Tag: Square Enix

Final Fantasy XI On Playstation Vita? Not on PS3


I believe Sony has talked before about the Playstation Vita being capable of supporting MMO platforms, and it appears that Square Enix is the first company to step up to the plate and give consideration to the concept. Siliconera is reporting that Square Enix has a vested interest in porting Final Fantasy XI over to the Playstation Vita with no timetable on anything. The plans themselves are not complete, and there is no guarantee this will actually work, come to fruition, or be viable over the Vita.

There are no plans for a PS3 port of Final Fantasy XI, however, as the process is a lot more complicated and Square is likely hard at work on keeping what will be the release version of Final Fantasy XIV on the PS3 up to date with the PC development.

Still, this is an interesting concept. If some MMOs appear on the Vita, it might just give me an incentive to buy the thing. You know what I’m thinking…Hello Kitty Online: Vita.

Third Square Enix MMO In The Works…Why?


Square Enix’s past with MMOs can be summed up a such: Final Fantasy XI was released and still trucks along well to this day. Fantasy Earth Zero was launched, died a quick death, and was revived by another company only to die again just this year. Final Fantasy XIV, however, is where the story gets interesting. Still reeling from its own launch, FFXIV has yet to institute subscriptions and has no timetable for doing so. The PS3 version has been delayed indefinitely with no release in sight. Finally, Square Enix’s upcoming MMO…hold the phone, upcoming MMO? One moment please.

And we’re back. Yes, folks, Square Enix is working on a third MMO, according to their most recent earnings report. The game is set to be announced this fiscal year, which means this article is essentially show boating and a reason to incorporate Tough Guys Don’t Dance into MMO Fallout.

There is good news, non-Final Fantasy fans. The MMO will be a different IP, it appears, meaning it could be anything from Dragon Quest to Thief, Kingdom Hearts, or more (personally I’m rooting for Snoopy’s Red Baron MMO). More on this title as it appears.

What Happened This Week: 4/15-4/21 Edition


This weeks question is for those of you who have quit an MMO (so virtually all of you). What level of interaction do you keep with your estranged title? Do you forget all about it and move on to your next title of choice, or are you one of those people who turns on jihad mode and begins a crusade to bring the game and company down because they did something that caused you to quit? Do you keep watch to see if they improve upon what made you quit to begin with, or is it a matter of once they lose your interest, it’s gone forever?

I can’t explain my interest in Hellgate Global. When I played the game at launch, I wasn’t too interested in it. In a way, I had the same reaction to Hellgate as I did with All Points Bulletin, in that it was a shooter/sword/RPG that tried to combine the best of both worlds, but ended up not doing either in a unique way. Essentially, it was Diablo, but played from a different perspective, and I lost interest in the same fashion I lost interest in Diablo: Going through similar looking dungeons (often the same dungeon several times for different missions) over and over again. And yet, I’m signed up for the beta. I could not give a single valid explanation why, other than that I paid the money for the boxed copy.

1. Yoshi’s Cookie: I Admire the Final Fantasy XIV Team

Say what you want about Final Fantasy XIV and odds are your complaints are very valid. What you can’t say is that the current development team, lead by Naoki “Yoshi” Yoshida, lacks motivation. Reading the producer’s letters, I can’t help but admire the devotion and passion that Yoshi and his team have put into Final Fantasy XIV in the past few months. Development has been steaming forward, with a ton of needed updates to turn Final Fantasy XIV into a viable product. FFXIV is functionally a great game, but it needs content and direction so players are doing something other than grinding exp and taking up the same leves over and over again.

What Yoshi has proven is that the team is not above slashing content that doesn’t work, or making drastic changes to other content. Among the updates in the works are the complete removal of physical levels, reworking the battle system, changing the job titles to be more recognizable, introducing grand companies and an achievement system. You can read the list of planned and currently in-the-works updates here.

2. Omali, Why Do You Hate Gamersfirst So Much?

I don’t have a personal grudge against Gamersfirst, I just have very low confidence in the company’s ability to police their own games, mainly because the company has absolutely failed to police their own games. The titles they do maintain are filled to the brim, as I’ve said before, with cheaters and gold farmers. So although I’d like to believe Gamersfirst when they say they have the cheaters all figured out, that’s exactly what Jagex said about gold farmers in Runescape, and I have the feeling Jagex has better resources for catching cheaters than G1.

Those of you who frequent MMO Fallout are well aware that I refuse to join in on the “I hope ___ game fails because I hate ___ company” trash that populates video game forums, and that it’s rather rare that a game comes out that can be labeled purely garbage. Just to name a few examples, DC Universe is a game I harp on, and my issues are not in the gameplay, but its longevity. The original All Points Bulletin had a lot of promise, but needed a real identity as either a shooter or an MMO, but not both. Earth Eternal had less bugs than any other game I’ve ever played but had almost no content outside of kill quests.

