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twesterm on 22 October 2010
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CChaos said:
twesterm said:
CChaos said:

It's always amusing that whenever Final Fantasy is mentioned, it ends up a flamewar.

They can fix it all up nice and pretty, but the rush is gone. They've lost that opportunity to get the legs moving and it'll cost them in the long run. They didn't release a product that most people wanted or felt that was worthwhile, so they're paying for it.

Honestly, and this is not an attempt to bait, but I think part of the blame for the game lies with those diehard fans they expected to make up the core of the game. When they started up the open beta, who were the first people to run in and grab spots? The people who enjoy the games most, of course. As I've said in other posts, the bugs can be fixed...the design decisions not so much. People aren't just complaining about the bugs...it's the servers, the interface, how different things in the game work, a lot of different, little things that make or break it for some people. FFIX players are used to similar methods used in their games (not to mention people who think Final Fantasy and Square Enix can do no wrong) and they liked what they saw in the beta. They're used to it and SE appeared to think everything was hunky dorry. But you don't hit the upper echelons until you can court the common gamer. That's where the bigger money comes from and they've simply failed to do that so far.

Maybe they can recover, maybe they can't, but they now have one hell of an uphill battle to fight.


Um, no we didn't.

Perhaps not you, but obviously others did or they wouldn't have sent this thing onward without tweaking a hell of a lot of stuff first. Hell, SE themselves said before in a news article that their feedback had been quite positive during the betas. So, obviously a good few people liked it enough that they figured it was ready for release.

So either Square Enix completely and utterly ignored their fan base and released it despite the bugs, or they really did think that this was the game that their fans wanted. It's one or the other, really.

This is why I figure there's no point in making excuses for a gaming company who's stuff you like. It's gaming, not an abusive relationship (well, not always, some companies sure feel that way). Without a reasonable critique of what's good and what's bad, nobody is going to end up getting what they want.

I'm not saying nobody did but it's just as silly to say that no FFXI like FFXIV as saying most FFXI like FFXIV.  Most of my linkshell and people I know in real life that loved FFXI to death despise FFXIV.  They don't despise it because of the changes, we all pretty much agree there's a good game underneath all the massive problems, we all hate it because it released in a completely unfinished state.

It's one thing to release an MMO with bugs, that happens, but there was no excuse to release FFXIV in the state it was in. 

And then there were the just plain awful design decisions like the market ward and one of the worst UI's ever created.  I've already ranted enough on both of those and there's no reason to repeat myself.