20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

I don’t ever remember them saying this, even when I’ve asked for over a year about the same problems with auto target, nobody ever brought this up. But even if it’s true, which I have no reason to disbelieve you, it just shows that every single question is worth asking, even if they’ve previously shot it down. What they have said they didn’t have plans for in the past may not be the same “no” back then as it is for current ffxi era.

I’m not saying they are lying when they say they “can’t” do something (they might be), but man, they sure do find ways to do some of the things they say they can’t do. So I just take whatever they say with a grain of salt until they flat out refuse to fix whatever.

I wish back when they concluded Adoulin or when PS2 support ended with content going forward. That they had invested resources into getting it off the PS2, it would have been an easier endeavor when they had more resources, alot of adjustments and current content would have been pushed back maybe by 2-3 years but at least the game would have a future. I know a drip feed of content is what keeps some community sticking around but i really wish they would have put their time into migrating off the PS2 instead of Voracious or even Rhapsodies.

This...Rhapsodies is fine, I kinda enjoyed it. but I don't enjoy Voracious story that much so far. I'm only doing it for Aeolian Edge neck. They'd rather get large amount of money for VR but not using the same money to solve technical issues for better gameplay, arghhhh.

I'd rather see them fix auto target issues than slog through long *** VR only for a neck. But I guess it's my fault that I wasn't complaining on forums hard enough!

You can crowdsource millions for FFXI and S-E will say ty and invest it in blockchain.

Doesn't matter if revenue stream goes up or down, they are not spending a penny over the bare minimum to ducttape this old *** game into the next month.

It's a miracle you're even getting those shitty missions.

It's funny to see Square Enix actively trying to anger and alienate their fanbases, very much like Blizzard did over the past few years.

It seems like they seen blizzard do it and was like nah hold my beer we can do worse better and faster.

"Do you guys not have phones lives?"

tbf, I think they did okay

Some of their answers were wrong and they ignored both of my questions, but they avoided saying anything directly antagonistic and were a bit less guarded than they have been in the past.


edit: woof does this ever show how low my expectations are

In retrospect, I should have asked if they would consider making a public bug tracker.

"We currently have no plans to do this"

This was about as abysmal as I expected thanks to all of the herpaderps. I told Funk he should try to get a real interview setup where he represents BGWiki and asks real questions and gets some answers. The dev team always seems to never quite treat these AMAs with players like they do the interviews they hold, even with Western outlets.

You have it backwards, Rhapsodies was a love letter ending for the fans. They did not intend to continue on this long since there was no expectation for the population to rise again.

We also don't really know how much it would cost to do some of the fixes, like decouple from POL. It's possible they are bullshitting, but they've been pretty consistent about it being a challenge over many interviews. I assume it requires a complete rewrite of large parts of the game, and it would probably be a major project and make the game unprofitable.

The hope is after TVR, they get another similarly sized budget so they can do the next phase on whatever they want.

I'm typically pretty critical of their excuses, but I'll give them a pass on decoupling from POL. It is not straightforward, they would need to design a whole new launcher from scratch and change huge portions of both client and server process as well as their update deployment workflow. Maybe the benefits would be worth it, maybe not, but it's considerable effort.

I'm kind of surprised everyone's reception of the AMA seems to be so negative. Here I thought it was a great and transparent display from the dev team. It seems to me that they share a lot of our concerns and criticisms, and if presented the opportunity would happily implement a lot of the stuff we've been asking for.

Personally, I'm really happy with some of their answers. It shed a lot of light on some of the limitations they have, and answered some questions we've had for a long time.

I'm fine with the answers

I'm less happy with some of the questions

Probably because you have views like this:

FFXI has been reverse engineered so heavily that other people actually understand enough about it to call SE out on their excuses. They were not transparent, and most of what people are asking for is not actually a huge investment, does not require a new engine, is not anywhere near the scope they claim. You might be willing to believe their lies and excuses, and that explains your take, but others know better.

Or they could just like... not do that and be less shitty? We don't need anything to inflate Spicy's already ridiculous ego -- the man might burst if the hot air balloon that is his head gets any bigger.

Oh I wholeheartedly agree that SE should be investing more money into this game so they can do the kinds of things we're asking for, and that it would be a worthwhile investment. But the budget they are operating on is quite small and anything that requires any kind of significant backend work just isn't feasible with the team and budget they have. The devs are doing the best they can with what they have, and it's pretty clear that they care deeply for the game and want a lot of the same things we do.

