New FFXI Expansion Crowdfund Idea

I'm not saying they don't care - the fact that XI gets updates at all is evidence that they do, but XIV is their flagship MMO these days.

XI is like a beloved elderly grandparent that gets to live in the house until nature takes its course.

I just saw once a new expansion being brought (SoA). And it was just different. Back then the content was abyssea empy farming, NNI, VW, one or other doing Legion.

The suddenly an entire new world was created where all your hard earned gear meant nothing. You were being raped by an unknown chapuli in ceizak, or an umbril at night.

The feeling of a new world is certainly an unique experience, having to learn things from zero, things where hardly amy info on bg or wiki.

So, its quite understandable why a new expansion is so wanted.



I ran out of this option already. More than once.

TLDR

This. A new expansion is out of the question because FFXI's asset creation environment can only be done with PS2 devkits. All brand new assets, IE models (characters, weapons, armor etc), animations, sprites, zones, and literally everything else can only be created with ps2 devkits, and then they use DirexctX conversion to port them over to the windows environment and into the live game. They cannot develop new things directly in windows because the original dev team never ported the process over when they got pulled off the project in 2007, and now nobody understands the original code well enough to do it.

So even if S-E transferred a full blown development team back to FFXI they literally do not have the hardware necessary to create a new expansion. An expansion is a huge undertaking, and they're afraid the couple of Ps2 devkits they have left would fry in the middle of the development process, leaving them with thousands of unfinished assets and no way to complete their design.

I think the dev kits is a lot more like an excuse to them than an actual technical impossibility.

There are so many optons and solutions in the world of programming, why they cant come up with a reasonable alternative to something so old?

I bet it's more of a legal issue than a hardware issue. It's probably not legal to break the encryption of the PS2 Dev kits.

I say this with zero knowledge of game development. It just seems like anything that logically can be done, isn't due to some stupid law.

I dont think its comparable the costs to develop a suposed to be best game of all time using lastest technology and hardware and developing a content for an old game using old technology and old hardware technology.

Today's windows environment and the Ps2 environment are radically different. This game was developed by a team using technology from 2002, and since then computing standards and development languages have undergone massive transformation. Much of the functionality from the antiquated systems and languages are no longer supported, and the current dev's have outright said they don't understand the original coding very well. The only team that was capable of porting the asset creation process from Ps2 to windows left the project in 2007. Ignoring the fact that some of them may have passed away over the past decade or that they're all scattered and may not be willing to return, even if S-E COULD reassemble what's left of that team so much time has passed and they'd be so removed from the code that they probably couldn't do it even if they wanted to.



They aren't lying when they say there are significant technical hurdles involved. There aren't any more ps2 devkits left for S-E to aquire and without them their hands are tied. This game is old, and I don't see any lack of passion from the current devs whenever they provide us with community interviews. If anything, Matsui's team is far MORE attatched to the community than Tanaka's team ever was. Tanaka's group was very disconnected from the fanbase, and Matsui actively reaches out to us with communication. So I have little reason to doubt them when they say they're facing technical challenges they don't know how to overcome.

FFXI's age is the problem. The programming that was used for the game is no longer being used or taught. SE's current teams do not know how to program content for this game and it is essentially a dead end and useless information for anything other than FFXI so no one is lining up to learn it or go to a dev team that uses it.

To create new content and assets they would likely need to move the game to an entirely new engine that they could use with PC, which is a huge undertaking and would take significant money and man power that SE would be insane to invest at this point in the games life.

A mobile app would negate the majority of problems with PS2 limitations (as far as a UI goes; not the capacity of 12 inventory lists of 80 items that need to load every time you zone or the 7 item AH limit or 8 item outbound delivery service cap).

I think it would be neat to do /something/ on mobile. Hope we get news on that front eventually.

Didn't mean to sidetrack. Just brainstorming what they /could/ do. I know it's all for naught as they already have their intentions decided internally (most likely) and as much as people want to think that the US forums of fansites are looked over, I'd guess it's only a little bit. They probably get enough "ideas" from the JP forums.

C'est la vie.

Apollo is mostly right.

i have a suspicion that Nexon has moved from making the mobile version, to porting the games systems to a new age platform.

Wasn't it some other game that they lost the source code of and they reverse engineer it so they could run it on other platforms?

I'm grasping for straws here hehehe :p

Anyway good to see some ppl caring about the idea, it's just and idea of course and it will only grow with positive attention.

lold

Yes please (throws life away)

There's never going to be a mobile client for the current game.

IIRC, they licensed the development and management of FFXI mobile to Nexon. If it's ever released, it'll be a much simplified mobile game using the names, lore, and art assets of XI with entirely new gameplay and user accounts.

