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Considering that it cost a bajillion dollars to get the hardware going for it, I never actually played it 
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Sep 10, 2013 23:11
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Plus it was only good, not great. Secret of Mana had more depth to it, and that's kinda sad.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:15
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Azure_Horizon posted:I think the problem was that it didn't sell well enough in comparison to its production costs. Neither did FFXII, for that matter. I guess that's where XV's planned sequels come in  Terper posted:XV doesn't seem to be using the Command system from Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance so I'm not fully on board with that yet. The command system was pretty great, except when trying to scroll through the list in the heat of battle. It was better than the menu system and MP of the older games, but could still be improved. They could let you map commands to certain button actions, such as in Devil May Cry where pressing forward and attack would do the Stinger, and pressing back and attack would do the High Time. Dissidia used a very similar system, and even let you choose which attacks are assigned to each direction. Actually, Dragon's Dogma is very similar to what I'm describing, although it's let down by the lack of lock-on targeting. Square, Triangle and Circle are normal attacks or assigned to context-sensitive stuff like talking, but holding L1 or R1 lets you use different attacks with them. Even FFXIV does something similar, but for all four face buttons and the d-pad directions as well. It's just a better way of quickly accessing abilities and spells without having to pick them from a menu or scroll through a list.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:16
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Come on, Nomura, work with me here.
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NikkolasKing posted:I wonder who wrote VI and IX? Kitase was the scenario writer for VI and Sakaguchi was for IX.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:18
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That loving Sned posted:The command system was pretty great, except when trying to scroll through the list in the heat of battle. It was better than the menu system and MP of the older games, but could still be improved. Yeah, the largest problem with the Command system is that it's just "go through the list, if something is on cooldown skip it" most of the time. If they could configure it so it was more flexible it would be a much better system in general. It's way better than the MP system but still pretty flawed.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:24
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One of the problems with Kingdom Hearts' battle system is that far too many of the moves are automated. In KHII, you get an ability to do a sliding dash attack towards the enemy if you press attack when you're a fair distance away, and a spinning, ascending attack for when they're above you. Once you've locked on to an enemy, all you need to do is keep pressing attack and Sora will do the appropriate attacks to ensure he always hits them. It's like playing Devil May Cry on Automatic mode, the game just does the combos for you. One of the cool things about XV's combat is that not only can you use a ton of different weapons on the fly (as well as different characters), you can also have unarmed combat. It's not quite certain why someone who can manifest swords wouldn't be attacking with one, but games like No More Heroes 2 manage to balance the sword and melee combat well. There seems to be a lot of context sensitive attacks, like Yakuza's heat actions, but hopefully that blue juice coming out of the enemies will actually be red in the western release of the game.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:01
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ImpAtom posted:What precisely about the Kingdom Hearts plot would give you any thought they would be capable writers in another situation? I mean the only writer we know so far is Kazushige Nojima and he really should not be someone you have faith in to provide a good product. Considering the characters are all named poo poo like Gladiolus Amicitia and Ignis Stupeo Scientia, I feel pretty safe of erring on the side of ridiculous melodrama. The part where they're not doing a stupid crossover franchise between 2 companies with nothing in common and aren't 20 odd games into their own story that's based of the scribblings of a mad man that have only gotten dumber and more complicated with each game.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:08
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Phantasium posted:I didn't stop buying RPGs on consoles for some arbitrary reason, they stopped making ones I was interested in on consoles! Or being slightly more realistic, not as many. BioMe posted:I hope this is the last time I need to reiterate that I actually like turn-based games And sure, if you define yourself by the video games you play you might be a weirdo. Not for anything you listed because none of those seem like inherently bad design choices. I mean Shadow Hearts stuck a simple rhythm game on bog standard FF gameplay, called it a day, basically fixed everything. It really shouldn't be that hard for Square to design a decent turn-based game given they've been in the business for 20 years. But their attempts to renew their formula run with the assumption that turn-based gameplay is boring micromanagement poo poo. That's why they've made at least three games that center entirely around automating the process. So I really don't know why it's such a controversial statement that Square should just stop and focus on what they do well, especially for anyone who likes turn-based. Unless there's some territorial gaming tribal bullshit about X people ruining or X genre taking over whatever.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:12
