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Role Playing (Games) XBox (Games)

The Hassles of FFXI on the 360 56

Posted by Zonk from the double-the-interface-double-the-fun dept.
Via GameSetWatch, an IGN article looking at the frustration and hassles of the SquareEnix PlayOnline interface on the Xbox 360. From the article: "If you've played FFXI previously, the process of going through Play Online to get into and out of a game session may seem familiar. On the PS2, which didn't have a complete Online solution like Xbox Live, Play Online's existence was justified and even welcomed. On Xbox 360... not so justified, and definitely not welcomed."
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The Hassles of FFXI on the 360 More

The Hassles of FFXI on the 360

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  • What is square thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NVP_Radical_Dreamer ( 925080 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @03:35PM (#14249899) Homepage
    Before you mod me troll, hear me out...

    I am a LONG time fan of square, from back in the days of the original nes final fantasy games up though the "Secret of XXXXXXX" games and even up to FF7, but recently they have been pissing off a lot of long time fans such as myself by implementing dumb ideas like this. It seems that they are running out of ideas. Crystal Chronicals when compared to such gems as Chrono Trigger looks like they arent even trying anymore. There is no more story, there is no more feeling for the characters, there is no more fun. Just empty shells of what could have been really great games.

    I dont want to see them fail by any means, but I refuse to buy into these half assed attempts they have been making.
    • Well your going to have to wait for games such as bluedragon from a developer called Mistwalker. These are the guys that were producing the old games you remember. Dont you wonder why the games seem different after FF9? Its because its not the same team. Sadly the mistwalker games wont come on ps3, so i'll never have a chance of playing them.
      • Actually, it seems they were different after FF7, FF8 just seemed overly simple in some areas while being way overcomplex in others. Finding your way around was a chore and the weapon systems sucked ass. Not to mention the hassle of sucking spells for hours out of enemies, just to run out 5 minutes later...
    • After all, they did just release this awesome GBA game called "Final Fantasy IV". It's the latest and greatest of the FF series and you should definitely give it a try before giving up on Square/Enix.

      It reminds me of the glory days of console RPG's on systems like SNES and PSX.

    • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by oGMo ( 379 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @04:34PM (#14250601)
      I am a LONG time fan of square, from back in the days of the original nes final fantasy games up though the "Secret of XXXXXXX" games and even up to FF7, but recently they have been pissing off a lot of long time fans such as myself by implementing dumb ideas like this. It seems that they are running out of ideas. Crystal Chronicals when compared to such gems as Chrono Trigger looks like they arent even trying anymore. There is no more story, there is no more feeling for the characters, there is no more fun. Just empty shells of what could have been really great games.

      I'm not saying you're a troll, but I wonder exactly what you're talking about here. Specifically, what "dumb idea like this" you're referring to. Also the sanity of the article in question.

      First, assuming you're referring to FFXI when you mean either "dumb ideas like this" or "there is no more story," this is far from true. FFXI has a very deep and long-running storyline; the fact it takes a lot of work to experience may turn off a lot of people, but no one is demanding they play it, either. In fact, I warn most people away from FFXI unless they have time to dedicate.

      But the story is just about as Final-Fantasy-esque as they come. (There is even Cid!) I will not spoil it (and indeed I don't know a good bit of it, having not yet played all the way through it), but there is far, far more than your typical MMO, involving multiple large story arcs. Both current expansions (Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia), as well as the upcoming Treasures of Aht Urhgan [playonline.com], are for the most part story additions, consisting of a large number of new missions.

      While the game is obviously adapted toward a large multiplayer world, you still have all the typical Final Fantasy bits you'd expect, like riding chocobos [rpgamer.com], fighting large critters [rpgamer.com], summoning familiar faces [rpgamer.com], and going to weird magical worlds [rpgamer.com] to save the planet. But you do it with your friends, and you are the characters that experience the story. (Given the fact FF1 and FF3 had "you" as the characters, not predefined roles, this not something unusual to the series.)

      But it takes a major time dedication. This is not something you will finish in 50-100 hours. This is for people who want to have the time they spend now still paying off after a year, two years, three years down the road. (Although you will be "into" the game in a much shorter period of time.) It's not for everyone.

