20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

Yup.

This applies to all games tbh. Games are only "alive", because players find the gameplay fun enough to provide values for them. A game will die if nobody find it fun nor play it anymore.

There are gacha games that released in 2021 and shut down in less than 1 year after. Only because nobody play them. "Old" and "new" doesn't even matter in this case.

People think FFXI is dying because of the lack of expansion. But I think it's more than that. It's also because many modern gamers prefer fast food gameplay aren't interested in FFXI gameplay so they aren't joining. But older generation gamers playerbase will eventually decrease as they get even older and stop playing games or die.

Even if SE spend money on the next expansion, if new generation players deem FFXI gameplay worthless they aren't going to play it. Then FFXI will die eventually.

And even if SE made a policy to keep FFXI server up indefinitely even if it loses money, FFXI would still be "dead" with 0 people on the server if nobody play it.


A game doesn't have to die simply because it's old. But they will die if nobody play them. Like that 2021 gacha that shut down in less than 1 year.

If you don't want to see it die. Fight! Tell your kids, or friend's kids play FFXI. If they have fun they'll stay. Then FFXI will stay alive. With new Expansion or not.

If you tell kids to play FFXI and they decide not to because it's not fun for them, and nobody else get new players to join. Then FFXI will die eventually, even with new expansions. No amount of ads or money spent on an expansion can sell it if the market deem it worthless.

And if you already fought but unable to change anything, I'd just move on with life and accept the fact that the market doesn't need FFXI anymore. It's more healthy this way.

QFT

worked for Activision QA briefly in 2010 and their company motto that particular year was "Good enough isn't" and every time I saw that ***on a banner or a t-shirt or a mug i was just like *** You.

I understand the pursuit of an ideal, I understand shooting for the stars, but this was not that.

It's not about new players*, it's about keeping what you have happy and willing to pay you money. FFXI still has a lot of paying customers compared to the rest of the market. You know what XI is like? XI is like a members only gym and stuff like everquest, gw2, eve online is like an outdoor free gym full of bums.

Not only does the game have a lot of paying players, but some of us pay a lot of money and would pay more if we were kept happy. I spend over £60 a month on this game, usually happy to do so.

Nobody is expecting an expansion every 2 years like wow or xiv gets, but after 6 years (since seekers of adoulin) on the 20th anniversary we still can't get one? Then to top it off, after annoying everyone with a 5 hour stream (they can't even be bothered to add subs on) showing nothing, Square Enix make them shove really overpriced merch in our faces? Why are people angry? idk it's a mystery I guess.

Not even demanding more for free, asking them to take our money for an expansion and they still won't do it.

They literally didn't even do the bare minimum of showing us new stuff from VR to look forward to...not even that.

tfw end of stream



to be clear I don't blame matsui and other developers, I blame the person in charge of the budget. Cause they even had the gaul to say XI has a huge profit margin LOL

*you know who is more likely to promote the game to others? happy players, word of mouth is how you market a game now and not paid pr.

To be fair, Everquest has likely a similar player count and keeps rolling out expansions/addons/whatever you want to call them. They're up to 28 of them. They found a way to make it work.

Their latest one offers:

The powers that be at SE just don't want to make it happen.

My comment was responding Draylo saying "not everything has to die simply because it's old". I wasn't saying SE shouldn't make current customer happy.

That Mandy cup was really nice though, perfect way to collect all those tears.

Years ago SE said they run out of PS2 dev kit during SoA development.

So the cost of rolling out an expansion in EQ is likely much, much lower than FFXI because of "PS2 limitation". They either need a reboot for a new engine that doesn't rely on PS2 dev kit or somehow obtain more dev kit somewhere which isn't purchaseable anymore. Or else they can't add new assets to FFXI.

It's not about sub number nor age, it's a huge structural problem that EQ doesn't have. Which makes SE "not care".

At this point you really do have to choose to believe the PS2 limitation stuff.

They added new abilities, animations and models. It's clearly not true anymore, if it ever was.

PS2 dev kit issue is because cutscene dats use a custom byte table (likely originally intended to save RAM on ps2). They likely have GUI or other easier method of creating these dats on a program that only runs on PS2 dev kits. They would need to create a similar GUI that does not require dev kits to get away from them.

That said, third party community has reversed most of these byte tables. Atom0s has heavy public documentation on almost all of the opcodes:
https://github.com/atom0s/XiEvents

Someone who already has this knowledge could create such a tool in a matter of days, and it's likely private servers will have one before SE bothers. Even if you rule out the ability to use third party sources and introduce someone who has no knowledge of the system, this tool could likely be recreated in a very short time by viewing their original source.

I don't feel this is a crippling structural problem. It is just lack of understanding on the part of the team, and lack of caring on the part of those funding the team. Every time these technical problems are brought up in a vague manner, I can't help but view it as simply a PR cop-out. Maybe the cost of a few days to a month of dev time exceeds the cost of maintenance of a PS2 dev kit, but if that is the case then you are looking at just a few thousand dollars anyway. It isn't a valid excuse to produce garbage.

If I remember correctly most of the new models were added during SoA. Except reisenjima zone no? They haven't add new models at large scale for a long time.

And yes they did confirmed that their workflow is PS2 dev kit reliant in an interview.

Third party developers have managed workflow for creating and modifying models in large scale without even access to source codes, much less dev kits. The formats are all well known to us at this point. We had custom dats in 2008. Ashenbubs did a remaster of half the game by hand, manually editing things, not using AI upscaling or similar technology.