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:The part where they're not doing a stupid crossover franchise between 2 companies with nothing in common and aren't 20 odd games into their own story that's based of the scribblings of a mad man that have only gotten dumber and more complicated with each game. Except they're still using the FFXIII mythology and the same madman is still doing his scribblings so... BioMe posted:So I really don't know why it's such a controversial statement that Square should just stop and focus on what they do well, especially for anyone who likes turn-based. Unless there's some territorial gaming tribal bullshit about X people ruining or X genre taking over whatever. What Square-Enix does well isn't combat systems. It never has been and it isn't even in Kingdom Hearts or Dissidia or any of the action games. What they are good at (or were good at) is simple highly accessible games that anyone can play, backed up by extremely high production values and just enough illusion of depth that people can ignore the fact they're playing the McDonald's of JRPGs. They're simple games for anyone to play and get a fix of melodrama, shiny graphics, and numbers getting bigger. Any attempt they've made to be more than this has been met with mixed reception at best. I like Shadow Hearts too but its combat system wasn't exactly any great shakes except for including an element of interaction. What you seem to be saying is that you, despite what you said earlier, don't like really like turn-based combat. You want action elements in your gameplay. Which is fine. I agree. Not everyone does and not everyone who plays Final Fantasy is going to fall into the same category of wanting action in their RPG. I mean I am looking forward to FFXV. I like the gameplay despite its flaws. Not everyone is obligated to feel that way and it isn't simply because they're clinging to outdated gameplay. It is because it is changing genres on them and they're not obligated to want to play an entirely different kind of game. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 00:22
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ImpAtom posted:Except they're still using the FFXIII mythology and the same madman is still doing his scribblings so... Do we really know it's going to have that much to do with XIII though? I thought the connection was supposed to be flimsy right from the beginning and the project must have also had some big changes under Nomura after all this time. Who granted is just a slightly different kind of madman, but still. edit: getting madmen mixed up BioMe fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 00:27
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BioMe posted:Do we really know it's going to have that much to do with XIII though? I thought the connection was supposed to be flimsy right from the beginning and the project must have also had some big changes under Kojima after all this time. Who granted is just a slightly different kind of madman, but still. The backstory we have so far is that Etro, the big glowing stupid plot point from FFXIII, is responsible for giving Noctus and the female lead their superpowers. (I also assume you mean Nomura.) They've held to that even after the name change so we can presume that poo poo is going to still be around.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:29
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ImpAtom posted:The backstory we have so far is that Etro, the big glowing stupid plot point from FFXIII, is responsible for giving Noctus and the female lead their superpowers. (I also assume you mean Nomura.) But honestly from everything I've read I don't think it's the same Etro? Like, given FF and how it handles concepts and names it really seems like this will probably be the same deal as Ifrit or Cid or whatever. A Goddess name Etro gave the protags powers. That's really all we know. Does that mean there's l'Cie and Cie'th and all that poo poo going around? Who knows! I'm willing to bet if they are it's probably not the exact same set up as it is in 13.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:33
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I'm not sure if I want to know what Kojima's Final Fantasy would be.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:33
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Pasteurized Milk posted:I'm not sure if I want to know what Kojima's Final Fantasy would be. One 40 hour cutscene followed by a 2 minute boss fight.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:35
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:But honestly from everything I've read I don't think it's the same Etro? Like, given FF and how it handles concepts and names it really seems like this will probably be the same deal as Ifrit or Cid or whatever. A Goddess name Etro gave the protags powers. That's really all we know. Does that mean there's l'Cie and Cie'th and all that poo poo going around? Who knows! I'm willing to bet if they are it's probably not the exact same set up as it is in 13. There's concept art already out for Fal'cie in FFXV so at bare minimum they're reusing the basic concept. The other renamed spinoff they did (Final Fantasy Type-0, which began as FFXIII: Agito and was announced at the same time as Versus) also kept using L'cie and Fal'cie. They altered the concepts a little (other people could use magic) but still. They even wave at the stupid Pulse/Lindzei stuff in a way I don't want to actually spoil because there's still a chance it'll get a fan translation. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 00:36
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Paracelsus posted:While I'm sure that's true, as SE's management process seems to be an utter mess, it's tangential to the issue of whether 13 was near-universally reviled by the public, at least as measured by total sales. I'm just saying that it would have had to crack 10 million sales (i.e. be another FF7) to match the ridiculous budget it had. This is why we got two sequels. As for Shadow Hearts' gameplay: It was basically perfect, and the threshold for great turn-based gameplay. But we won't ever see something like it again. Azure_Horizon fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 00:39
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Pasteurized Milk posted:I'm not sure if I want to know what Kojima's Final Fantasy would be. Well the reason I associated the two is that I heard they used to have lunch together sometimes. Kingdom Hearts started with a Disney and a Square employee small-talking about a crossover in a lift you know.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:45
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If KH's root premise wasn't so completely bizarre it wouldn't be nearly as lovable a game. That and Superglide.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:50
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Winks posted:One 40 hour cutscene followed by a 2 minute boss fight. 