I want All Points Bulletin to become Gamersfirst’s big title that will come out and virtually lobotomize all of the cheaters that Realtime Worlds never dealt with, that will inspire the company to run the gold farmers out of their other games. If they are unable to, hopefully Gamersfirst will be able to survive the disappointing reception. Realtime Worlds didn’t.

3. Let’s See Some More Games Revived.

Let’s go over some titles, shall we? Earth Eternal is being revived by a Japanese company, APB by G1, Star Trek Online was revived by Cryptic, Gods & Heroes is entering closed beta under Heatwave Interactive, T3fun is bringing back Hellgate London, and there are probably a few more I can’t think of right now. If The Mummy can get an MMO deal, I want to see some of these other defunct MMOs come back.

I want to see Tabula Rasa brought back, because with all the changes that the developers made in the two months before the game shut down, a lot of the community’s problems were fixed, albeit too late. Shadowbane should be brought back now that the existing version wouldn’t suffer the same problems of the original run (remember the Shadowbane reboot?), and would be run by a single, stable company. I want Dungeon Runners brought back as a free to play title with a cash shop, so the game can financially support more than three people. But above all, I want Tabula Rasa brought back, so I can shoot Richard Garriot in the face with a level 40 shotgun for allowing his team to screw the game two ways to Sunday.

4. I Don’t Have Autism.

The reason I set up MMO Fallout is because of my fascination with the business side of the genre. This is one of the few sections of the gaming industry where a company can’t just throw a game into the open, occasionally lower its price, and then get to work on the sequel. Currently, I feature over 70 MMOs on the category list, including news for games I don’t list (Guild Wars among them).

I noticed a surge in this after Minecraft really gathered steam, and that’s the amount of people who are equating what they see as hard work to autism, and I’ve had a few people asking me if I have autism. First of all that’s an incredibly offensive thing to ask someone, and as a random person on the internet it’s none of your damn business.

Next, I want to make something clear about MMO Fallout. I have a job, I work around generally between 25-30 hours a week at my retail job that I’m using to pay for my car and insurance. I subscribe to, at most, two MMOs, by virtue of my own wallet and time. Writing articles for MMO Fallout takes up a couple of hours of the day at most, spread out throughout my free time. So I wouldn’t call MMO Fallout my “second job.” More like a hobby I’m using to get myself trained for my ultimate end-game (as you’d see in my about page, talk radio).

5. Taking MMO Fallout To The Next Level

I’m going to start trying to get some interviews with different developers. When I call MMO Fallout a hobby, that doesn’t change how serious I am with expanding this website into something bigger. I have a lot of ideas on what I want to do with this blog, and simple text based articles aren’t going to cut it.

Square Enix Posts "Extraordinary Losses"


Square Enix posted a $16 million loss for Q1 2011, posting an even more bleak forecast for the rest of the year. The tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year is a major player in the report, coupled with the ongoing development of Final Fantasy XIV while the servers remain free of charge, and the lackluster sales of certain Square Enix properties.

Due to the recording of extraordinary losses, forecasted net income (loss) is revised for fiscal year.

The report also notes the cancellation of some projects, none are mentioned specifically. According to Wikipedia, Square’s last cancellation was in March over a 3rd person shooter called Gun Loco, a 360 exclusive. Square Enix has several titles still to release this year, including Wakfu, Dungeon Siege 3, Dead Island, Deus Ex, and a few others that should bolster their sales.

Square Enix Posts “Extraordinary Losses”


Square Enix posted a $16 million loss for Q1 2011, posting an even more bleak forecast for the rest of the year. The tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year is a major player in the report, coupled with the ongoing development of Final Fantasy XIV while the servers remain free of charge, and the lackluster sales of certain Square Enix properties.

Due to the recording of extraordinary losses, forecasted net income (loss) is revised for fiscal year.

The report also notes the cancellation of some projects, none are mentioned specifically. According to Wikipedia, Square’s last cancellation was in March over a 3rd person shooter called Gun Loco, a 360 exclusive. Square Enix has several titles still to release this year, including Wakfu, Dungeon Siege 3, Dead Island, Deus Ex, and a few others that should bolster their sales.

Final Fantasy XIV Bots


I’m going to use these bots in a good way, and not just because I want to simultaneously annoy the people who believe me to be paid by Square Enix to prop up Final Fantasy XIV, but also to greatly annoy the people who think I’m getting paid to associate Runescape with the cheater’s paradise that it is.

I came across these bots in Final Fantasy XIV, and promptly reported them via the in-game support system. While I was taking down each of their names, however, it did dawn on me that these bots might actually be a good sign. Back when I played Tabula Rasa in its year of existence, there were never any gold farmers. I think, overall, there was one guy (not even your stereotypical gold farmer, it was some guy in Utah if I remember correctly) we all knew who tried selling currency and high level armor for money, and he was simply flamed out of global chat, and then his account would be banned. No, he wasn’t particularly good at it.