      On the issue of PlayOnline, having used POL on a regular basis (being a FFXI player since the PS2 release), I can say (along with many who have played it since the PC beta) that POL is very nice. This is one benefit of "some companies" to leave the online handling to publishers; when they need an integrated multiplatform framework, they're not locked in by the platform.

      The article basically boils down to "waah, this UI is just like the PS2 version!" What do they expect? The interface provides uniform features to two other platforms. Unless Microsoft wants to provide its Live functionality to other platforms, only exclusive titles are going to use it. This is something XBOX fans had better get used to.

      Additionally, it's somewhat humorous to note the complaint about 6GB of space taken up for the hdd image. The X360 drive is suprisingly small... even the PS2 HDD is 40GB, and the FFXI image there (which loads completely and requires no disc) is 12-16GB now with all the expansions loaded. Yes, this is a big game. Don't complain to Square about having a lot of content, complain to Microsoft about having restrictively small media.

    • Re:What is square thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @04:36PM (#14250642)
      The Square Enix of 2005 is not the Squaresoft that produced all those great games you remember. After the company invested over $250 million (US) in a poorly-planned CGI movie production facility that was quickly obsoleted by competitors running on commodity hardware and Linux, the "Final Fantasy" movie they planned to recoup the loss with bombed in nearly every nation it was released. Hironobu Sakaguchi, long the creative heart of Squaresoft, was the director of the movie, and was ostracized by the rest of the employees afterward finally gave in to Japanese tradition and quit. It's a pretty safe bet that similar fates befell most of the other Squaresoft old timers, and some less than stellar management after the failure of the FF movie lead the company into massive debt, which opened it up for a takeover by Enix.

      Now Squaresoft is just a brand name Enix markets to bring in easy cash to gamers looking to feed their hunger for nostalgia. Smart gamers would do well to stay far away from future FF games...
      • Hironobu Sakaguchi, long the creative heart of Squaresoft, was the director of the movie, and was ostracized by the rest of the employees afterward finally gave in to Japanese tradition and ended his life at the end of his own Samuri Sword.

        Yeah. That's more like it.

    • Crystal Chronicles [wikipedia.org] should be compared more to Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest [wikipedia.org], or even Secret of Evermore [wikipedia.org], than Chrono Trigger [wikipedia.org].
    • "from back in the days of the original nes final fantasy games up though the "Secret of XXXXXXX" games."

      Heretic! If you were truly a fan, then you'd know that "Secret of Mana" (Seiken Densetsu 2, sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure) and "Secret of Evermore" (a one-off for us ignorant gaijins, like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest) have absolutely nothing to do with each other!

      Burn him!

      (I liked Enix games better, anyway.)

      "and even up to FF7, but recently they have been pissing off a lot of long time fans such as my
      • "As much as I'd like to see an English version of Dragon Quest V for the PS2 (or IV for PSX, for that matter), I'm kinda hoping DQVIII continues to bomb in North America and Europe. So long as it stays a Japan-only kitsch thing, there's hope that it will stick with the fundamentals, making those rare DQ expeditions across the Pacific that much more valuable." How can you say this? Dragon Quest 8 is a far better game than any game Square-Enix has published in the PS2 era. Saying that you want it to fail is
        • "Saying that you want it to fail is as counter productive"

          You missed part of my statement:

          I'm kinda hoping DQVIII continues to bomb in North America and Europe.

          Don't worry, enough rabid Japanese fanboys bought DQVIII to keep S-E in solvency for a long time to come. Look at the pretty picture with the slimes [1up.com].

          "I Would say the majority of FF fans started with FF7 because it was the first PS FF, it had 3D graphics and it had a compelling storyline."

          Given the choice between the two, more people bought it becau

  • Maybe they missed the hastle of dealing with SE all together. The useless GM's, the horrible IT staff that can never keep things running (wait no, the game is being "DDoS'd"), and the emergancy maitnence that never ends when it is supposed to (I didn't want to play on my day off anyways).

