Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

[TeacupNinja]

Final Fantasy XIV May Come to Xbox 360, Vita, Mobile

Naoki Yoshida discusses new platforms for the MMO.

October 20, 2011

Square said last month that Final Fantasy XIV "greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy brand, but they've recently been working on version 2.0 in order to breathe new life into the property. The game's producer & director, Naoki Yoshida, recently announced a closed beta for PlayStation 3, and has now spoken in a new interview about expanding the game to additional platforms.

According to Yoshida, the PlayStation 3 version is currently a priority, but an Xbox 360 release isn't out of the question for the future.

"The one thing to regain that damaged player trust is to keep those promises, and one of the promises was to release a PlayStation 3 version," he said. "We made that promise long, long ago, and we still haven't kept it. We made that promise not only to the players, but to Sony as well. The first thing that we need to do, to regain that trust, is to fulfill those promises of bringing the PS3 version. Our priority right now is getting that version finished."

"Of course, because the game is developed on the PC, moving it to the Xbox 360 platform wouldn't be that difficult, but as we said before, the thing we have to get done first is getting that PS3 version done. Once that's done, we can take the next step from there. We are continuing our talks with Microsoft, but then you think, maybe next year Microsoft might be announcing their next hardware, and so our decision is do we wait for that next hardware? So we're going to wait and see what's happening after we delivered what we've promised."


Chocobos in Final Fantasy XIV's PC version

Yoshida also discussed the possibility of the game receiving an app for other platforms, such as PlayStation Vita andsmartphones, that would allow players to check in-game stats.

"Currently this is all post-2.0, but because we're doing a reconstruction of our server system, in those plans, we're going to make sure that the servers can be accessed by outside devices such as smart phones," he said. "Not just the Vita, but also smart phones, so that kind of access will be allowed. What that will open the door to is things like applications that people can used to check their inventory, or check the market and purchase things from the auctions. Those are the things we are laying for in our server foundation, so we can be ready to implement those after 2.0."

For the full interview, head over to RPG Site.

Final Fantasy XIV's beta will likely hit PlayStation 3 in 2012, with a full launch expected in 2013. Version 2.0 is expected to be released on PC in 2012.


Source - IGN



Teatime with TeacupNinja: This is where I put my opinion! I honestly can't wait if they do this, it has me amped for the Ps3 release, as for the 360, I'm a bit iffy about it. I've always been a Sony fanboy. Microsoft....kinda doesn't deserve such a title IMO. I've looked at gameplay for XIV, looks fun. I don't care about the system or if they've tarnished the game from XI. I play games for the fun factor. Since I am a casual gamer, I hope XIV will bring my adventuring taste to it's climax while XI holds me over! I also know this article is late, but I just wanted to see if I could find anything. I also did some more digging and called my Gamestop where I lived, asked if there are any copies and the guy was like "No but we got people pre-ordering it." which gives me more excitement than needed! WOOOOOOOOO! Sorry if this post came out crappy. I tried.

[ShepardG]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

Unfortunately, your post didn't come out like crap, however...

You seem a bit delusional as to what is currently going on with XIV. You did say you played XI, have you played any other MMO's to compare XI to?

Here's SE's biggest problem, they have this base of producers/designers/directors that's been with the company since PS1, that... for lack of a better term, aren't adapting. All the things you dislike in XI? well multiply those times 10 and you have XIV at launch. It was really really bad. Like... really bad.

People got "re-assigned" etc. after 1 month of the game being out. I mean i personally haven't played a worse game than XIV at launch. So they've been trying to improve it, but it quickly became apparent that the game's foundation was rotten and that to create anything worth while, it would have to be completely re-built from the ground up. Which is what their doing. What they also decided to do was continue the current version of XIV so that the most addicted players would still be around when v2.0 released.

I can't fault them, but this porting of XIV to the 360/ps3/vita/smartphones is so far down the line, as to be almost non-exhistant. I mean they have to make a game that people actually enjoy playing on any sort of scale more than 50k subs a month.

