneously creating Crystal Tools alongside the upcoming Final Fantasy games, which was a resounding failure that had a disastrous effect on the development of FFXIII, FFXIV, and FFXV. Delays and problems with the development of Crystal Tools held up the development of all of the games that were supposed to use it. Likewise, the engine wasn't well suited to the games that were being made, especially an MMO like FFXIV. The Luminous Engine ended up being almost as big of a managerial failure.
It is clear that the problems behind FFXII onwards are the result of fundamental company cultural and organizational flaws that persisted throughout Wada's tenure as CEO.
Is this the guy who puts zippers on everythingbecause of this guy
OP
OP
At the risk of getting avatar quoted, I still stand by the decision to reveal the FFVII Remake when they did. The internet was a shitshow of cynicism for years, especially the previous forum, where people kept repeatedly stating that the game would never be remade and you were all idiots for stating otherwise.
Now it's cynical on the grounds of when it'll release, but I'll still take the knowledge that it's a project that exists over endlessly arguing over something hypothetical.
I think transitioning to modern development practices definitely made things really difficult for Square-Enix, but Final Fantasy has some specific problems insofar as each new entry requires creating an entirely new cast, setting, mythology, and story (along with all of the changes in art and music direction that go along with that). FF is much less able to iterate from one entry to the next than most game series can.
But also, there does seem to be a sort of creative malaise (and some level of risk aversion) when it comes to Final Fantasy for the last decade or so, yeah. It actually reminds me a lot of the 007 films: most Bond films in the modern era can pretty easily be interpreted as reactions to how audiences received the prior film (and this need to react often takes precedence *over* simple author-driven creative direction). Final Fantasy feels the same way (which is why FF13 feels like a backlash against/repudiation of FF12 and FF15 feels like a backlash against/repudiation of FF13).
The series still mostly adheres to its reputation for polish and beauty, but it hasn't been the place to find industry-leading production values for a while now, and that's a bummer.
But also, there does seem to be a sort of creative malaise (and some level of risk aversion) when it comes to Final Fantasy for the last decade or so, yeah. It actually reminds me a lot of the 007 films: most Bond films in the modern era can pretty easily be interpreted as reactions to how audiences received the prior film (and this need to react often takes precedence *over* simple author-driven creative direction). Final Fantasy feels the same way (which is why FF13 feels like a backlash against/repudiation of FF12 and FF15 feels like a backlash against/repudiation of FF13).
The series still mostly adheres to its reputation for polish and beauty, but it hasn't been the place to find industry-leading production values for a while now, and that's a bummer.
You are overvaluating Square studios and minimizing Nintendo studios, specially the Zelda Team.
Also Xenoblade only exists because Takahashi's vision, following his own words, isn't able to reach so far, so he started to experimenting things. Being a first-party from a company like Nintendo which over-controls their studios, but also give freedom for them to try new things helps a lot.
I still think that Final Fantasy XVI can be huge, not only because it's a new Final Fantasy, but if they pick the criticize by their hearts and stop with the bullshit, like creating engines everyday and use Unreal 4 and focus the core-game on the gameplay instead of japanese chichés, dumb existentialism and cutscenes which were cool three generations ago, but doesn't make any sense these days.
Something I wanted to see in future FFs but it will never happen...
+ Sakaguchi producing/directing a new FF.
+ Horii producing/directing a new FF.
I really wish to cut the bullshit I don't know how to tell a story Tabata.
+ Sakaguchi producing/directing a new FF.
+ Horii producing/directing a new FF.
I really wish to cut the bullshit I don't know how to tell a story Tabata.
Every AAA game experiences development problems. As has been pointed out by other posters, they reinvent the wheel with every entry into the franchise, which just exacerbates the already significant challenge of creating a AAA game. FF XV is far from the only AAA game to experience multi-year development hell.
This.
What makes FF unique and good? Ever since 9 the series hasn't followed any traditional structure. Each iteration is unique from the last. To me that is what makes FF special. Where you have games like Dragon Quest offering a familiar, traditional experience each time, you have FF trying new things. Sometimes it works (FF12, FFXV) sometimes it doesn't (FFXIII). I wouldn't have it another way tbh. Personally I don't want them cranking out games similar to 7-9 every time. Maybe a throwback iteration or spinoff (WoFF). If they did we wouldn't get wonderful games like XII, which there still hasn't really been anything like from any developer.
