Final Fantasy XV SPOILER THREAD

hosannainexcelsis said:
"Rushing it"? The game took 10+ years to make, in various formats. Saying it was rushed makes no sense.

Also, if Final Fantasy as a franchise is abandoned then Square-Enix Japan may as well just shut down. Final Fantasy is their identity.
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FFXV only started in late 2012 and that also includes working with a work-in-progress engine. It's best to assume that most of Versus XIII didn't make it into this game or has been heavily repurposed. I don't think you can say that development really took 10 years.

It's really just about 4 years.

Whatever the case maybe, the Final Fantasy franchise is now free of its formal shackles and I hope to see something fresh again.
 
entrydenied said:
FFXV only started in late 2012 and that also includes working with a work-in-progress engine. It's best to assume that most of Versus XIII didn't make it into this game or has been heavily repurposed. I don't think you can say that development really took 10 years.

It's really just about 4 years.

Whatever the case maybe, the Final Fantasy franchise is now free of its formal shackles and I hope to see something fresh again.
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orthodoxy1095 said:
Saying it took 10 years makes no sense.
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Final Fantasy XV may be a substantial retooling of the original ideas for Versus XIII, however many original ideas there were, but it's still basically a continuation of the same project attempting to salvage 10 years of sunk time and resources. It's not like Square scrapped the whole Versus XIII project and started fresh with XV.
 
Muntu said:
This thread made me buy game time for XIV lol. I'll get XV after it runs out or I get bored of MMORPG combat.
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Took me 2h to get bored of XIV's terrible archaic MMO combat. Especially when GW2 did it so much better and even that bored me eventually.
 
hosannainexcelsis said:
Final Fantasy XV may be a substantial retooling of the original ideas for Versus XIII, however many original ideas there were, but it's still basically a continuation of the same project attempting to salvage 10 years of sunk time and resources. It's not like Square scrapped the whole Versus XIII project and started fresh with XV.
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It wasn't even under full steam with an full crew at all times during the Versus days. Babbling about "10 years" is honestly just a misleading way to talk about the game.
 
duckroll said:
Calling a 4 year development cycle of a 6 year internal concept "rushing" is also misleading/uninformed.
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Perhaps. I don't think it's unreasonable to look at the game and see the gum, glue and paperclips holding it together and think that it could use more time in the oven and that it was sent out before it was actually fixed up.

But I guess that begs the question of it was ever salvageable.
 
duckroll said:
Calling a 4 year development cycle of a 6 year internal concept "rushing" is also misleading/uninformed.
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I don't think that's true. If we're being technical, the first year was mostly them trying to reform the game into FF15 while they had into a new engine still in development. That's why the E3 2013 demo wasn't even real gameplay but a concept trailer, it was pretty early for them to show anything.

A development team can be rushed on deadlines and the time they would otherwise need to develop a product competently and still have years to make it. I think that what you said there is an oversimplification of the challenges of development.

Especially since they did end up leaving tons of stuff on the cutting room floor, that must have taken significant time just to do that and try and piece other things together.

I'm not envious at all of the job Tabata had
 
entrydenied said:
I hope that doesn't slow down FFXVI's development and plans...

Sometimes I forget that the game is in development. Probably for the better.
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We don't even know what state, if any, planning for XVI is in right now.

orthodoxy1095 said:
It wasn't even under full steam with an full crew at all times during the Versus days. Babbling about "10 years" is honestly just a misleading way to talk about the game.
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I am well aware that the game has not been being worked on by the same large number of people for 10 years, but

duckroll said:
Calling a 4 year development cycle of a 6 year internal concept "rushing" is also misleading/uninformed.
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I'm just trying to say that painting XV as the Pure and Blameless Nomura and Tabata being cruelly abused by the Evil Square Executives not giving them enough time to realize their perfect vision doesn't seem like an accurate portrayal of events.
 
hosannainexcelsis said:
I'm just trying to say that painting XV as the Pure and Blameless Nomura and Tabata being cruelly abused by the Evil Square Executives not giving them enough time to realize their perfect vision doesn't seem like an accurate portrayal of events.
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Nobody said directors were blameless, but when you have to cut out a huge amount of things that were probably supposed to be in the game, that usually has to do with interference or deadlines.

Tons of games have had to deal with content cut just because they ran out of time, its not as if its a situation unique to SE staff or development teams.
 
FFXV is rushed in the same sense that Bioshock Infinite is rushed. We can sit around all day trying to pretend that in a perfect world given unlimited time and resources, a development team might make a work that feels more complete and more enjoyable. Or, we can look at a project that took many years to make, going through one iteration after another, and major change after major change as development progresses, and see that it is a project that needs to be pushed to ship eventually or it will never ship.