Their existing workflow may utilize ps2 dev kit for models as well, but it's not something that is hard to get away from. Lack of new models is most likely due to lack of funding to have new models created, not inability to integrate them with the system.

The expansion before seekers was 2007 (wings), the only reason they released Seekers was because XIV failed and they panicked. Before this they kept saying they could never make another expansion.

Which shows when the will is there, they can do it just fine.

No way lol. They said they got an increased (3 years) funding for 20 anniversary and VR. So their funding didn't decrease, but increased recently.

And for whatever reason, Matsui wouldn't bother to spare a "few thousand dollars" out of it to write a GUI and make even ONE model and add them to the game?

And rather, they would choose to brainstorm endless creative/painful ideas to tell VR stories without one single new model, even with more money in their hands?

Something doesn't add up. This decision isn't logical.

Maybe the problem isn't that simple. I wouldn't assume anything unless I have more info.

Yeah its just a complete shame, even if it took them a long time it would make people happy and more optimistic for the games future.

You're entitled to your viewpoints, but private server and third party communities have reverse engineered everything to the point that adding new content is fully covered under our understanding. The question isn't 'can it be done without dev kits', because people have outright proven that it can be. Third party developers can add new monsters, new complex cutscenes, new dialogue. It's not fast because nobody has made a tool to automate and simplify it, but the understanding exists to make such a tool.

The better question is 'why don't they transition away from dev kits?', and that is a more difficult question since we can only guess at their workflow. Perhaps they are not aware of all the existing solutions to convert models. Perhaps they do not trust third party software as a bridge. Perhaps they overestimate the actual cost of writing such a tool. I can only speculate.

He used an AI up-scaling program, he did manual editing to clear them up (especially the alpha textures) but it's still 95% AI upscaled texture work and without that it would of been impossible for one person.

It's still a lot of work, even with that and a great asset to the community but it's still AI upscaled.

I thought they told us a few years back (around the sudden end of Monstrosity) that FFXI does not have dedicated technical staff anymore.

Thus any of these 3P experts on FFXI's guts that have been working on it for more than a decade are likely *way* more experienced than the people making SE's next set of cutscenes.

In one of the interviews I posted, Fujito states there's a third-party contractor that takes care of the hardware itself. He is the one that deals with them.

The rest of the team does not appear to have the required knowledge.

Apologies for the misrepresentation, I was going off these comments he made in ashita discord:

Yea, they definitely said this. It was stated that the team consists of 6 members, with no developers, and none of them have job duties limited to specifically FFXI.

Absolutely true. I'm just saying that the 'limitations' are likely due to a lack of understanding or willingness. They aren't strictly limitations of their system, or as large a hurdle as they want readers to believe.

That new 4gamer interview actually touches on a bunch of the topics people are discussing. It's worth looking at for anyone who is curious.

Is this bytecode structure shared with anything else?

It seems unlikely to me that SE developed this on their own, it's not gonna be a unique problem to FFXI and presumably other PS2 game using the HDD would need something similar. The work involved seems like something that would be part of another commercial solution.

I just find it unlikely SE developed the compilation tools, interpreter/vm, bytecode structure, and debugging tools on their own. If they didn't, there's a high chance that licensing issues are involved and prevent them from using reverse engineered resources in building new tools.

I heard 3rd party hardware guy and this is all I can think of.....

If there is a hurdle that is already solved like you claimed, then it's likely more of a corporate culture/people/project management issue that no employee wants to touch or something.

I have no idea, I can only guess. Their PR team never communicate ***.

Edit: Someone above made another guess :x

To the best of my understanding, it's in-house to SE. There are consistancies with reversing done on console FFs, though it is not identical.

It's a good question for AMA I would say.

"Are you still dependent of PS2 dev kits? If yes, then why, when it was proven that you can work with FFXI code without them?"

It feels as if SE thinks every day of service since like, 2015, has been gravy for the players.

Gravy that we are thankful to pay for(clearly, we are), and gravy that can be taken away at any time. They vary the flavor from month to month, they occasionally add new ingredients. Just enough to keep enough people paying enough money to justify the cost of the gravy.

Any profits that could be used to obtain and prepare actual fresh meat to be served are either "not sufficient", and/or are funneled into other restaurants that are more profitable.

Meanwhile when a customer asks if they will ever add a new dish to the menu, they are told "Sorry, meat shortage. All we have is what's left in our freezer."


the PS2 dev kit thing always struck me as too easy of an excuse tbh. Like, you're telling me there's really no other way for a determined team to get around that particular gordian knot? Maybe they just don't have access to someone with that skillset?

I think they're just out of touch as usual, not recognizing the signs of what I see as a theme park backlash in the mmo space. I was at the bank yesterday, some 25 year old kid working there tells me his favorite game is OS Runescape. The definition of anecdotal, i know, but like..does it get any more mainstream than a dude working at a bank? idk

Maybe should find ideal way to phrase it and try to get it answered. They did say in the 4gamer interview that they are still dependant on them, I think that sounds a bit confrontational. I kind of expect it would just be ignored either way, though.

They just lie, lets be honest. Again, they stated after wings they could never add another expansion and so started doing mini expansions. Then in 2013? They made seekers of adoulin, which was a massive expansion.

I thought they did that because the PS2 hard drive couldn't store any more big updates that would include stuff like new models. Then they cut console support and suddenly had infinite space to work with.