Think something like a cross between Diablo and FFT. It has the potential to be fun, but it's only superficially related to the existing game.

There have been more than a few games where S-E admitted they no longer had the original source code to. I guess the idea was that after releasing a game the finalized version was a "final product" and so it wouldn't need to be revisited. Thus they could dispose of the records to make room for new things. Final fantasy 8 and the PC port of final fantasy 7 were both victims of this trend. There's a few digital articles on the subject and quite a few mesage board discussions on gaming related forms, but this is probably the most well written as far as official publications go. (Not S-E official, but gamer related article offical).

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/06/13/square-enix-digital-preservation-plans-slowed-by-lost-code/



And therein in a nutshell is the reason a new expansion for FFXI is little more than a pipe dream at this point. Twenty years later with only a fraction of the original fan base still playing, it would be a serious financial risk to take. The amount of resources they'd have to invest to get the code usable in a native windows environment would be staggering for the expected returns.

This isn't true, almost all new assets are made in outside programs on pc and then loaded into the ps2 creation kit to compile the patches. Almost all the work for monthly updates is done on pc, with photoshop and modeling software. They also stated they bought lots of Playstation2 devkits years ago and that could be hundreds for all we know. Also can we keep in mind that electronics (a ps2 devkit is a glorified ps2) can be repaired anyway. Some of you have this idea that the ps2 dev unit explodes when something breaks like a mission impossible tape or something.

Ps2 devkits



They can make an expansion, they just changed development strategy years back and honestly I think most players are ok with how they are doing things right now.

That still doesn't change that fact that they can't directly create assets in windows. With the game's current engine it's a requirement for them to build the Ps2 component first and then convert it. You're not wrong about the photoshop and modeling software thing, and it's definately a bit backwards now because they're using windows applications to build a Ps2 component only to bring it back into windows again. In fact I think the devs have acknowledged that with a laugh a couple times because of the irony of it. The problem is that they can't skip the Ps2 phase, and while they do have the conversion process, they have nothing that lets them bypass it. If they try to create or edit the assets directly using photoshop and said modeling programs the resulting files are incompatible with the game engine.

And you'll have to start with new characters. Booooo. Boooo, SE, booo.

Well, yeah. It's not a port or a client for the existing game, it's a wholly new game, and very likely a linear mobile game instead of an open-world MMO.

That doesn't mean it'll be bad, per se. Repackaging the FFXI world and story into a streamlined single-player experience could be pretty awesome. It's just not what people seem to expect when they hear "FFXI Mobile".

They could call it Vana'diel Mobile and I'd be ok with it.

I hate when companies put out absolute garbage sequels that ride on the name of a great game. Looking at you Elder Scrolls Online.

So many armchair DEVs on this forum. I love when people so confidently state "they cannot do it due to x" when they have already been proved wrong. It just reminds me of the people saying a FF7 remake was impossible and would never happen.

To be fair, Devs used to flat-out lie about what they could and could not do before. I recall inventories were so set-in-stone that they couldn't be increased and now they have us paying extra for more inventories.

::thinks::

However, they really do seem to hate how much data has to load every time we zone with 12x inventories of up to 80 items each (and every other currency/data in the Currencies 1+2 list /and/ Temp and Perma Key items). Zoning is just... horrible. It's a pity zones don't flow more smoothly actually. From what I understand about World of Warcraft, it doesn't have zone lines that need to load each time like we do. They beat us on that one.

I hope that by the end of the games life, the DSP project can remake most, if not all of the content for easier setting up of our own servers 'out of the box'. Having the source code on hand would be a gift of god, but that will never happen, unless someone manages to buy/license it.

But did it happen already?

Not yet, but you can't say that its impossible because it isn't. They have already created a few new assets and I don't doubt they are capable of creating an expansion if they wanted to. I remember so fondly arguing with tons of people on this forum, including the owner, in saying that a FF7 remake was IMPOSSIBLE, gosh they lost all source code and it wouldn't be profitable! Stop assuming what a huge corp like SE can or cannot do.

I am not saying that it is impossible. With enough money and resources anything development wise is possible, I just think that people are severely underestimating the cost and amount of work it would require.

https://www.siliconera.com/final-fantasy-xi-developers-possibilities-ps4-port-offline-version/

They have already stated that they are not interested in crowdfunding and cite developmental tool limitations and funding issues hindering any sort of remake. While they don't specifically state that they won't create a new expansion, they do state that they want to focus what resources they have into expanding existing content.

I also don't think that comparing a FFXI expansion to a remake of what many people would argue is the best FF game of all time is fair. I think that a game like the FF7 remake is going to have a much larger audience than an expansion to FFXI would have in 2020.