I can honestly say what I think is going to happen, imo, when v2.0 is released... the game might be a gem to play/experience/etc. but nobody is going to give it another chance, it will have this massive ammount of money sunk into it, and then 3 months after launch, becomes free2play, and 1 year later, is taken off line.

[Raydeus]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

It is sad that right now CCP's DUST514 has a way better prospect than XIV on the PS3.

[jenova_9]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

mew! FFXIV is already far better than it was at launch! It is improving and 2.0 with this great team and direction really know what they are doing, mew! It's done a complete 180 and it's remake will prove that mmorpgs can be fixed and improved!

and of course they can make more big sales on PS3. so porting it to PS3 makes obvious sense.

I don't think any 360 plans would work out with Microsoft now. Maybe if they bribe them enough but I dunno.

Vita and Mobile is a wasted investment for an mmorpg, they should concentrate on the platforms that would help it sell successfully, PC and PS3.

[Neverslip]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

Interesting that you found SE saying that essentially FFxiv was coming (eventually) to a Microsoft platform. I had not heard that SE has even given that possibility hope. Thanks for finding that. I mostly play on 360 but have a PS3 for the exclusives Sony gets that appeal to me (Demons Souls, 3D Dot Heroes, SotC/Ico remaster) so it's nice to see that it may come to the console I prefer to game on. It probably won't come for a very very long time since the PS3 version won't be out for a long time either. I'll probably get it for PS3 if the wait for a Microsoft launch looks to resemble the wait peopel have endured for anything at all regarding FFxiiiVS.

it has me amped for the Ps3 release, as for the 360, I'm a bit iffy about it. I've always been a Sony fanboy. Microsoft....kinda doesn't deserve such a title IMO. ... I play games for the fun factor. Since I am a casual gamer.

A casual fanboy? The terms for me are mutually exclusive. Being just casually fanatic just doesn't make much sense to me. Hell, Fanboyism in regards to gaming platforms makes about as much sense to me as having an asshole surgically implanted in one's mouth.

[Kailea]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

FFXIV on 360? wont happen, on Vita or mobile? ....no on the XBOX 720? maybe

[Raydeus]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

Vita and Mobile is a wasted investment for an mmorpg, they should concentrate on the platforms that would help it sell successfully, PC and PS3.

Maybe they'll go the DUST route and implement market/AH access, LS-chat, Mog House management and other things like that on portables instead of the actual game. But it really depends on what features XIV has by then.



In DUST it makes perfect sense to do it that way because the market, resources, communication tools and everything that's meta accounts for a big chunk of the gameplay. So a portable DUST app will be pretty useful considering just how complex gameplay can get in EVE.

PS > If CCP doesn't screw up that is, if they do it will be just a gimmick at most.

[Icemage]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

Considering the current rumors that are swirling that suggest that both Microsoft and Sony will "probably" have new consoles on the market by 2013, I find the percent likelihood that FFXIV will appear on either the Xbox 360 or PS3 at this late date to be very close to 0. As a major publisher, I'm fairly certain Square-Enix probably has an inkling of what MS and Sony have in mind, and if anything they should be targeting the next generation where they aren't hampered as much by the technical limitations (namely: RAM) of the current gen consoles.

S-E also has a big hurdle with respect to Microsoft and their attitude toward subscription services on Xbox Live. My understanding was that the original reason FFXIV was supposedly only coming to PC and PS3 was because of Microsoft putting up resistance to people logging in to PlayOnline (and the resulting amount of confusion), as well as disagreements regarding fees. None of that actually changes even with new console hardware, so there's that too.

I personally think FFXIV is toast no matter what Square-Enix does. The game has been basically written off by everyone, and while it has improved many things, it can never get back the marketing buzz that it needs because at it's core, it's "just another fantasy MMO". Were it not for the presence of (a few) familiar classes and (a few) familiar spells and items, you wouldn't even think it was a Final Fantasy game.


