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

and if you automatically believe what they say as the truth then you are fool and don't understand anything.

them saying, we will continue to do updates means nothing.

what SE conspiracy theories?

fact is, they will never say, we are not going to do anymore content, even if they know that to be true, they would lose millions of dollars, that is just common sense.

Yes but as a gaming company it gets harder and harder to keep good talent working on dated gaming technology. Your best guys are going to want to work on the new shiny game, not the 7 year old dinosaur.

So we'll get less skilled workers on FFXI. In fact I imagine we already have been getting second tier people and you can see the result. Content that is getting increasingly sparse and uninspired. How many players are going to keep with it if the quality keeps deteriorating.

So it's not necessarily a stupid move to try to transition gamers to FFXIV. It lessens the strain on your programmers to have one game to work on. It keeps everyone at the company engaged with a state of the are graphic engine. And you hopefully keep the FFXI players and gain some new in the meantime. If it works out, its win-win.

Everyone who plays FFXI for gameplay left years ago. FFXI players play FFXI for the atmosphere and the people.

If the main gameplay activity on XIV is Guildeves and SE says it is, then that combined with the complete lack of grouping will make the gameplay on XIV inferior to XI imo.

And anyone who thinks people will party on XIV is fooling themselves. If people don't need to group, they won't. XIV will be a solo MMO where people only play together in endgame just like WoW.

Speak for yourself. There's plenty of non-hardcore people that are still getting around to completing storyline and such. Not everyone plays MMO's as if they are some race to the finish.



Well SE seems to have solved the problem by recreating the experience with a different Roman Numeral attached. I don't think SE was willing to abandon the PS2 players so they just created an updated game which didn't include PS2 limitations.

You can get through the entire storyline in a month if you played a few hours a day everyday. The rest of your time spent is grinding to get to the level to be able to complete such things. As well, you said "storyline" which fits under what I meant for "atmosphere". An MMO may not be a "race" but please explain how going slower is more enjoyable? I read the cutscenes, I paid attention, I don't understand how I could get more enjoyment out of putting in a month delay between doing the missions instead of doing them all in a row. In fact, I think it's better to do them all at once so everything is still fresh in your head.

My best experience in this game was doing CoP. I went from Riverne A to completion in two weeks with a static. We had to schedule around full time jobs and commitments but we still completed the entire thing in two weeks of a few evenings a week. That's one of four expansions down in a week. RotZ is much shorter, I did ToAU as it came out, but each update only lasted me a day or two (depending on if there was a JP midnight wait in between quests).

And about grouping and FFXI/FFXIV, forced grouping is a blessing and a curse. You get people that are more patient (i.e. can deal with BS a whole lot better) through forced grouping, but you also get less people as well as make it harder to play catch up if you're a new player. Everyone here seems to be thinking that forced grouping makes this game awesome, but please explain why I always read posts from people completely unable to advance in this game because they cannot find a group to do mission X or BC Y? If forced grouping was truly such a wonderful thing, why do so many people avoid repeating missions with others?

FFXI would probably have 20% of its users if it didn't have the coating of a FF title on it. In fact it would probably have closed servers already if it had some obscure name as "Battle for Vana'diel" and skipped the classic jobs from FF titles as well.

Of course even WoW is living on the fact that it is a Blizzard product, and that they always have made quality games. Even if their MMO would be bad, they'd have people sticking with it as a huge solo game on servers.

idk if SE is stupid or what but if they wanted a guaranteed success they should have done a Chrono MMO.

Edited, Sep 1st 2009 1:40am by Lobivopis

The one positive out of that interview is that they did admit some people will decide to stick with XI. So hopefully they will keep that in mind and not pull the plug on it. I still can't say I trust them though.

I honestly think at this point it's going to be harder to get people staying on FFXIV for a long period of time. We'll all try it out, some will stay, but I think alot of us will come back to XI, that's if we even leave in the first place.

Many of us have put in ridiculous amounts of time in FFXI, and still have tons of things to accomplish. If you've been playing FFXI for 5+ years, the nostalgia always brings you back, it's not necessarily a good thing, but it's what happens. It's also what makes new games seem meh, even though it's usually not the case.

Unicorn at peak times still hits upwards of 3500 people, meaning server population is much larger than that. All servers probably reach 2000-3000 people at peak times. They can't even combine servers yet cause it would be far too many people, hell there's two servers now that you can't even go to cause they're overpopulated.

There might be a 2010 release date estimated for XIV, but it's probably late '10, and knowing SE and they're delays we're probably looking more towards 2011. This is all assuming testing and betas go well. I'm just going to keep playing FFXI until XIV is officially out and I've decided, XIV is great and I'm sticking to it!