Is Final Fantasy On The Verge Of Collapse?

[hikaruchan]

Scoobes said:

Crystalchild said:

 

 Game journalism is broken, and broke Final Fantasy, which will probably become a niche market like many others JRPGs.

 

Just wrong.

i think the thing that has pissed of (myself included) most of the haters, was that so many things were left out.

the world was never so streamlined (e.g limited), you cannot access any house (as if there were many anyway.. ) there was almost nothing to do aside from the mainstory, no deep hidden secrets that had nothing to do with the Fal'cie thing..

and as Square told us so often already ~ a game like FF7 couldnt be remaked without MUCH effort. (much much more than FFXIII has taken.) Why? because of the technical prsentation. it consumes so much time and money .. that the Games overall size suffers from it.

to me, FFXIII had the same monotone feeling as a FPS. 'luckilly' the presentation was great and has maked up for it.

 

it isnt square's fault, its simply that games get more and more complex.

If you read some of the dev interviews they paint a horrible picture of the development for FFXIII. The sheer volume of artwork in the game is astounding and this is because the art team spent years making art assets to the point where large amounts were left out of the final game.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_The_Scenes_of__Square_Enixs_Final_Fantasy_XIII.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: GamasutraNews (Gamasutra News)

This article also suggests that the developers didn't have any clear focus of what was going to be in the final game, even at late stages of development. Who knows what different features the teams were toying around with? Even after the trailer (which was a proof of concept) the team didn't have a clear focus of what direction to take the game:

"However, it became clear that, at the time, there were actually very few members who saw the trailer as a representation of what we wanted to achieve with Final Fantasy XIII. This lack of a shared vision became the root of many conflicts that arose later in development."

It was actually only after the demo was released that the team gained an insight into how the final game would be:

"Even at a late stage of development, we did not agree on key elements of the game, which stemmed from the lack of a cohesive vision, the lack of finalized specs, and the remaining problems with communication between departments.

What enabled us to conquer this line of seemingly endless conflicts was the development process for the Final Fantasy XIII demo, which was included in the Japan-only Blu-ray version of the animated film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete. The demo was not in our original plan, so we had to make adjustments to the overall schedule to accommodate it. Whatever effects creating the demo had on the schedule, once it was complete we realized it was just the panacea we needed."

The article also talks about how trying to develop a universal engine to use accross multiple platforms and multiple games negatively impacted on development and how international player tests came too late for many criticisms of the game to be addressed. All these factors point to a highly inefficient development process for the game and poor leadership/decision making.

I don't think that making a game with the depth of previous Final Fantasy games is impossible, but it is if your development procedure is as inefficient as the development of FFXIII was. I hope the lessons learnt from FFXIII development translate to efficient development of future titles leading to more depth.

FFXII also had a lot of similar development problems with a lot internal pliitics and Mastsuno san getting sick compounded  the problems