Square Enix Attempting Final Fantasy XIV Damage Control

basscomm writes "Just the other day, it was discussed here on Slashdot that Final Fantasy XIV was released into the world as a buggy, incomplete mess. Now, it's been announced that due to 'generous amounts of player feedback' that lots of changes are coming (honest!). And, as a result, anyone who registers their game before October 25th will have their 30-day trial upgraded to a 60-day trial. But will it be enough to keep the game from hemorrhaging players once the free trials end?"

SE Stole My Play Time

[ThePolkapunk]

I already stopped my subscription to FFXIV. Even though I still had two weeks left before 30 day trial would've been over, they already disabled my logon. To me, this seems inexcusably bad. I paid for the game, which includes 30 days and they haven't given that to me. There's no way I'll be coming back.

How bad is it?

[Kjella]

Let's say what gamerankings says:
Final Fantasy XIV: 51.43% [gamerankings.com]
Daikatana: 54.08% [gamerankings.com]

That's a "throw it in the garbage bin and start over" rating.

If a company must perform damage control...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

... I would like them to perform this kind of damage control. You know, the kind of damage control that involves listening to your user-base.

Mind you, it's not like they had a choice.

Re:This happens when you abandon consoles for PCs

[hedwards]

Back then that largely applied to PC releases as well. Because it was difficult to impossible to apply patches after the fact, the portion of the budget spent on QA ahead of time was much greater than it is today. A lot of what's released today would have been considered completely unacceptable to developers of yore.

But it's also the release schedule, while 3D Realms took it too far, there is something to be said for releasing a product when it's done. The main mistake they made was not sticking with an engine and not defining a fixed list of features. Had they done that and released it when the bugs were fixed, we wouldn't be waiting for Gearbox to finish it up.

Nothing against Gearbox, I've been playing borderlands for a few days now and have yet to come across a single bug. Which I couldn't say at that point for the poster boy for incompetent QA that is Fallout 3.

Here's some damage control

[dominion]

Now would be the time to announce PS3 remakes of Final Fantasy VI and VII, available together for $29.

Re:SE Stole My Play Time

[JorDan Clock]

Refunding for unused time? Yeah, that's pretty much never done. But so is blocking use of an account just because you cancelled your subscription before your paid for time is up. In fact, this is the first time I've ever heard of a game (or any other subscription service) working like this. It's like Square-Enix has never bothered to even READ about another MMO beside FFXI and is trying to reinvent the wheel. Only its a square.

Re:Probably not. Sorry.

[kurokame]

There won't be, it's a "we're fixing it, honest!" announcement. The problems that don't relate to the core design may get fixed within a year or two if it's still running and receiving enough funding / staff to do anything on that scale.

Re:Probably not. Sorry.

[vadim_t]

It's not a bug in the implementation, if it's coded according to spec. However, most people would say that it's a bug in the specification.

I'm also pretty sure it violates some sort of Windows Logo or similar requirement.

Re:There aren't enough fixes in the world for this

[Omestes]

What lore?

Last time I checked Final Fantasy didn't even have a continuing story, each game is stand alone and completely unrelated to every previous game (not counting the fan service sequel on the PS2)

But then again I gave up on Final Fantasy after IX, when I noticed that my love of the game was almost 100% NES/SNES nostalgia. The only thing I miss about the series (and JRPGs in general) is that their great for being lazy, you don't have to actually do combat, you just navigate menus. Sometimes that is all I want. But Final Fantasy got boring, all of its stories are almost purely political now, and I really don't care about fictional politics. I miss the general tropes of "Giant Evil Guy Wants to Be God, something something something crystals... oh dear, a demon!" Sure, I suppose that isn't as deep as "the country of something wants to conquer the good country of something else, but a silly looking hermaphrodite saves the day!"

Re:Probably not. Sorry.

[_xeno_]

Just Cause 2 was published by them, it was made by Avalanche Studios and Eidos (according to the Wikipedia).

Square Enix has this weird publisher/developer mix thing going for them. I think they realize that as a developer they're sinking, so they're moving into publishing instead.

Re:Probably not. Sorry.

[St.Creed]

Never viewed it as too big a deal, if you really need to alt+tab out then you aren't really playing your game anyways.

The developers were with you on that. And that's one of the reasons why World of Warcraft blew the competition out of the water.

I played several games before WoW came out. Horrible, bug ridden messes (EVE Online was the worst offender here, although it kinda survived despite that. But the day before release they patched it and they actually re-introduced most bugs from the last 3 patchrounds). And it was accepted because "everyone did it like that".

And along came Blizzard with the beta for WoW - and it didn't crash. It just ran. Flawlessly. My friends and myself all bought it and played it for years because we could see the quality control behind it and thought "if something's wrong, they'll fix it - because they've already shown their level of commitment". I think I've had about two crashes over the years - both caused by addons, not the game itself.

Seriously: this attitude that you can deliver a subpar product because, hey, there is no choice anyway - look where it got WAR? Everquest? Star Wars Galaxies? Tabula Rasa? Earth and Beyond? All gone. And Final Fantasy is next, and that's not just because of ALT-Tab, but because of what that attitude tells me as customer about their customer care. Or lack of it.

Re:There aren't enough fixes in the world for this

[Daetrin]

Well part of the problem is that everyone agrees FF13 was rather busted, but people can't agree on _how_. I loved the open world of FF12, but i _hated_ the combat engine. Just program the AI and sit back and do nothing. I thought FF13 actually fixed the combat, at least _after_ the 10-20 hour "tutorial" was finished. I do miss the turn based battles (though that was something FF12 didn't have either) and not being able to directly control the other characters, but at least i felt like i was actively involved in the combat. To me a great game would be FF12's world and story (except maybe focused on Basch instead of Vaan, like they'd originally planed) but FF13's combat and leveling. Or FF10's combat and leveling. Anything but the boring mess that was FF12's system.

Obviously that kind of game wouldn't appeal to you however, which is why Squenix is always going to be upsetting _someone_ when they make a new game. It's kind of unfortunate however when they manage to upset _everyone_, which seems to have happened somewhat with FF13 and even more so with FF14.

Re:Probably not. Sorry.

[springbox]

Have you ever played FFXI before? Most of your time in the game involves long periods of waiting, so being able to look at a website while doing so is actually a good thing.

Re:Probably not. Sorry.

[szemeredy]

As far as in-house developed games go, Square Enix has always had a bad track record when it comes to MMO PC performance. They have made improvements in recent years, but only when using someone else's game engine: The Last Remnant (Unreal Engine 3 and Steamworks) and Gyromancer (Bejeweled Twist) both run quite well on PC.