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Sep 11, 2013 00:51
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Way behind on this thread, but I am SUPER HAPPY about this. For all that I'm really bad at Theatrhythm, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
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Sep 11, 2013 02:40
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Dr Pepper posted:Chrono Trigger uses a 32 Megabit cartridge. The amount of stuff you'd have had in a 32 Megabyte SNES RPG would have been terrifying in the best way. A 200+ hour long RPG would either have been amazing or the worst nightmare imaginable. You could've had a FF6 where you play through the War of the Magi, then the Empire's rise with you running around as a Celes/Leo/Kefka trio of destruction, then a Returner Interlude, then FF6 proper. Chrono Trigger with 8x the content would be terrifying. Especially trying to get the 100+ endings it'd have had.  Pyroxene Stigma posted:Plus it was only good, not great. Secret of Mana had more depth to it, and that's kinda sad. Secret of Mana was a simple game, which can easily be a major reason why it was so good. While it had some issues it just felt smooth as hell. Plus it did co-op as co-op is supposed to be done and with no hassle. Then they released Legend of Mana and I don't know what the gently caress kind of drugs they were on when they designed multiplayer for that. A game like that done today wouldn't even need to pause for the ring menus. You'd open the menu and navigate it with one analog stick while still moving with the other. You'd even have an extra button or two to use as quick keys for a couple spells. ImpAtom posted:Except they're still using the FFXIII mythology and the same madman is still doing his scribblings so... FFT had a good combat system. You could credit that to Matsuno specifically and not Squaresoft though since it's just a well polished and more advanced system from what he used in Tactics Ogre, but it's still a well done setup.
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Sep 11, 2013 03:20
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Evil Fluffy posted:FFT had a good combat system. You could credit that to Matsuno specifically and not Squaresoft though since it's just a well polished and more advanced system from what he used in Tactics Ogre, but it's still a well done setup. I honestly thought TO's battle system was a bit better polished and designed. FFT's was more breakable but contained a lot more weird fiddly bits and spots of bad design. (I still liked it though, especially because I played it before I played TO.)
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Sep 11, 2013 03:24
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ImpAtom posted:I honestly thought TO's battle system was a bit better polished and designed. FFT's was more breakable but contained a lot more weird fiddly bits and spots of bad design. (I still liked it though, especially because I played it before I played TO.) Are we talking about the original TO? TO was SUPER breakable if you knew what you were doing. Necro/Retissue? Then whatever spell turned a unit into a sword? Or if you want to go for regular, run-of-the-mill broken you had units like Angels and Liches. The only reason I could be bothered to play through Hell Gate was because it was pretty easy to clear an entire map with a single spell before any of the enemies moved. Or for early game, several teleporting ghosts that the enemy literally had no way to kill. Still, I found TO way more clunky and poorly polished than FFT, and could never get into it the same way. A tiny bit of level difference resulted in a HUGE power discrepancy. I don't remember how it worked exactly, but having a higher level gave you offense and defensive bonuses, while having a lower level gave you offense and defense penalties. So having about a 2 level difference meant the weaker unit was taking twice as much damage and putting out half the offense as they would against an equal-level opponent. And there were a bunch of levels where you had to save a stupid AI ally surrounded by enemies all the way across the map. It was the Riovanes Rooftop, but twice as bad and about 10 times as often.