Edit: In regards to what you're saying... this specific thing DOES need a new engine because it's probably tied to Playonline restrictions. I imagine if we ever get off Playonline, then it's something that would be much easier to solve... it's getting there that's the hard part.

How much time have you spent reverse engineering FFXI, analyzing FFXI network traffic, or doing anything that would give you this knowledge? Do you have any concrete reason to believe playonline would effect anything inside FFXI? The only part of playonline that remains when the game launches is a single structure that gets passed off. Private servers don't even use playonline to launch the main client. Why do you feel so confident speaking as if your completely unsubstantiated thoughts are fact, when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about?

I think this part of the code is well understood enough via almost two decades of reverse engineering efforts that there is enough community knowledge to determine if this is really feasible or not. It wouldn't be difficult to establish if it's really something that is going to require that level of effort.

My feeling is they see it less as "this is a lot of work" and more "We're afraid to poke at it because we don't know how it works and are afraid something will break".

This is delusional. Yoshida's division is not solely responsible for MMOs, first of all. It also handles series such as Dragon Quest Builders. So them working on a non-MMO with XVI is not new ground.

Secondly, there's no indication I'm aware of that they're "being forced to do it." Yoshida is a self-professed Matsuno fanboy, and various other members of the XVI team coming off of XIV had worked on entries such as XII; XVI is clearly a passion project, harkening back to past Matsuno games in tone. And it's frankly the best looking single player Final Fantasy we've gotten in over a decade.

XVI's success or lack thereof (lol good joke) isn't going to have any effect on the MMOs' budgets, least of all XI's. "Speaking with your wallet" is ineffective at communicating a specific idea ("divert resources to this instead") when you aren't actually communicating to the company directly with words at the same time, which can obviously be difficult to do with any visibility.

No disagreement that the leadership's obsession in NFTs is stupid af, though.

A few years ago Fujito (I think) alluded to doing some back end server work and didn't specify what but he basically said he was afraid this would cause the game to break.

I assume a lot of the hang ups with technical changes boil down to this.

The answer is probably to give them resources to test it safely then roll it out with a team larger than the 5-6 currently doing everything. The problem with that is they could spend the whole year's budget on a white elephant project and then there would be no content for paying customers. It all goes back to SE just giving them some free money, which seems to be a problem as they're expected to have XI pay for itself.

Which is kind of silly, because XI doesn't get to keep any of its money to invest in itself. I realize that's how businesses work, but still... you'd think they could give them literally anything to help keep the project moving and growing.

I think you're thinking of the Freshly Picked sometime in the last year where he said he discovered some box in the server room and didn't know what it did. It was simultaneously amusing and alarming.

We only have estimates of how profitable it is, so it's all vague. But if we assume 10 million a year is the revenue and the 'profit' is 40% afterall the the expenses including amortizing the office space, salaries, benefits, and dev costs for new content, the 4 million would still need to go to SE as 'profit' to keep the game going. Then a budget gets decided after that. if they invested all of its profits, then the game decomes unprofitable or just break-even and may get shut down.

There's no way around the logic since SE is a business. The only way to get a bigger budget is to show growth and profitability. I think that was Matsui's pitch for the 20th. Which is why I was a bit nervous with the negativity, SE could see it as a wasted effort and ask him to go year-to-year on the bugeting again. I hope they get another 3year budget after this year.

YoshiP is the producer of XIV and XI, he should not be working on anything else at all. Also many of the staff and money from XIV (and since they merged staff now xi) are working on and being funneled into it to make sure they get it out of the door, and you can very much see that from the style/designs of the game being very similar to XIV and it being his new baby. His pride will force him to invest everything into it, and if he has to rip money from anything else (including XIV and XI) he will do it. He runs XIV and XI and can do what he wants with the money they have available, he does not have that kind of power of DQ because he is not the producer of that.

They are pulling what they did with XI to make XIV many years again again to push out 16.

I won't give them any of my money, anyone else can make up their own mind.

WANT TO BUY DRAGONQUEST X ONLINE IN TRUE ENGLISH NOT HALF ASSED TRANSLATED ***SQUARE SUCKS BIG FAT ***, its literally FFXI 2.0

ok