Tag: Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV: No, Subscriptions Should Not Be Convenient…


Excuse me, I'd like to return this game.

Playing Final Fantasy XIV requires a base $9.99 monthly fee plus $3 per character, leaving you with a $12.99 monthly cost assuming you only create one character (and with the ability to be all classes, there is no need for a second character, quite frankly). Assuming most of the visitors to MMO Fallout have played a subscription based MMO before, many of you are likely assuming “well, I’ll just put in my credit card info, and set myself up for the monthly charges.” You would be completely wrong.

Rather than going for a traditional subscription system, Square is instead running a Square-Bucks system, also known as Crysta, that is used for everything from account services, to planned cash shop items, to your subscription. Of course, proprietary cash system means what else, but forced increment purchases. In this case, you can only purchase Crysta in $5, $10, $20, $30, $50, or $100 purchases, making you fork over fifteen dollars for a twelve dollar subscription, so that three of it may go to…consider it a savings account. Your alternative is to pay through a company called Click and Buy, although depending on who you ask, the company’s reputation is rather dubious for unauthorized charges.

Those of you who played Final Fantasy XI and are returning for XIV are likely asking, since when was Square Enix ever about convenience for their customers? If the lack of an auction house, non-functioning patcher, fatigue system, and leve limits, weren’t a clue, all one has to do is look at the twenty hour bosses in Final Fantasy XI.

Don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy XIV will do great…in Japan, where Final Fantasy sells like Fanta in the Sahara, but will likely remain a niche title in the West. The problem doesn’t stem from bad gameplay, but from lack of user friendliness that doesn’t even come close to “hold my hand, Square.” More importantly, however, is that Square has shown some quick movement in the past couple weeks to make the game more user friendly. After a large number of complaints by players, Square finally added in hardware mouse support.

At the end of the day, Final Fantasy XIV is like a fine wine, one that you can’t reach because the company put it on the top shelf, you are five foot three, and the only staff on the floor who can get it for you is currently texting his girlfriend in the frozen food aisle, and will be with you “in just a minute.”

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.

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Nothing Says Loving Like A Non-Functioning Patcher


Excuse me, I'd like to sell this patcher. It's, uh, rare.

Under normal circumstances, I could chalk this up to Final Fantasy XIV having just launched yesterday (for the head start) but at some point I would be injecting rationale and patience into an area of the system where people have historically rejected both. If you haven’t participated in Square Enix’s foray into the newest generation of Massively Multiplayer titles, Final Fantasy XIV has among the least user friendly patch downloading tools on the market. In open beta, I was assured by several vehement defenders that my infinity-estimated waiting time for this nine gigabyte patch would be fixed by the time the game launched. Granted, I was also called a “trolling d-bag” for my discontent that a fifteen megabyte patch should have a six hour waiting time, so take with it what you will.

Those of you who, like myself, managed to get into the open beta likely accomplished this task by using the Megaupload links on FFXIVcore, or managed to find the patches using someone else’s torrent system. As a number of people pointed out on unofficial forums (as the open beta testers weren’t allowed into the Square Enix forums), nothing kills interest in a game like being forced to jump through hoops just to install the damned thing.

Of course, this isn’t me just pulling “the general consensus” out of my rear end and presenting it as the majority opinion. A couple years ago, when NCsoft was putting forth plans to move Dungeon Runners to a web-client system, they noted that around one third of their users never even got past downloading the game. Of course people who plucked down fifty bucks on a game are going to try a lot harder to get in, but consider early discontent as a playing factor when Square Enix’s post 1-month figures come back.

Remember, a guy who says “I hated the game, there’s lag/performance issues” convinces few, as lag is subjective and based on time, location, and the person’s computer/internet. On the other hand, a person who says “I can’t really give an opinion, I never got the game working,” stands to convince many more not to go through the hassle of even giving the game a chance. Opinions on a game vary from person to person, but barriers of entry are universal.

So is Final Fantasy XIV doomed to head down the All Points Bulletin route and crash by this December? Not a snowball’s chance in hell. Owing to the Square Enix community, there are more than enough people willing to embrace the patcher, with its faults, and deal with it to cover those who will quit after the first month’s free time. If anything, one might consider the patcher a test of patience. If you’re patient enough to get download and move all the patches, then some of the facets of the game itself will be a breeze (not getting into that here, however). Of course, there is still plenty of time for Square to streamline the patcher once the population has gone down to its core populace.

