Fujito 4gamer Interview

Pretty much as expected really. Most of those things have been said before.

Would it really be that hard to port it over to PC core?

FFXIV already stole 95% of the models they could copy them easily.

I will not be playing "sortie and segs and oddy NM's" (oh my) for the next 10 years. If there is no new content coming our way ever again I'm pretty sure that news is going to be the final nail in the coffin.

I wonder how old this interview actually is. Didn’t FFRK end service fall last year

SE has given up on gaming and is going the way of Konami

expect Final Fantasy slot machines

Just look at ff16, Said FU to their fanbase to make a A- devil may cry.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/08/07/square-enix-says-final-fantasy-xvi-sales-are-now-not-meeting-expectations/?sh=4a76379d4386

I will beat ff16 once I download it on pc for free - enjoy the 25 dollars till i beat bumba

XIV is in the middle of a massive graphics overhaul, so they're really missing a huge chance to take advantage of the work they'll need done already happening (instead of being forced to rehire or pay employees for work that was already done)as we speak.
I dislike private servers in general, but at this point I kinda want one to do the port themselves and see what happens.

they wont even let me get to the floor till I beat a Ice tiger and a Tree... :(

With the sheer number of private servers out there, you know that if each of the teams collaborated, they could probably have made their own MMO from scratch by this point.

Square-Enix shifting the blame to Sony for not having sold enough PlayStations definitely tells me they didn't get a lot of money for the exclusivity. Ouch.

No crying about the bribe after you take it. Shoulda known better.


That's, significant.

They'll definitely make it up with NFTs though.

Lol 30th anniversary event confirmed.

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This actually brings up a question I've been curious about for a while. Will private servers even WORK after the official servers shut down? I never played on one but I thought about trying it out back in like 2016 or something when I got bored with voidwatch and was mostly playing FF 14. I remember one of the steps involved with connecting to the private server required updating your game client to the current live version, and at the time my client was almost a year out of date. They had some convoluted way of accomplishing that through the check version button if you didn't have an active paid subscription. I remember thinking to myself "what happens if the official servers ever go down and you can't do this step anymore?"

I really have no clue how they work but now that we're at the point we are I'm going to go ahead and posit that question just because I'd like an actual answer. If anyone knows I'm genuinely curious here if the live servers shutting down would break something in the private server code that made them all non-functional too.

It won't break anything. The better servers provide their own files, and the game client won't need any further updates if the live servers shut down.

Enjoy your 8 months of announcements for a Red Mog Pell.

I used to run one of the bigger private servers up until earlier this year.

The answer is "they'll be fine, possibly even better off."

Every time Square updates the retail client, it shifts a lot of IDs around for items/events/NPC cutscenes/etc which makes a lot of hassle for private servers. Because of this, many private servers simply run on old versions of the client and never update. Even the ones that don't run old versions of the client and update each time that retail does will just run whatever the "last" version ends up being, so no big deal.

Private servers don't interact with XI's live service in literally any way, so there will be no issue if/when retail servers ever go down. The biggest issue that the private server community will face is that they will no longer be able to go onto retail to test/capture data to use while programming additional content and will instead simply have to guess how things actually worked based on old wiki/bgwiki/ffxiah posts, so that would suck but it wouldn't break anything necessarily.

I have heard that from the spending-to-earning ratio point of view, XVI is one of the more successful games made by S-E recently (not sure how much truth was in that information). I think that S-E is just going down "the Hollywood" path. Just being profitable is not good enough, it needs to be profitable enough so they can show numbers to their stockholders. The consumers (in this case players) are less important.

It is not about Square-Enix per se, but I do feel, that way too many companies consider their clients as an unnecessary obstacle between the company and clients' money.

So I'm not that surprised by what was said in this interview.

The main concern has clearly been the stakeholders for a while. Final Fantasy 14 is their flagship product now, but I can tell you now that game's lifespan will be shorter than 11's. There's a fair amount of discontent amongst the 14 playerbase, and the general consensus is that even over there the design has gone downhill over time. New content and storylines are growing more shallow and jobs have been homogenized to the point almost all the different classes within the same role feel very same-y. I think heavenward was their strongest expansion myself, and that was the literal first expansion after the realm reborn release. It's kind of funny how that lines up with 11's timeline, because most would agree that the strongest expansion here was Chains of Promathia, which was the first major expansion for the NA community (Zilart came bundled with the base game so it kind of doesn't count).