We will never find out the truth, but I'd bet that it was Sony that pushed that announcement out the door way early. If there was no exclusivity deal I doubt Square would have even mentioned it.
OP
OP
Why do people keep ignoring Sakaguchi's duds?
The guy has released lots of great stuff, but his recent output hasn't exactly screamed "Square has to rehire him he'll fix everything!"
It was announced at E3 2013 and development didn't start until a bit before then.
You also have to take into account that the Luminous Engine (the FFXV engine) was hard to use and they ended up having to scrap all of their work and restart. In October 2014, they announced they were restarting the work on the game in Unreal Engine 4.
When you consider that, the game (as you know it now) has been in development for 4 years.
Even FFXIII is a FF imo... a bad FF? Yeap but it is a unique FF.
FFXV didn't feel like a FF anymore.
The last two games I played from him is way better than FFXV.
All of which went through countless iterations and were only shown off near completion. And even then with games like BOTW there were still delays.
The only real fault I'd give Square would be announcing games too early, thus exposing their internal development process to everyone as it happens. The majority of the industry keeps shit on lockdown as projects get canceled, shelved, scrapped and rebooted.
Their stuff is super ambitious and I'm glad they're still around. FFXV is a fucking WEIRD game. For all its faults (and there are many), the game tried some really out-there decisions and commits to some wild shit. I can get plenty of polished-to-a-dull-sheen "perfect" experiences from other publishers in the industry but every once in a while I want some wild shit with a high budget and Square's games tend to deliver.
I mean yeah XIII is not a good game.
What is FF now is what I'm asking. It hasn't really had a crystallized identity in almost 20 years.
XVI will likely be completely different from XV.
KH3 switched to UE4 part way through development. FF7:R was originally CyberConnect 2 who used UE4 for all their games. I don't know how much SE internal swallowed of the project though.
They should have moved to UE4 sooner. Next gen they need to stop this develop an engine from scratch bullshit. They obviously have proven twice that they can't
OP
OP
Also, and I'm no expert on this at all, I would imagine having to work with Disney and their numerous licenses adds significantly to the development times of these games.
You can absolutely bet that if the KH games weren't of the highest quality in all fronts that Disney would yank that license away real fast. It's been proven several times already.
KH3 was originally developed with Luminous (the FFXV engine) but it was hard to use so they scrapped it in October 2014 and moved to UE4.
I get the impression that Square Enix is a company that is primarily concerned with merchandising. It just so happens that a vast pool of it's key talent happen to be auteurs that are pretty decent game designers all things considered, in spite of their overt ambitions. They will reboot the development of their titles how many times they feel is necessary for their creative talent to meet their hopelessly massive ambition, because the titles they make serve as the backbone of their marketing apparatus for the better half of an entire decade. A new entry in a Final Fantasy game may as well be considered a new major IP, but they stick with the moniker simply because of branding.
Just compare how they treated Eidos and Project W, with how they'll let Nomura drag his feet for years on FFXV and KH3. One was kneecapped out of the gate by company investors despite Eidos being a proven developer, while they'll happily let development drag on for their key titles just because their golden goose is expectant to bring in the revenue.
Just compare how they treated Eidos and Project W, with how they'll let Nomura drag his feet for years on FFXV and KH3. One was kneecapped out of the gate by company investors despite Eidos being a proven developer, while they'll happily let development drag on for their key titles just because their golden goose is expectant to bring in the revenue.
OP
OP
It's honestly sheer madness that they haven't had any of their Western studios work on any of their Japanese projects.
You'd think they would have handed Parasite Eve or Bushido Blade to one of these teams, or at least a mid-budget FF spin-off just to see how it would turn out.
But FF 1 to 10 actually built upon each other. They always introduced new mechanics in combat and overall, but it was always turn based, you always used potions the same way, etc. Yes, the job system and other things were radical, but most changes are in the settings and the worldbuilding.
That's the biggest part why every entry felt different.
It wasn't until XII where they went overboard with their ambition and failed to deliver on their basic premise each game one way or the other.
I don't know whether it was because of Sakaguchi, but the old games felt like there was a vision behind them, how the world should look, and their inhabitants, and how the story plays out in those worlds. They were all super unique but on the mark every single time. XII still was up there in that regard but after that? So bad...
And he's the guy that is about to put out a huge JRPG with top of the line visuals in 5.5 years of development time that included an engine change part way through. People are so ignorant for trying to put all the blame on the directors when it's the higher ups at SE causing the problems.