Icemage

[Raydeus]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

Microsoft policy is the reason why DUST is PS3 exclusive, which I'm very ok with.

As for XIV I want to believe YoshiP&Co. will do something good with the game. But considering how much time and money has already been spent on SE's F-35 I'm not sure it has much of a chance against the competition unless they manage to make a miracle happen. Since they need nothing short of Epic for 2.0 to be able to get another chance.

/doubt

[Malacite]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

The PS3 trailer is being shown at this year's E3, that's already been confirmed so that might stir up some badly needed PR.

[Hayde]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

At the moment, one of the biggest problems is SE and Yoshida is by large listening and molding FFXIV according to what *current* subscribers are advocating for and surprisingly...even from the NA side. While this sounds good in theory, a game developer needs to have some degree of a backbone to stand by their own personal integrity of their work; it seems to me like they almost currently have no idea what exactly to do with the game. Complain enough, and they'll surely slip a hotfix in, as evident by patches so far. You can tell the game is very confusing at the moment because leveling from 1 through 50 is ridiculously easy (if not perhaps, a little boring) and then you get slapped with virtually nothing to do at end-game but a grindfest that's leagues worse than WoW/SWTOR/Rift--and hell, dare I say, the current state of FFXI?

There has been a large amount of complaints by the low drop rate percentage since Ifrit, and even going by the forums this weekend it seems the issue has not been fixed even with the new speed chest runs with Aurum Vale. More to that problem; once you finish your AF you're pretty much stuck grinding between a few 'instanced dungeons' for loot. I believe I told Murphie this the other day; the current FFXIV is not a game you can play 'hardcore', IMO even if you wanted to...like if you actually logged on for more than--oh I want to say, 5-6 hours or more a day every day...you quickly lose interest within the span of a month. Of course, that's my personal opinion and I'm sure there's plenty out there that disagree. I just find this a very awkward situation, as I'm usually drawn and addicted to MMO's for long periods of time--with classic FFXI and WoW taking up much of my time during those years.

I can see 2.0 succeeding, although probably not to Wada's (or maybe even Yoshida) expectations. Returning players from Japan alone as well as loyal SE/FF fans will likely push the subs back to 100,000 to 200,000; however if Wada plans to go back to their initial plans of competing against WoW in the millions...they're going to need to pull something spectacular out of their asses. SWTOR was already met with strict criticism in terms of comparing to circa 2012 MMO standards, and 2.0 is likely going to measured by whatever 2013 has set in its place (likely going to be whatever MoP/GW2 has to offer.) However, various recent articles have indicated that Japanese developers and gamers firmly believe their games are superior--and perhaps they just like the grindy, tedious atmosphere that most of us have grown tire of after years of playing that genre.

All in all, Yoshida just needs to stick with his vision and go with it. Far too many of the official forums' bullshit include fools who wish to relive their vanilla XI/EQ1 experience of making the game the most tedious, grindy, annoying game in existence. It's almost sad how they every attempt and patch thus far has been met with stiff opposition to 'reverse the changes' in order to make the game 'harder'. I have no idea how they believe a once-failed project on XIV, who is already taking up a large amount of resources and money to rebuild, can possibly sell if they make an EQ1 clone in 2013.

The current population numbers are a bit worrying for SE, though this has been anticipated since the subscription fee came back up. No one server has higher than roughly 1000-1500 players at any given time according some parsing done on the official forums. That means right now, the game probably has an average of 25k to 50k subs at best. If this was any investor-owned MMO IP like western games tend to go, it would have gone under or went F2P long time ago.