Thanks for that. I was curious about that for all this time and it's nice to have an answer. The reasoning makes sense too. If all the ID's get shifted around between different versions then a server would only work with one instance of a client. If two clients had different IDs for the same resource it would be impossible for the server to properly talk to both of them without errors.

Pretty sure they meant the source code/game engine and the entire development environment, not models.

Plus FF14's models are visibly different from ff11's, if you compare them side by side they aren't even the same lol.


Just go look at how many indie devs successfully developed a mmo with mediocre success, v.s successful titles from other popular indie genre like metroidvania/rogue-lite/farm sim/R18+. That's about how hard it is to build a mmo from scratch.

It's easy to imagine how doing this and that being easy but in reality they are probably not that easy lol.

Yeah, quit bitching about RMTs.

Thanks to those hundred of naked galkas in South Gustamberg that we are still playing FFXI.

Long live China

Not just that, but once SE live goes offline, then a "final" version of the client exists and can easily be packaged up into a custom installer, then have modifications applied, all without worrying about a future update breaking stuff.

One of the more successful post-death private games is Earth and Beyond Emulator.

https://www.net-7.org

It emulates EA's EnB servers along with some client mods to allow players to re-experience the game.

I'm not sure anyone gives a damn if HQ gugool jaja has an extra polygon or two. If you mean the player models, I'm not sure why you think that's a hurdle when all of the mods for xiv show updating minor changes to models to be an insignificant hurdle in the grand scheme of things.

Toss out the source code and just emulate XI behavior instead. Even XIV's code has all of the variables/stats from XI from what my time in it has shown me. So long as it can run the damage formulae and other calculations you don't have to bother unraveling ps2 limitations at all. You don't unravel xi's old code to make things work in the new engine, you edit the new engine to make things xi.

The real hard part is the manpower required to put in 15 odd years of finishing touches and redoing things not already copied over to xiv (eg they have to rebuild all of the zones and playtest everything to make sure anything easily handled via automation like quests didn't end up with a bug.)

Of course even this isn't really viable for SE since we know from experience in xi that SE didn't keep documentation, backups, or anyone that knows how to edit the xiv generation of spaghetti code on staff.

only the global version of FFRK ended. the JP version is still going

And what about all the money i invested in FFRK?

Where is my refund?

XIV's engine is fundamentally incompatible with anything regarding XI.

They didn't simply rip models out of XI and put them into XIV, they remade them from scratch. XI's models are mirrored, which means the model data is split in half. XI also doesn't use any physical-based rendering materials, so there are no bump, normal, spec maps, so even if you could re-rig the model to a skeleton XIV knows what to do with, you would have one terrible looking asset. They also don't have nearly all of the models from XI. There are nearly 1800 unique models in XI (This does not count gear models).

You would either have to rebuild XI's servers and networking protocol or re-write the entire network layer for XIV's client.

Let's not forget cutscenes, particle effects, and event data. All of these would have to be remade.

This interview is quite sad. The slow death of an IP by a company that refuses to invest in modernizing its toolset. They certainly could upgrade it. It would take some specialists, but it could be done.

That's not to say they couldn't do *something* to throw us a bone and keep the game alive beyond its retail lifespan.

It deserves better, its unreal how they are treating this game atm. Surely Yoshi PP only wants his MMO on the map.

Ultimately all good things come to an end.

It's sad and frustrating, but we all knew this would happen at some point. SE are a business and not exactly the best run business at that. After the complete disappointment which was the 20th anniversary we all knew where this was going.

There isn't enough interest in the game to warrant remastering/remaking it or even making new expansions for it. It sucks. And we are in a vicious cycle where if we vote with our wallets and unsub, they will just shut the game down anyway.

14 doesn't seem like it's getting the funding it really needs either, it's going to be just like 11, to be a game that SE milks for profits until players get annoyed enough and start unsubbing.

FFXI will always live in our hearts

I didn't understand the "sad" part. I don't mean to be rude, but the guy clearly says that they've decided to keep the game going because it was still profitable. Where is the profit going? Surely not towards making the game more enjoyable for us.

What we have been getting are changes to values on the database.

INSERT INTO master_level (ml, exp_required)
VALUES (50, 500000000000000);

That's a wrap boys, good job!