It's not that easy to continually produce huge AAA titles that push the envelope for your company, if not your industry.
If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times. The XIII Era and whatever it was called (Nova Crystallis? ) was a mess capped off with one of the messier game development stories to date. Whatever you think of the games mentioned in OP (I love all of them), it's behind them now.
This hypothesis that it is endemic to Square will hold more weight for me if XVI also underdelivers. Whatever your definition of that is.
This hypothesis that it is endemic to Square will hold more weight for me if XVI also underdelivers. Whatever your definition of that is.
Moms are tough.
Really, it's just bad management. You have ambition that far exceeds scale and ability, rather than giving developers reasonable goals and development schedules.
An anecdote I heard once from Sakaguchi for the earlier games is they prioritized a "gaming bible" of story, lore, maps, quests, and mechanics prior to ever actually "developing" the main game. As a result, everyone started the project on the same page, with the story and game end-goals clearly in sight, and they could reference that development bible if they had any questions or strayed too far off the path. It kept development tight, teams unified, and production waste to a minimum.
I think they've long-since stopped doing that. I read the postmortem for FFXIII and it was insane. They took their best artists, put them in separate rooms, and they came up with art and assets independently of one another. There was almost no communication between the development teams, so when it came time to "make" the game, they just cobbled the elements together through a series of jump cuts. You want to know why characters in FFXIII are always "falling" and then the screen fades to black and they wake up somewhere else? You want to know why they literally teleport into random new locations? You want to know why the story meanders and cuts back and forth to different characters without reason? It's because the world wasn't seamlessly integrated and never planned to be organically traveled through. They're random levels and assets that the story randomly sends you to so those assets don't go to waste. And that was their approach for combat, character, and features as well. Design over function.
That's just ONE game, but it's an example of how poorly they planned things out compared to those earlier games. It's also the same problem in FFXV, that "lack of proper planning". They have years of it, but none of it built towards anything. There was no build-up and thus major events lack meaning or significance. There's no proper foreshadowing, pacing, or denouement.
That's an issue in these games regardless of game engine, new mechanics, and new story.
I thought I was falling out of love with JRPGs around the time Square started to falter, but on looking outside the Final Fantasy bubble I discovered that's not the case. Persona, Xenoblade, Shadow Hearts, Lost Odyssey, Dragon Quest, Ys, and many alternatives existed that I've now fallen in love with, and Final Fantasy isn't really the standard bearer for me for JRPGs any more. The games are still good, but not historic and not usually "great".
And it really all comes down to poor management.
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Something has apparently been up with Square's production management ever since it moved on from PS2-level production values. Most other Japanese developers seem to have finally cleared that hill, seemingly not Square yet. Their smaller-scale projects like portable games or mobile games or spin-offs seem okay, but not their flagship projects.
I'm not big on Dragon Quest but isn't there a specific team of people or at least a specific director who has handled all of those for 30 years? And from what I can tell, even DQXI doesn't look like it had a gigantic development budget compared to something like FFXV or GTAV or Red Dead II. The main DQ games to me all look like they were somewhat "spartan" games for their time in terms of production value, and that seems to be one of that franchise's strengths.
In any case, I'm interested in where Square goes from here with FF, because XV looks like the end of this whole "Fabula Nova Crystalis" business Square has had to carry for the last 12 years, along with the Crystal Tools. Mainline FF is working on a clean slate now. Who knows, maybe they might just break down and develop FFXVI on Unreal 4 like KHIII and DQXI.
I'm not big on Dragon Quest but isn't there a specific team of people or at least a specific director who has handled all of those for 30 years? And from what I can tell, even DQXI doesn't look like it had a gigantic development budget compared to something like FFXV or GTAV or Red Dead II. The main DQ games to me all look like they were somewhat "spartan" games for their time in terms of production value, and that seems to be one of that franchise's strengths.
In any case, I'm interested in where Square goes from here with FF, because XV looks like the end of this whole "Fabula Nova Crystalis" business Square has had to carry for the last 12 years, along with the Crystal Tools. Mainline FF is working on a clean slate now. Who knows, maybe they might just break down and develop FFXVI on Unreal 4 like KHIII and DQXI.
Pretty much, All of those companies have had big delays and issues even if the games came out good, it's not like they were without problems. I think if Square didn't announce games as early as they did, it would end up being better in the long run.
I can't think of a single game without issues except for Tetris...