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Sep 11, 2013 03:50
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Final Fantasy being stuck in a decade-long rut is a problem because the series' traditional heterogeneity benefits from frequent releases and suffers from infrequent ones. Neither fans nor developers seem to have any idea of what Final Fantasy should be, but if they can get back to staggering the development and releasing one about every eighteen months or so, then it's not a problem if you don't like what they were trying, because the next one's coming out soon and it'll be different.
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Sep 11, 2013 03:54
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A 32 megabyte SNES game probably wouldn't have been longer, it just would have had fancier audio and graphics. Look at what Star Ocean made the SNES do with 6 and a special sprite decompression chip. With a cart that big they could have even more and better sprite work without needing special hardware to cram it all on the cart.
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Sep 11, 2013 03:58
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Azure_Horizon posted:I think the problem was that it didn't sell well enough in comparison to its production costs. Neither did FFXII, for that matter. Correct, their games are so expensive and take so long to make that don't make as much money off them as they should. This also creates long voids in their release schedule. Years ago, Square-Enix had a number of lower budget handheld games in order to pad out their fiscal year. These small games allowed Square-Enix to scout out talent, such as acquiring leads from Jupiter Corporation who collaborated on the World Ends With You, or allow novice designers to test out their skills on a low risk/budget game. However, the troubled development cycles of their big budget games, especially FFXIV, cannibalized these small teams. It's now similar to a feast and famine cycle in which a business has brief bursts of heavy business interspersed with periods of low activity. For example, Take2 concentrates on extremely high metacritic scoring games that can sell well over ten million copies. However, Take2 has had some troubled financial statements over the years in spite of multi-million sellers, such as GTA and RDR. Much of their profits are eaten by the massive budgets and the lengthy developments. DLC is critical is extending the sales life of the game and making money off the initial investment. A game which fails to meet expectations, such as Max Payne 3, is an incredibly costly failure because of how many resources were invested into their games. Take2 and their 2K Games subsidiary are interested into expanding into mobile gaming because of its low costs of development and high growth. Square-Enix games typically don't have the sales or critical acclaim of Take2 but shares many of their weaknesses. You need to be someone like Acti-Blizzard in order to survive in the AAA market. Acti-Blizz makes very few games except guaranteed hits they can ship every year. This minimizes their costs and allows them to pour their resources into yearly releases, popular Blizzard games, and 'safe' new IPs such as Bungie's Destiny. EA has struggled over the years because of their risky new IPs. The failure threshold for AAA games is just so high in today's market. Much of EA's profits from Battlefield/Madden/Fifa/Sims is eaten up by costly failures such as SWTOR and [insert failed EA new IP here]. Also note that much of the sales numbers touted for FFXIII are actually shipped numbers. Square-Enix loses money on unsold copies in non-Japanese retail stores. The company issues credit to North American/European retailers who slash prices of their games through something called price protection. Price protection allows publishers to ship extremely large amounts of copies into stores since retailers have reassurance that the publishers will compensate them for underperforming games. The retailer may have to make quick price drops to move copies of under performing games and require the publisher to make up the difference. In SE's financial statements they lost significant amounts of money on price protection for several of their domestically developed games and Eidos developed games. They also issued credit on unsold copies of the first release of FFXIV. That loving Sned posted:If Final Fantasy XV was the Resident Evil 4 of the series, I'd be loving thrilled. Like RE4 taking out the fixed camera angles, key hunting, and substantially improving the combat and inventory system, XV would replace random encounters, scaled-down overworlds, and menu-driven combat to make it feel like you're actually controlling a character, rather than just giving them advice. This was a problem in XIII and XIII-2, where the battle system was fully real-time, but the only thing you could tell your character to do was what attacks to do and in what order, with partners following one of six AI scripts and your movement being done automatically. Similar to Resident Evil's slow decline due to rising development costs (and Capcom's talent exodus), I don't have much faith in FFXV with where the company is headed. At least Resident Evil 6 could appeal to Western audiences who enjoyed shooters. I don't think Square-Enix's Japanese developers can successfully compete and create innovative AAA games in today's market without tremendous financial hardship (a la FFXIV: ARR). The company has a stifling development methodology and is unable to grow its dwindling pool of talent to offset a brain drain. They are very similar to EA (other than collaborating on a joint venture for EA LA) in that they're both extremely large and powerful companies with a crippling bureaucracy that is unable to readily identify shifts in the market and create quality games in time. EA usually uses its large wealth and manpower to brute force their way into a market. They allow other, usually smaller, companies to venture forth into unproven genres and then go in to conquer that market with their vast resources. You