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.

Absolutely Brilliant! Episode #1: Final Fantasy XIV


I'm legally required to remind you to game responsibly.

Here at MMO Fallout, I try to offer my help to companies more in the form of business decisions, rather than what I might feel that the game needs. I only play a handful of MMOs, and honestly am not the best person to go to in order to find out what your game needs tweaking. Sure, I know that All Points Bulletin needs better shooting and driving, and I know that Blizzard needs to severely crack down on mobile authenticators being used as a free way to manipulate stolen accounts, but I couldn’t tell you how the latest expansion affected drop rates in Lineage 2, or how players in Guild Wars might react if a certain update was implemented.

Absolutely Brilliant! is a new category devoted to people clearly smarter than myself. In this section, I highlight ideas that, even if the company the game is directed at won’t take notice, other companies with similar models could definitely benefit from grabbing up this person’s idea.

Final Fantasy XIV goes into open beta soon, and the closed beta members are throwing suggestions left and right. Our first idea comes from MMORPG.com user ProfRed, who has an idea to make the market system a lot more streamlined. Seeing as how Square Enix is not gracing Final Fantasy XIV with an auction house (at least not for now), players are trying to find new ways to make the retainer system (a character who sits in market areas selling your items for you) as easy to use as possible. Rather than just a simple search engine, ProfRed (or The Professor, as I’ve taken to calling him) suggested:

“They simply need to add a way to browse items in one of the market wards.  Say search for an item and it lists what market wards it exists in.  Not even prices just where.  Something akin to standing at the entrance and yelling, “I NEED A PINK MAGE HAT OF DOOM”, and vendors yelling back, “GET IT HERE!!!”.

Personal trade/merchanting is a great thing.  I am sick of MMO’s making everything easy mode and catering to the anti social.”

Having a system like this would be a little shaky at the start, having to type the name of the item out exactly, but if Square Enix would implement this, such a system would do wonders more than some of the other suggestions (holding up signs, descriptions above names, etc), be less cumbersome if only the player speaking could see the feedback, and would remove the prospect of walking through a thousand retainers looking for your pink mage hat of doom, the idea of which sends me back to my years of playing games like ROSE Online, and the myriad of other free Korean games, most of which featured some form of private shop.

So that’s episode 1 of Absolutely Brilliant! For the record, I won’t be accepting direct submissions by email to this category, but if you see someone’s idea on a forum feel free to link me to it, either here or through my email. Special thanks to ProfRed, and all of the people who will eventually spite me for indirectly associating them with this webiste.

Final Fantasy XIV 360 Not Cancelled, Just Delayed Forever


Square Enix

If you check any gaming related website, electronics store, or wikipedia, you’ll find that Square Enix is set to release Final Fantasy XIV on the 30th of September for the PC, and sometime in March next year on the Playstation 3. What you won’t find, on the other hand, is a release date, or an acknowledgement of the Xbox360 version of Final Fantasy XIV, and Square Enix would like to rectify that.

In a recent interview with VG247, producer Hiromichi Tanaka stated that the 360 version of the upcoming Final Fantasy MMO is in fact not canned on the 360, but has rather been delayed and put on hold while talks continue with Microsoft. Going further into details, Tanaka explained that Xbox Live is virtually the only hurdle keeping Final Fantasy XIV from continuing development on the platform.

I’ve been pretty unrepentant in the past with my feelings towards Microsoft and have always backed up my philosophy that if you are a console gamer looking for an MMO, your best bet is to stick with a Playstation 3. The hurdles that the developers have been reaching with Microsoft are essentially set at Microsoft’s love of money, and their need to stick their fingers into everyone else’s cookie jar, leading to the point where a deal between Microsoft and the BBC to offer streaming BBC over Xbox Live (at no cost to Microsoft) was turned down because Microsoft couldn’t make any money off of it.

As much as I hate to play the pessimist, those who are waiting out on a 360 version of Final Fantasy XIV might as well wait in line behind those still hoping for a console edition of Champions Online, Age of Conan, and Star Trek Online, who are standing right over there with the folk waiting for Duke Nukem Forever and the rapture.

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.

Final Fantasy XIV: No Microtransactions


PS3 Compromised.