[Aeni]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

To piggyback on Hayde's post, Yoshi P and Co would do well to heed the advice of other MMO developers. Here is a sample of the way these developers think (taking an excerpt from Ghostcrawler's - aka Greg Street - blog)

Wow, Dungeons are Hard! - World of Warcraft

The bottom line is that we want Heroics and raids to be challenging, and that is particularly true now while the content is new and characters are still collecting gear. They’re only going to get easier from here on out. We want players to approach an encounter, especially a Heroic encounter, as a puzzle to be solved. We want groups to communicate and strategize. And by extension, we want you to celebrate when you win instead of it being a foregone conclusion.

On the other hand, we don't want you to stumble your way to victory. We don't want you to be able to overwhelm bosses without noticing or caring what they’re doing. We don’t want healers to be able to make up for all of the mistakes on the part of the other players. While at the end of the day, dungeons may just be gussied up loot vending machines, we want you to do more than push a button to get the loot.

Ultimately, we don’t want to give undergeared or unorganized groups a near guaranteed chance of success, because then the content will feel absolutely trivial for players in appropriate gear who communicate, cooperate, and strategize.

The basic tenet which the current WoW development team have adopted is to communicate with the players. They lay out the underlying goals of an expected content, then flesh it out, and then acknowledge of some of the player feedback. In short, do not develop a game on the sole basis of player demands ... you develop a game that will engage a player and ask for that player to invest a bit of him/herself. Currently, FFXIV seems to lack this at its core with the recent updates. It's almost as if they're catering to a cacophony of FFXI players rather than trying to divorce themselves from that game but at the same time trying to develop a game which takes the parts that work best.

I still think WoW is the gold standard for MMOs with the structure that is built in place. No one needs to copy every single piece of that but when they've already solved an issue, then why not borrow that solution rather than trying to reinvent the wheel?

[jenova_9]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

but you see, mew. People constantly debate what should be easier or harder. But usually harder makes mmorpgs feel more rewarding and attention grabbing than breezy easy mmorpgs.

even so, FFXIV is still turning out to be more user friendly than FFXI, mew. So more people are likely to reach the top tier content.

and they still have room for challenges, like the difficulty option for primal battles and stuff, mew.

but ya, one thing they should improve is make sure it is reasonable when it comes to making money and getting up to date gear without soley relying on AH, crafting and tedious farming, mew.

also expanding the kinds of events and adventureous things to do, besides main story and stuff, would be nice too, mew!

And of course the top tier content should be where most of the events are focused on so people have so much to do and stuff! and all the classes and stuff should be viable and of course add more fighter classes that are cool like ninja, geomancer, dancer, etc.

There are great ways they can make this more fun, mew =^^=

but ya, people should give it a chance, of course even with FFXI influence, it still won't be exactly like XI or anything else, so its flavor will be something most can enjoy if they simply adapt to its wavelength and type of mmorpg, mew.

[Mezlo]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

What Hayde said. Once you get to the end, all you can do is spam instanced raids for hope of some nice gear to drop at horrible drop rates... I'm looking forward to the updates and 2.0 however. If you're a new player coming to ffxiv now, there are tons to do to keep you busy and interested in the game. For those of su that started and played alot since inception, meh, not much to do...

[Malacite]

Re: Final Fantasy XIV (14) May come to 360, Vita & Mobile! (Old/New News!)

Well, that's also largely because so much time has been dedicated to fixing a broken game. So I cut Yoshi a bit of slack in that regard.

Otherwise I agree - you want to listen to player input closely, but not cater to the whims of every mouth breather. Ironically this is something Tanaka understood, but he stood too firmly in his own resolve/ideas and that bit him in the ass. Thus far Yoshi's done a fairly decent job and it remains to be seen how things progress. I don't think they've quite gone too far in the opposite direction just yet.

As a side note, I still feel like Abyssea & CoP were the 2 best things SE's ever produced. Abyssea for the ease of access and just plain fun (it's still the only content ever in XI where I feel players are adequately rewarded for time invested) CoP for the wonderful story rewarded for overcoming great (but not impossible) challenges. I'm really hoping either 2.0 or XIV's 1st expansion will bring in some CoP-like content.