Hiromichi Tanaka: "we're not sure" on FFXI future...Follow

I think anyone who trusts them now is a complete tool. And that's why I say they can take XIV and cram it where the sun don't shine. I could take them abandoning XI if they had FINISHED it first. Imagine watching the SW series, and you watch I-IV and in the middle of V, they cut the movie off and say "that's it". THAT is what SE is doing.

Edited, Aug 25th 2009 4:32am by VrKurosawa

Given my track record with being able to deal with badly programmed, incompletely documented, and poorly archived code, I say bring it the **** on.

I would love to have the chance to rewrite the game (server and client) the way it should have been written in the first place.

I love how SE keeps saying that doing a client update to FFXI would be "too hard" when they **** out five or six Final Fantasy remakes a year.

This just wont happen at all, it's blatantly obvious they fear an everquest 1 > everquest 2 situation where we all refuse to swap and the new game being a flop(even moreso now that it has been seen it looks almost the same as FFXI). They really don't want FFXI to carry on now, they want to push us all off onto the new game and carry on paying them on that. This can be seen by how many similarites they put in to make the transition as easy as possible...even the races are the same. Given how they are cloning FFXI as much as they are its easy to see they want and plan for us all to be moving onto there and that without us moving it wont succeed at all, this game is more aimed and pulling us over and bringing back old ffxi users than claiming new. The more the game appears the same the more sure and obvious it is they will kill FFXI off asap when it goes live.

With this company and the way we are all seeing them in a different light I can honestly say I would not be suprised if they closed the servers down shortly after the new game is released.. even moreso if we don't swap as quickly as they like and the money men get itchy feet.

The horrible part is if they had done all this and kept the job/xp system the same I would maybe not feel so bad about starting again...but seeing how the new game seems pretty but ultimately not something I like the sound of they are just killing off my game and replacing it with something I have no intrest in.

Honestly when I saw the announcement of Final Fantasy 14 at first at E3 and watched the promo movie I was like OMG HURRAY! I even went by the info desk and had a talk with them about their intentions, but its kinda funny when the info booth knew nothing but the fact it was getting released on a console first and that the only thing getting ported over was the linkshell community group I looked at my gf with a look like someone had kicked me in the stomach. Honestly loved this game to death and to hear that FF14 was coming out I immediately knew that they have plans to drop FF11... After all its the fate of most if not all MMORPGs where when the sequel comes out the latter dies... Its so depressing... 6 years of work and to add injurty to insult they mass banned a bunch of accounts followed by a change of billing where a decent portion of the population if wanting to continue the game must secure a credit card from a specific financial institution to continue playing makes you really wonder what intentions they have.

Back to E3 after hearing the news I walked over to the merchandising portion of the booth found that my good friend's anime and imports distribution company was handling presenting toys from Kotobukyia and he was like "you're going to play ff14 aren't you" and I looked at him and strongly said hell no...

The question remains, after all the crap thats happen and all of us so upset at SE are we all seriously passing up on FF14? I am because of the way I was treated but if the didn't occur I most likely would've trasnfered from FF11 to FF14 regardless of how much I hated the idea of a new game after all the work in FF11 was about to vanish... It be a lie to say I wasn't at least somewhat looking forward to a change in play.

It makes sense for SE to try and keep whoever refuses to transfer to FF14 in FF11 but try their best to take a blow at WOW. FF11 = 500,000 players (maybe) while WOW is may times and it isn't released internationally according to my inquires with my JP friends they never had the opprutunity to join WOW and don't really know what it is. WOW is obviously countering with their expansion Cataclysm to try and keep their member base interested but even they have gone through some crap with the release of Wrath of Lich King in which all the instanced gear presented at the end of Burning Crusade deemed useless causing scores of players to quit.

Basically the fate of FF11 our beloved game of up to 7 years is about to take a fatal blow to FF14. Its going to happen on just the premise that its very difficult to focus on two MMORPGS at once.

While I hate SE I miss the community in FF11 and hate the fact FF14 will split up the community we've practically lived in for the last 6-7 years.

Edited, Aug 25th 2009 6:56am by GummybearOdin

I took it as: "We are not sure if we are going to add another expansion after the add-on."

Not: "We are unsure on if we are going to add anything after the next update."

Yeah. The only real way for the community to keep FFXI going is to not buy FFXIV. Hopefully most people like myself will not be transferring.

Which most of the whiners round here still do, thus proving SE's views right that most players will accept whatever they're given and carry on paying because they're still happy spending weeks of their lives camping the phat lewt in whatever form their particular desired e-peen enhancer is found in the game.

This bears repeating.

I've yet to see a game where everyone who plays it is happy with what the developers did. This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of unresolved issues in XI, that there isn't room for improvement and expansion -- but, I wouldn't fear. They will keep it up for as long as someone is paying for it. They would love it if you paid for both.

Personally, I've come to peace with the eventual death of XI. I love it; I still play it, and I'm going to take a lot of good memories from this game. Nothing is forever, though, especially not a video game^^

But, no need to write your virtual wills yet. You've got at least a good 2-3 year span before you have to worry about anything, and that's assuming that XIV isn't a colossal flop.

Creating a "service" that bans thousands of legit players for little to no reason also makes no sense from a business standpoint.

You are assuming SE has the slightest clue what they are doing. I'm not sure what happened to Square of old or perhaps they were always run in this manner and just fail completely at managing and maintaining an MMO and should have stuck to off-line console games, but from my time in FFXI and what I've been seeing on the forums since I quit they don't seem to be concerned about their loyal playerbase.

FFXI was fortunate to start out with a large community of FF diehards, myself included, that only knew Squaresoft made excellent console games and were sure that FFXI would be a blast to play. This was indeed true, but most of the players had little to no exposure to Squaresoft as a real entity. Up till we had to deal with their support shortcommings and political stance in-game they were simply a name attached to a really kickass line of RPGs. Perhaps alot of the fault is in their transformation from Squaresoft to Square-Enix. I couldn't say.

Today's MMO market has changed alot. I've seen new MMO's released and crushed by WoW. SE has lost a huge advantage in the fact their playerbase is no longer naive. We know how they are likely to handle maintenance and support in FFXIV.

I for one stopping giving them my money not because I disliked FFXI but because I grew to dislike SE as a company so I refused to continue to support them. I won't be purchasing FFXIV on the same grounds and I know I'm not alone.

Their poor treatment of FFXI players makes absolutely no business sense at all especially when they are counting on these very same players to reach critical mass in FFXIV so making your argument on "business sense" alone makes no sense :p

Edited, Aug 25th 2009 9:50am by Amp

For clarification, they've never stated that it would not be a Final Fantasy title. They said it would not be a sequel to Final Fantasy XI and would have no relation to it.

Good DLC are my last hope. I'd love to see them as map/mission packs. For example, we could get the Far East and a few missions with it. It will give us new places to merit and maybe a few new NMs. I really just want some new places to explore every now and then.