When Realtime Worlds announced that All Points Bulletin would not feature a cash shop, of course they meant “unless the voices in our heads tell us that the community wants a $25 mount.” Whether or not you enjoy paying over an existing subscription fee, I think we can all agree that the cash shop system is sweeping its way through the MMO frontier, regardless of what you or I may think about it. There are real concerns in your favorite MMO swapping to a Turbine model, or the Cryptic/Sony double-dipping system.

Fans of Final Fantasy XIV take heart: Square Enix will not be putting a cash shop in (unless you ask for it). And even if you ask for it, Square will adamantly refuse to allow a person’s real money equate to how much power they have in-game, meaning that anything added to a FFXIV cash shop will be vanity only. Although there are those who oppose cash shops in subscription games in all forms, vanity or not, this news should bring a sigh of relief to those holding off their preorders out of fear of a Turbine-esque shift some six months to a year in the future post-launch.

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.

Final Fantasy XIV: Delays And Pricing Structure


PS3 Compromised.

I’m not a fan of cross-platform games as the more systems that are added to the fray, the higher the odds for delays due to unforeseen problems on one system. The end result is that, in an attempt to please everyone in the crowd, the developer delays all of the titles in order to ensure a simultaneous release, even if it means a delay of up to a year or more. MMOs, thankfully, have not had this issue. Given their release dates, the rest of us can breath a sigh of relief that Funcom never decided to delay Age of Conan for the never-released 360 port, or Champions Online with the also-never-released 360 port, and now Star Trek Online for its now-canned 360 port. In the case of Champions Online, the 360 version was fairly close to release, shutting down due to issues with Microsoft.

So bully to PC and tough luck for PS3 as Square Enix decided that they will release the PC version of Final Fantasy XIV this September, while the PS3 version will be delayed until March 2011 (at least). The PC version will hit at the end of September, and not much has been said specifically what caused the PS3 version to be delayed.

Even more interesting was the announcement of pricing structure. Players will be given one player and one ‘retainer’ character. The retainer character essentially acts as an official mule, managing the player’s sales and storage. Creating alts is possible, up to 8, but each one will tack on an additional three dollars, a month, to your subscription. Given the versatility of the player (able to level up all jobs), and the possibility of Final Fantasy XI’s grind making its way to XIV, an alt is unnecessary.

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears. Hopefully we won’t see any 20+ hour Pandemonium Wardens.

Someone At Square Enix is Getting Fired…


Only thing worse than a dumb employee...

In my current line of customer service work, saying the wrong thing to the wrong customer can be devastating. Odds are, if you tell a customer exactly where they can stick their refund, you’re going to get fired on the spot. Now, business can do all they can to stop employees from saying stupid things, as that just leaves one or two customers annoyed and potentially lost for good. Meanwhile, when an employee reveals something maybe they shouldn’t have, or reveals something that, despite false, damns the company, then you’re going to have a real problem on your hands.

Enter Square Enix! I don’t get to talk about Square Enix, nor their unconventional conventions of MMOs, so I always jump on the opportunity… So essentially once since MMO Fallout started. MMOsite is reporting on a Square Enix Human Resources employee who revealed the following on his blog:

“I think some amongst you will know, but FF11 started in 2002 … Well, this year it’ll end and the stage will shift to FF14.”
-Square Enix Employee

Now being Mr. I-Hate-Rumors, I immediately assumed one thing: This means Square Enix will shift much of its attention towards Final Fantasy 14, which makes sense. As for Final Fantasy XI being shut down; considering the number of players who still enjoy XI, and the message shutting down such a profitable game would send that player base, Square Enix would have to be more insane than normal to think that the players would just jump right over to XIV. Sure, some will, but overall Square will wind up with a predicament similar to that of Asheron’s Call 2.

Final Fantasy XI is eight years old this year, and still remains one of the (if not the) most popular MMOs in Japan. The game is showing its age, but by no means is the title ready to go on the cart. No, I think Final Fantasy XI has a good few years left in it, assuming Square isn’t using Final Fantasy XIV as the club to beat XI to death. There are still plenty of events planned for Final Fantasy XI, yet to come.

Luckily, Square got right on the case: The post has been removed and there has been an announcement that the post is a lie. That being said, thanks to your average sensationalist blogs, the topic will be on whether or not Square Enix is lying.

It’s always a good idea to tell your employees, especially your Human Resource people, not to reveal information that might be damning to a game, especially if the information isn’t really damning, but you’re going to word it in a specially cryptic fashion that makes it look so.

More on Square Enix as it approaches.