Granted, Tabula Rasa was not a game to gold farm. Gaining currency was easy enough that you would expect heavy inflation, but there wasn’t much worth buying from other players, so not much of a market formed. The player base was also tiny enough that there was no one buying. Now, I’ve spoken with other players who tell me that the bots I saw on my server (Karnak server) are much more prevalent on some other servers, and this tells me two things: Foremost, there has to be a decently sized community, because there is a market for currency/items. Secondly, Final Fantasy XIV has an economy, because there is a desire to buy gold to buy things with.

When the gold farmers leave Final Fantasy XIV, that’s when you’ll know the game is dead. Until then, however, this truck is still…trucking?

Hallelujah! Square Enix Restoring Services March 25th


Amidst the disaster in Japan, what with the body count rising and the ongoing threat of even greater problems stemming from the nuclear power plants, it’s easy for us westerners (and more likely easterners) to forget that Square Enix fully suspended services for Final Fantasy XI and XIV last week Sunday. In a new lodestone, the team settled in to offer us an update on the situation.

As the original shut down was to conserve energy, the team at Square has been working on conserving their own energy usage, in order to bring the servers back online. This includes, as the lodestone states, shutting off air conditioning and reducing the lighting (they could also reduce lighting costs by switching to compact fluorescent, but I won’t go into that as I can already smell the angry mob forming outside my house). So when are the servers coming back on?

With these energy saving measures in place, we will be able to bring our servers back online and restore service to FINAL FANTASY XIV, FINAL FANTASY XI, and PlayOnline on Mar. 25, 2011 4:00 (PDT).

It is important to note that Square’s promise of not billing players through April (especially on Final Fantasy XIV, wink wink) is still in effect, as the company reminds its Japanese players that the services may have to be shut off again if the energy situation worsens.

More on Final Fantasy as it appears.

Sony and Square Enix: Not Billing Japan This Month


With the recent earthquake in Japan, the power companies have asked that people and companies conserve as much power as possible, for fear of an electricity shortage. In response to the warning, Square Enix has decided to temporarily shutter services for Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV in Japan for at least a week, and will not be billing players for the cycle through April. More information is expected on how long the servers will be down, although players in Japan likely have more important out-of-game issues to deal with at the moment.

Source for Square Enix

Meanwhile, Sony Online Entertainment has announced that they are suspending billing for Japanese players. The company does not host servers in Japan. In addition, Sony had linked up players to the Google relief effort where they can donate.

http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

Our hearts go out to those affected by the earthquake, and we here at MMO Fallout wish a speedy recovery for Japan.

Did Somebody Say Official Forums? FFXI & FFXIV


Given Square Enix’s history of standard features either being implemented in an unnecessarily complicated manner, or simply not present at all, I can’t say I was surprised that Final Fantasy XIV launched without an official forum. Official forums in the ages of Final Fantasy XI (2002) were not common, although many of the MMOs from around FFXI’s days now carry discussion boards. That being said, when Square announced plans to focus more on talking to the community, and listening to the community, the introduction of official message boards became an inevitability.

I may be a day late on this, but the forums are open! Players of Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV can log in with their Square ID, choose a forum username, and start posting. The forums feature sections for Japanese, English, French, and German languages. I’ve been playing around on the boards for a while, and perhaps the best area houses a list of everything that is currently in development for Final Fantasy XIV. Of course, the threads themselves don’t offer a space for discussion, rather players are expected to create discussion threads on other sections of the forums and tag them with the unique [dev post #] from the original thread. Baby steps, Square.

Either way, the forums might be a continuation of what I’ve referred to as Square’s Great Apology, but they are a welcome addition to both MMOs. At least now players will have somewhere to post that isn’t as troll-infested, ala the MMORPG.com FFXIV-sub-forums.

Final Fantasy XIV: Physical Levels Being Removed?


Final Fantasy XIV bots.

Final Fantasy XIV is an odd bucket. For starters, I love the game, but I often find myself wishing Square would stop phoning me up at 3am, drunk, weeping and apologizing for issues I already know it is fixing. Since Final Fantasy XIV launched, cradled, and promptly slaughtered a flock of geese in its turbine engines, Square has been on the job to fix and tune the game to the liking of its community. The community, despite what one might have expected, has been quite helpful, if anything for the joy of having a free MMO to play that isn’t a Korean grinder (but a Japanese grinder!)

Taking a peek at the lodestone on Final Fantasy’s website reveals a massive list of updates that are currently in the works, from small tweaks to major adjustments. Recently new objectives have been added to the list, from new loot in battle, to balancing the synthesis system. Here are just a few new additions:

  • Instanced PvE content.
  • Auto-MP regeneration.
  • An auto-attack system.
  • Making certain NPCs more visible.

There are a lot of other features in the planning and production stages that are simply aesthetic, including the addition of more graphical “rewards” for ranking up. One question on the poll that caught my attention was whether or not players would prefer to remove the physical level altogether, with a focus being placed on each individual rank. An implication of this, as noted in the poll, is that players would craft and receive gear that relied on skill rank to wear. Another feature receiving a heavy-handed look in the poll was the attribute system, meaning a major overhaul could be in the future for that system as well.

You can check out the rest of the lodestone here. More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.