see this with God of War -> Dante's Inferno, Star Wars: The Old Republic -> World of Warcraft, and Dota 2/League of Legends -> Dawngate. For example, when DOTA was slowly gaining popularity, Blizzard didn't attempt to capitalize on its popularity until a decade later. Smaller companies such as Stardock and startups such as Riot Games were able to address the growing interest in MOBAs due to their small, focused teams. In spite of creating Warcraft 3, Blizzard entertainment didn't pursue DOTA since they were transitioning from an agile company to a slower, more powerful company during World of Warcraft's lengthy development. Instead, Valve Corporation, an agile company that limits their company size, hired Icefrog and made Dota 2. EA's large size prevents it from being an agile company. Instead, their sheer size allows them to have delayed responses to market trends backed up with a large array of resources. However, this method has gotten much more difficult to implement due to the costs of development and the sheer size of the company. For example, their World of Warcraft competitor, Star Wars: The Old Republic, took five years to make and arrived in a market that had changed drastically since the game's conception. The game's problematic development methodology led to a game with a bad launch and an inefficient content production pipeline. Sometimes market trends change and a game arrives as a relic of a bygone era due to a lengthy development cycle. EA's company culture is geared toward making annual releases that will go on to have a lion's share of the market. If you were ever curious why so many EA acquisitions end up destroying the company in question, then this is the reason why. Companies such as Origin Systems, Bullfrog, and Westwood, (and Bioware) faced strong internal pressure to conform to EA's company culture. Studios creating games for different genres for different demographics are constantly compared and critiqued under EA's management. This creates an invisible yet ever present pressure for studios to one up each other. This is why many of them fail in spite of the strong creative freedom and access to EA's vast resources they are promised. Some of these developers usually worked better when placed under technical and budget restrains. These new acquisitions need to justify their paychecks by making games for wider demographics under shorter development schedules. While quick development cycles work for EA Sports games competing in an oligopoly, they don't work as well for other genres experiencing fierce competition. This why many EA games, such as Dragon Age 2, are rushed out and designed to appeal to a much broader market than their predecessors. EA's acquisition of casual game developer Popcap for a billion dollars eventually led to a string of layoffs and the departure of Plants vs. Zombies designer, George Fan. Popcap's focus on experimenting with low budget casual games clashed with EA emphasis on big budget games. Similarly, Square-Enix's is a large company that is crippled by their sheer size and bureaucracy. A lot of their games, such as FFXIII and FFXIV, feel like they missed years of advancement in game design and shifts in consumer tastes. Their development methodology in Japan isn't able to create AAA games that can compete globally. I don't see the oldguard changing this without getting out of AAA. FFXIII-2 was heavily focus tested in order to fix FFXIII's problems but it suffered from a mixed reception and poor sales. As for FFXV, I think there is a reason why FFvsXIII constantly had its resources given to FFXIII and FFXIV. Those games were much more important and the management simply doesn't trust Nomura to create a AAA game in a timely manner. Considering how terrible FFXIII's development was, FFvsXIII's problems must have been extraordinarily bad. I think the only reason the made it is because they don't have anything else in the development pipeline that could qualify as FFXV. They can also plan out a monetization/DLC/sequelscheme for the game that they didn't have the foresight for with FFXIII. In spite of its extremely lengthy development cycle, the FFXV continues to suffer from scope explosion. For example, the game has had several real-time cutscenes changed into CGI and vice-versa depending on what Nomura feels would be best. CGI scenes are incredibly expensive to make. For a point of reference, the CGI trailer for Deus Ex: Human cost over $2 million to make. So creating a ton of high quality CGI for the game that doesn't see the light of day is extremely wasteful. I should also mention that expensive CGI that is incredibly stupid in this age of cutting edge graphics. I can understand using a CGI trailer to build up hype, such as the infamous Dead Island trailer, but CGI that's embedded in the game for the player to find is a terrible waste use of money. SE makes a lot of CGI because they have an in-house CGI studio called Visual Works. Having a dedicated CGI studio can lower costs if you constantly use it to create CGI and spread out fixed costs over a lot of content. However, constantly creating expensive CGI that is attached to constantly delayed games in order to justify having a dedicated CGI studio defeats the concept in the first place. Then you hear stuff about how the decision to have a large overworld wasn't established until years into development. It's pretty clear that Nomura has a very inefficient game design philosophy that doesn't work in HD development as well as it did for PS2 games. However, he seems to be pretty good at nurturing talent since he established SE Osaka and oversaw several smaller projects to successful releases. I just don't have much faith in his ability to make a AAA game. I guess he is another symptom of how the Peter Principle affects the company hierarchy. I'd have much more faith in the game if there was some young, open minded, risk taker leading the project. There are a lot of younger names attached to FFXV, such as key members from FF Type-0, but I don't know how they'll handle HD development. You also hear a lot of speculation that the first e3 