There are so many reasons Square has trouble, though. Politics. Changing leads mid-way through a project. Giving an art designer creative control over some of their games. Rolling a new engine after every single game. Hiring everyone who draws art they like instead of contracting them so they end up with a billion artists and nothing to use the art on. Insisting that their own art isn't "japanese enough" when the western studio they hire to make a new FF sends them their own reference art as a test to see if they recognize it. Insisting that same studio fax the game's entire codebase to them in binary. Making games to fit the concept art they have rather than starting with a great story and then commissioning art to support that story. Creating new systems entirely for every single game.
but most importantly,
Square just shot themselves in the foot.
I don't know how much the rest of you know about Japanese culture (I'm an expert), but honor and shame are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in America where you can become successful by being an asshole. If you screw someone over in Japan, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.
What this means is the japanese public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase FFXIII for either system, nor will they purchase any of Square's games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Square has alienated an entire market with this move.
Square, publicly apologize and cancel FFXIII for 360 or you can kiss your business goodbye.
There are so many reasons Square has trouble, though. Politics. Changing leads mid-way through a project. Giving an art designer creative control over some of their games. Rolling a new engine after every single game. Hiring everyone who draws art they like instead of contracting them so they end up with a billion artists and nothing to use the art on. Insisting that their own art isn't "japanese enough" when the western studio they hire to make a new FF sends them their own reference art as a test to see if they recognize it. Insisting that same studio fax the game's entire codebase to them in binary. Making games to fit the concept art they have rather than starting with a great story and then commissioning art to support that story. Creating new systems entirely for every single game.
but most importantly,
Square just shot themselves in the foot.
I don't know how much the rest of you know about Japanese culture (I'm an expert), but honor and shame are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in America where you can become successful by being an asshole. If you screw someone over in Japan, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.
What this means is the japanese public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase FFXIII for either system, nor will they purchase any of Square's games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Square has alienated an entire market with this move.
Square, publicly apologize and cancel FFXIII for 360 or you can kiss your business goodbye.
like how a monster at the end of a horror movie clings to life and musters a final scare before getting killed off i think that's what FFXV was in regard to SE's issues in the 2000s. just general mismanagement along with problems that plagued most japanese devs in the HD era
i think they're past most of those problems in regard to mainline FF (remains to be seen what FF7R will amount to). they may very well fuck up FFXVI and beyond but the page has turned
i think they're past most of those problems in regard to mainline FF (remains to be seen what FF7R will amount to). they may very well fuck up FFXVI and beyond but the page has turned
Let's all take one giant step back and look at the game that we did not get:
I love the little fighter face cam in the HP gauges. Alternatively, if you look up that first trailer, it is pretty akin to what we did get in the final product.
Square really threw money at this franchise after X and wanted to push the limits of aesthetic. The games are beautiful but no longer carry the weight that they used to. Truthfully, I believe around this time in development that Square took a look at all of the open world games coming out and realized that this didn't "feel impressive enough," and squandered the game by shifting people around.
Looking back at all of the good Final Fantasy titles, it's very easy to see that they were cohesive titles pretty much churned out by the same guys.
I have a hunch that Kingdom Hearts III will suffer this same lack of cohesion as well.
I love the little fighter face cam in the HP gauges. Alternatively, if you look up that first trailer, it is pretty akin to what we did get in the final product.
Square really threw money at this franchise after X and wanted to push the limits of aesthetic. The games are beautiful but no longer carry the weight that they used to. Truthfully, I believe around this time in development that Square took a look at all of the open world games coming out and realized that this didn't "feel impressive enough," and squandered the game by shifting people around.
Looking back at all of the good Final Fantasy titles, it's very easy to see that they were cohesive titles pretty much churned out by the same guys.
I have a hunch that Kingdom Hearts III will suffer this same lack of cohesion as well.
Trying to reinvent the wheel when they don't need to
Just make octopath traveler type JRPG fully 3D and it'll sell well, take less time to develop and they won't have to spend years fucking around with a bunch of broken action systems
Just make octopath traveler type JRPG fully 3D and it'll sell well, take less time to develop and they won't have to spend years fucking around with a bunch of broken action systems
For me it's because they no longer want to make a more traditional Final Fantasy. I'd probably say at a push that FF X is the last traditional FF, if not IX.
By stepping away from such an established formula, they've made life incredibly difficult for themselves.
By stepping away from such an established formula, they've made life incredibly difficult for themselves.