    But then again, M$ Fanboys should be completely used to such problems.
    • Would you rather have X360-only servers so you can play an MMORPG with the 4 North Americans and Europeans that could get an Xbox and the 2 Japanese who bothered to buy one? Wow, you'd have an entire party then!

      If you're going to have universal, cross-platform servers, this is something that needs to happen. Deal with it.
      • Maybe you missed the point of my post..?

        And last time I checked, the internet had all kinds of computers / OS's / etc connecting to it, and it doesn't crash every 5 minutes for a day while the internet gods repeatedly fix the same problem, only to later blame it on total BS.

        Unless SE can learn the meaning of Customer Support (Useful GMs, mostly working systems, not fucking over BSTs, etc) I'll take my money elseware.
        • "And last time I checked, the internet had all kinds of computers / OS's / etc connecting to it,"

          Yes, and software for all of those platforms, for example, can assume that the underlying code is taking care of TCP/IP communication. Throw the PS2 into the mix, though, and you have to have an interface that's completely self-contained.

          S-E made POL to be a common interface between multiple platforms, and they had to go by the lowest common denominator: the PS2. So while POL on Windows could have been stripp

  • So this article says... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So the point of this article is that Square designed Final Fantasy IX to include a complete system for registration of players, management of accounts, and now that they are trying to port it to the Xbox360 which already contains that funtionality...they are having a hard time.

    Wow, big suprise there. While I am not going to absolve the Square-Enix team, they're taking a game made for one platform, and putting it on another platform which has a totally different set of features they are required to use. I do
    • SE did the same thing with the PC release of FFXI. All I wanted was to double click an icon, and have the login screen appear. Then the pick character screen, then the game. Instead I got 6 levels of menus, a full email and web browsing client, etc. And the UI that was made for a PS2 (why can't I bind my spells to a single keystroke, instead of alt-Fx?). Its just Square being Square and putting in the minimal effort.
      • You mean square put in the extra effort to add all those features you are complaining about. That's what you meant to say right? And honestly who cares about the xbox360 version. Anyone who had any interest in playing FFXI already plays it on the PC or PS2. It's like people think because they ported the game to consoles they should change it to meet all the console fanboy needs.
        • No, I don't mean that. Those features were an annoyance- they *might* make sense on a PS2, but not on a PC. I have an email account, IM programs, web browsers, etc. I don't need or want new ones. Don't make me click through 6 or 7 screens worth of them to reach the damn game.

          I agree that the 360 version won't be very big though, with the PS2 and PC versions being years old.
  • We PC players had to put up with the exact same crap. Eternal install times, stupid interfaces, bad jazz music. Then there were the patches...

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @04:02PM (#14250215)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ...it wasn't welcomed on the PC version, either. Yet there it is, patching itself uselessly every time I played FFXI. Maybe they felt bad FFXI didn't have as many bugs as SWG so they thought they'd get as much of their quota of MMO annoyance out of the way as early as possible.

    I had to get all the way to the ultra-tedious resource gathering and tracking which stores were open when before I remembered what kind of game it was.
    • "...it wasn't welcomed on the PC version, either. Yet there it is, patching itself uselessly every time I played FFXI."

      It's there because you're sharing the game with PS2 players.

      Consider: you're on a PC. If you want to get together with a few of your online friends, you have various means of communications at your disposal, such as email and IM. You can even get yourself a windower and do these things while playing the game.

      However, there are also people playing on the PS2 (such as myself). The PS2 has
  • "The biggest culprit is frame rate, with the game chugging to keep up with large-scale environments and the large number of potential players, just like it did on the PS2. Character models and environmental detail are also too low for a reasonable next generation title."


    I guess the PS2 can't keep up with the game.

    or maybe its a beta.
  • "it's still pretty slow at copying data over from DVD to hard disk. "

    From the DVD to the what? The Core system doesn't have a hard drive, and because of it I distinctly remember Microsoft saying that no game will actually require the hard drive. Are they now backpedalling?
  • "And then, of course, there's the nuisance of having to fully log-off in order to exit a game of FFXI."

    Try /shutdown instead of /logoff next time.

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