Some projects have a clear end point and given enough time it will hit that objective nicely and be exactly what was envisioned. That's pretty rare. In many cases, especially in creative works, deadlines are what drives the project to completion because it forms the structure of the discipline that is needed to just say no to new ideas and changes. I don't think giving FFXV more time in the oven will necessarily fix any of the "incompleteness" at all. I think that given no deadlines, the game would just continue to spiral through series after series of iterations, with new "better" ideas coming in at every level of production, because there's always a new idea and there's always more you can add, especially in an open world concept. Adding new things will break other things, changing one thing can introduce unexpected outcomes in other things, and all this ripple through and require more testing, more fixes, and so on.

No, FFXV wasn't rushed. It was given an over generous development period with an overenthusiastic team who were too willing to listen to feedback and try to appease as many people as possible, both within the development team and within the fanbase.
 
duckroll said:
FFXV is rushed in the same sense that Bioshock Infinite is rushed. We can sit around all day trying to pretend that in a perfect world given unlimited time and resources, a development team might make a work that feels more complete and more enjoyable. Or, we can look at a project that took many years to make, going through one iteration after another, and major change after major change as development progresses, and see that it is a project that needs to be pushed to ship eventually or it will never ship.

Some projects have a clear end point and given enough time it will hit that objective nicely and be exactly what was envisioned. That's pretty rare. In many cases, especially in creative works, deadlines are what drives the project to completion because it forms the structure of the discipline that is needed to just say no to new ideas and changes. I don't think giving FFXV more time in the oven will necessarily fix any of the "incompleteness" at all. I think that given no deadlines, the game would just continue to spiral through series after series of iterations, with new "better" ideas coming in at every level of production, because there's always a new idea and there's always more you can add, especially in an open world concept. Adding new things will break other things, changing one thing can introduce unexpected outcomes in other things, and all this ripple through and require more testing, more fixes, and so on.

No, FFXV wasn't rushed. It was given an over generous development period with an overenthusiastic team who were too willing to listen to feedback and try to appease as many people as possible, both within the development team and within the fanbase.
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That's a very reasonable viewpoint to have.

I do sense a lot of Bioshock Infinite type discord in this end result.
 
duckroll said:
FFXV is rushed in the same sense that Bioshock Infinite is rushed. We can sit around all day trying to pretend that in a perfect world given unlimited time and resources, a development team might make a work that feels more complete and more enjoyable. Or, we can look at a project that took many years to make, going through one iteration after another, and major change after major change as development progresses, and see that it is a project that needs to be pushed to ship eventually or it will never ship.

Some projects have a clear end point and given enough time it will hit that objective nicely and be exactly what was envisioned. That's pretty rare. In many cases, especially in creative works, deadlines are what drives the project to completion because it forms the structure of the discipline that is needed to just say no to new ideas and changes. I don't think giving FFXV more time in the oven will necessarily fix any of the "incompleteness" at all. I think that given no deadlines, the game would just continue to spiral through series after series of iterations, with new "better" ideas coming in at every level of production, because there's always a new idea and there's always more you can add, especially in an open world concept. Adding new things will break other things, changing one thing can introduce unexpected outcomes in other things, and all this ripple through and require more testing, more fixes, and so on.

No, FFXV wasn't rushed. It was given an over generous development period with an overenthusiastic team who were too willing to listen to feedback and try to appease as many people as possible, both within the development team and within the fanbase.
Click to expand...

This is a great post about the value of deadlines in general.
 
hosannainexcelsis said:
I'm just trying to say that painting XV as the Pure and Blameless Nomura and Tabata being cruelly abused by the Evil Square Executives not giving them enough time to realize their perfect vision doesn't seem like an accurate portrayal of events.
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I don't think Nomura is blameless of anything. At the very least, he was overly ambitious and created a project that would have had a myriad of troubles even if his team was properly staffed. Similarly, I don't think SE Suits are "evil," I think they're largely incompetent and I still question the wisdom of passing the project to Tabata in the first place.

Ultimately, I have no idea if Tabata or Nomura's vision was ever truly worthwhile, let alone "perfect." Using the term "rushed" isn't a great description of the development cycle, but neither is the term "overly generous." It's hard to think being allotted three to four years to fix a mess of a project was overly generous when three to four years is a pretty typical cycle for a lot of WRPGs these days.

At the end of the day, the game needed to just come out now. It's a sunk cost and I'm glad we're going to be done with this hell soon.
 
4 years is over generous for a project that should have gotten 0 years of development after failing to get off the ground with 6 years of prep.

Let's take FFXIV as an example. That was a huge embarrassing mess that was actually released to market. The team that took over in 2011 had to fix the mess live, while the game was running and had subscribers. They released 2.0 just two years after they started work on it. Getting twice that time to "fix" a game that wasn't even released to begin with and hence had less limitations seems pretty damn generous to me.
 
I wonder how much of the game's development fluidity had to do with luminous being unwieldy for Tabata and the development team.

