I don't even know why companies are still making MMOs on this oversaturated market. Look at the past three years and all the MMOs that failed to meet everybodies expection and sales.. SWTOR, Rift, Warhammer, DC Universe, Conan, Vanguard a few years back etc. (with SWTOR being the worst offender), even GW2 didn't do that well and The Secret World failed too despite offering a somewhat different experience in gameplay. LotRO is one excpetion that actually got more players after switching business models. As long as WoW is still running nothing's gonna change that. FFXIV was made by people who clearly had no idea what they were doing and all the outsourcing to china probably didn't help too.
This is the part that completely baffles me.
Hiromichi Tanaka is the guy chiefly behind the development of both XI and XIV. He was the chief game designer for XI as well.
They knew what worked and what didn't work from their experiences from XI. They had a template and an expansive market to study.
They even had plenty of lore and mythology to draw from in that it's, you know, Final Fantasy.
So rather than draw on all of that to make the best game possible, they designed XIV with an entirely different back end which resulted in a ridiculously sluggish user interface, bland and unimaginative zones to explore, a lack of quest content, a horrible fatigue system that limited a player's time leveling a job, an item decay system that not only encouraged player interaction, but practically REQUIRED it and an in game market that made no sense and was tedious to access.
Most MMOs are timesinks when it's time to endgame. FF XIV was a timesink just to go fucking shopping.
And they didn't even create new races. They were the same exact races with different names. Lazy
AND where is the 'Final Fantasy' in Final Fantasy XIV? At the start, the game had:
No chocobo mounts
No summons
No real interactions with the crystals
No real interactions with moogles
No accessible airships
No familiar, tried and true FF themed jobs/classes
The game should have been called 'Generic Fantasy With Races Stolen From Our Previous MMO.'
And what they really should have done is taken one of their more famous FFs and made a MMO version of it. Final Fantasy VII Online, using that world and all of its concepts, would have been a grand experiment.
People that play FF want to interact with those characters. Can you imagine a MMO where you accepted jobs from Avalanch, worked with President Rufus to solve a mystery about Mako energy leakage in one of their plants, took quests to rescue refugees from Tifa, unlocked Cloud's motorcycle as a mount and fought Sephiroth in some endgame capacity?
I am not saying FF VII is MY favorite FF (although I am replaying it on PC and enjoying it), but this is such a fucking no brainer that if S-E hasn't thought of it yet, there is something seriously wrong with the suits that run that fucking company.
They should invest the money and development time into something else. They also need to stop making FF13-based games.
Neither of these will happen.
They have sunk too much money into FF XIV and are counting on the business model. It would not surprise me at this point to discover that the real reason they started snatching up Western IPs was because they needed something to make up for all the subscription fees lost from FF XIV's pathetic state at launch.
And as for FF XIII, they had it all mapped out with the whole 'Fabula Nova Crystalis' thing. Resources were allocated and schedules set.
And anyway, FF XIII-2 is a fucking brilliant MMO. Fuck the hate this game gets. It absolutely does not deserve it.
Personally, I'm more baffled, given S-E's financial concerns why:
A.) Final Fantasy Versus XIII hasn't been released yet.
B.) Final Fantasy Type 0 was never released to western audiences. There is too much fucking money in the west not to do this, and the decision to keep it in Asia reeks of stupidity.