trailer for FFXV was largely pre-rendered due to how different the character models and assets look from the latter battle trailer (up rezzed PS3 assets vs target render assets). It wouldn't be the first time passed off a pre-rendered scene as gameplay. The original FFXIII trailer showcased gameplay that ended up as a cutscene in the final game. FFXIV: ARR experienced a turnabout due to Yoshida's strong planning for FFXIV 2.0 and the radical shift in the game's development methodology. Yoshida is completely different when compared to other SE designers/producers in how he addresses an unhappy fanbase and tackles develop problems. He plays a lot of competing games and has regularly scheduled roundtables where FFXIV development team members can freely discuss problems and goals. Just compare how Yoshida constantly interacted with fans on forums and at events in comparison to how the rest of the Square-Enix designers live in their ivory towers and rarely meet with the people who make their jobs possible. We'll have to see how a FFXIV: ARR (a subscription Wrath of the Lich King era MMO with FF production values) does in today's market. Nonetheless, Yoshida is an example of how the rest of the company should plan their game development cycle, address technological hurdles, and interact with their fans. In spite of his relatively young age (he's only about a couple years younger than Nomura), he's very experienced due to his work on the Dragon Quest games. I think Square-Enix was grooming him to take over the mantle of Dragon Quest from its aging creator, Yuji Horii. I don't know what he's going to do now after FFXIV. SE is very lucky to have him. I just realized how much I wrote so thanks for reading all of this.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:27
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Sunning posted:Correct, their games are so expensive and take so long to make that don't make as much money off them as they should. This also creates long voids in their release schedule. Years ago, Square-Enix had a number of lower budget handheld games in order to pad out their fiscal year. These small games allowed Square-Enix to scout out talent, such as acquiring leads from Jupiter Corporation who collaborated on the World Ends With You, or allow novice designers to test out their skills on a low risk/budget game. However, the troubled development cycles of their big budget games, especially FFXIV, cannibalized these small teams. It's now similar to a feast and famine cycle in which a business has brief bursts of heavy business interspersed with periods of low activity. Hmmmm... *scratches chin* Fail.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:31
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Sunning posted:Correct, their games are so expensive and take so long to make that don't make as much money off them as they should. This also creates long voids in their release schedule. Years ago, Square-Enix had a number of lower budget handheld games in order to pad out their fiscal year. These small games allowed Square-Enix to scout out talent, such as acquiring leads from Jupiter Corporation who collaborated on the World Ends With You, or allow novice designers to test out their skills on a low risk/budget game. However, the troubled development cycles of their big budget games, especially FFXIV, cannibalized these small teams. It's now similar to a feast and famine cycle in which a business has brief bursts of heavy business interspersed with periods of low activity. Yes
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Sep 11, 2013 04:34
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Sunning posted:I just realized how much I wrote so thanks for reading all of this. Man, you're giving good clear info. I don't think it matters that it's long. Anyway: What I've heard with regards to Nomura is that he's extremely unfocused. I'd heard the CG thing you mentioned before and there are a lot of stories about how he is extremely fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants with almost all aspects of development. It isn't really a good thing though because it isn't flexible fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants but just a general lack of focus. Some of the supposedly leaks with regards to FFXIIvs basically hinted that they were basically making things up as they went along. I haven't really heard anything about this changing with regards to FFXV either, which is part of why I don't have a lot of faith in the game despite wanting to play it. It may have a good battle system but everything else is up in the air. There's also got to be a lot of internal pressure from Square-Enix and unfortunately nothing I've heard about S-E development suggests they have a good focused intentional pressure but instead a frantic desire to satisfy to what they think the demand is. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 04:36
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ImpAtom posted:Oh, I'm not arguing that there aren't games that sell better. Skyrim and Pokemon are utter behemoths and the Diablo brand is so strong it sold well despite everyone, including Blizzard themselves, admitting it was a lovely game. I was referring more to console-based RPGs, although that's probably me narrowing it a bit too much because that line is becoming increasingly blurry with Diablo 3 now out on PC and an (admittedly crappier) Skyrim out for consoles. OTOH the "console-style RPG" is an endangered species as is, so being the best selling one of those is still not a particularly solid position to be in.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:48
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Square being married to graphical excess and CGI budgets that might make Pixar raise an eyebrow is pretty sad because they were clearly at their best back when they could toss a few hundred grand at a dozen projects at a time and shoveling millions at a monolithic project while a few things fight over the scraps just isn't producing the kind of quality improvements worth the giant spending.
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Sep 11, 2013 05:00
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Okay, Sunning, now you have* to tell us what your day job is. Because this is some comprehensive and informative stuff. Analyst? Journo? Mail guy? (*You don't actually have to.)
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Sep 11, 2013 05:01
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dis astranagant posted:Square being married to graphical excess and CGI budgets that might make Pixar raise an eyebrow is pretty sad because they were clearly at their best back when they could toss a few hundred grand at a dozen projects at a time and shoveling millions at a monolithic project while a few things fight over the scraps just isn't producing the kind of quality improvements worth the giant spending. It's also kinda ironic that they're so focused on CGI since a giant CGI behemoth is what almost destroyed them in the first place.
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Sep 11, 2013 05:13
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Is the 3ds or ios version of Theatrhythm considered better?
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Sep 11, 2013 05:32
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Is the 3ds or ios version of Theatrhythm considered better? For my money the 3ds version is a much better experience. They cut a lot of the content from the iOS version.
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Sep 11, 2013 07:19
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Kingdom Hearts games always have really cool gameplay and a terrible, terrible story that only keeps getting worse. I am completely ok with the same team making a game that isn't KH.
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Sep 11, 2013 07:39
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dis astranagant posted:A 32 megabyte SNES game probably wouldn't have been longer, it just would have had fancier audio and graphics. Look at what Star Ocean made the SNES do with 6 and a special sprite decompression chip. With a cart that big they could have even more and better sprite work without needing special hardware to cram it all on the cart. If you want to see what a 32MB RPG looks like, try Mother 3 for the GBA. Every NPC has unique sprites for facing in all eight directions, as well as walking and talking. It makes the 3MB Earthbound feel pretty stiff in comparison.
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Sep 11, 2013 08:10
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Is the 3ds or ios version of Theatrhythm considered better? If you're a casual fan who just wants to play a few certain songs for the sake of nostalgia then the iOS version is fine, you can just buy the songs you like and be done with it. It's missing a ton of stuff - not just songs, but they stripped away most of the single-player junk and RPG elements and whatnot, but it does have a few exclusive tunes that aren't available for the 3DS version. If you intend to spend any serious time with the game then the 3DS version is definitely the way to go - you get ~80 songs right off the bat, and there's a ton more to do (levelling characters, challenges and so on). I hear it's kinda hard to find these days, and it's not on the eShop, but even if it's holding at launch price it's still much better value. I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread, but you might wanna keep this in mind: S-E just announced Theatrhythm: Curtain Call for 3DS in Japan. ~200 songs, ~60 characters.
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Sep 11, 2013 08:19
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Alright, 3DS version it is, thanks.  And yeah, seeing the news of the sequel actually made me want to go and buy the original since it'll probably be a year or so before it comes out here, and luckily the gamestop by my work has a copy so I can just nab it on my way home.
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Sep 11, 2013 08:21
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| # ? May 21, 2024 17:40 |
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Might buy Platinum tomorrow just so I can find all the Sunning posts scattered across Games. If you don't get paid at least a little bit to write about the industry you probably should.
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Sep 11, 2013 08:25
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