At the same time though I remember Tabata's praise for MGSV's presentation and in light of those comments and now knowing we have scenarios where Ravus dies off screen and you learn of his development and realignment as a force for good through scattered notes and then you fight his reanimated corpse (yay for shock value?), I really think shit like that was a deliberate design decision rather than a time management issue.

Ugh.
 
duckroll said:
4 years is over generous for a project that should have gotten 0 years of development after failing to get off the ground with 6 years of prep.

Let's take FFXIV as an example. That was a huge embarrassing mess that was actually released to market. The team that took over in 2011 had to fix the mess live, while the game was running and had subscribers. They released 2.0 just two years after they started work on it. Getting twice that time to "fix" a game that wasn't even released to begin with and hence had less limitations seems pretty damn generous to me.
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FF14 2.0 had over 600+ people working on it at one time though, not including outsourcing houses.

They had so many people working on it that they actively shut down the rest of their AAA development to work on that title from start to finish.

I don't think its fair to compare the amount of time spent.
 
Inuhanyou said:
FF14 2.0 had over 600+ people working on it at one time though, not including outsourcing houses.

They had so many people working on it that they actively shut down the rest of their AAA development to work on that title from start to finish.

I don't think its fair to compare the amount of time spent.
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Source on this because 600 people in any project is either Hollywood accounting or the dumbest thing imaginable. Even during the lead up to 2.0 from 1.23b the staff pictures looked pretty small all things considered.
 
vainglorious said:
I wonder how much of the game's development fluidity had to do with luminous being unwieldy for Tabata and the development team.

At the same time though I remember Tabata's praise for MGSV's presentation and in light of those comments and now knowing we have scenarios where Ravus dies off screen and you learn of his development and realignment as a force for good through scattered notes and then you fight his reanimated corpse (yay for shock value?), I really think shit like that was a deliberate design decision rather than a time management issue.

Ugh.
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I mean you think about it and this game probably has little cutscenes since they can't afford to create like 7 long hours of fully animated cutscenes anymore. Like the expenses of all those mocap shoots, (we're talking like at least four characters for more than half the game's scenes), all that animation data that needs to be cleaned up, all that time dedicated to keyframing facial animation for BOTH languages, since iirc Square has a team specifically for that purpose, that adds up. And it doesn't seem like Square has really made huge efforts to make the process much faster or easier.
 
Crossing Eden said:
I mean you think about it and this game probably has little cutscenes since they can't afford to create like 7 long hours of fully animated cutscenes anymore. Like the expenses of all those mocap shoots, (we're talking like at least four characters for more than half the game's scenes), all that animation data that needs to be cleaned up, all that time dedicated to keyframing facial animation for BOTH languages, since iirc Square has a team specifically for that purpose, that adds up. And it doesn't seem like Square has really made huge efforts to make the process much faster or easier.
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Kingsglaive was such a fucking mistake. The fact that they're splicing in cutscenes from Kingsglaive so that the game's narrative has better flow makes me wish that VisualWorks just worked on cutscenes for the game instead of that fucking movie.
 
~Cross~ said:
Source on this because 600 people in any project is either Hollywood accounting or the dumbest thing imaginable. Even during the lead up to 2.0 from 1.23b the staff pictures looked pretty small all things considered.
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I don't have a source, but it was stated at one point during the game's development, along with the redirection of internal staff toward pushing the product for faster development completion.

In general its not all that uncommon for super big studios.

Resident Evil had 6 had that amount of people working on it. Ubisoft games sometimes have far more than that amount. Its what AAA gaming has done.
 
vainglorious said:
Kingsglaive was such a fucking mistake. The fact that they're splicing in cutscenes from Kingsglaive so that the game's narrative has better flow makes me wish that VisualWorks just worked on cutscenes for the game instead of that fucking movie.
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On the bright side we got the best Luna design.
qnvRexl.gif
 
Inuhanyou said:
I don't have a source, but it was stated at one point during the game's development, along with the redirection of internal staff toward pushing the product for faster development completion.

In general its not all that uncommon for super big studios.

Resident Evil had 6 had that amount of people working on it. Ubisoft games sometimes have far more than that amount. Its what AAA gaming has done.
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On an agile yearly series sure, but pulling that many people to do a rush job is all sorts of bad management that ALWAYS ends badly. This just sounds like the usual internet hyperbole that turns into fact because enough people repeated it.
 
~Cross~ said:
Source on this because 600 people in any project is either Hollywood accounting or the dumbest thing imaginable. Even during the lead up to 2.0 from 1.23b the staff pictures looked pretty small all things considered.
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As far as we know, there were over 300 in-house people. Then there was a solid chunk of work that was actually out-sourced to third party companies:

RPG Site: About how large now is the team working on FF14 and how has it - if at all - affected Square Enix development internally? Actually, I’m really interested in the way the team works so perhaps if you could describe a bit about day to day workings and various staff roles? Going back to the idea of 2.0 having an ‘epic Final Fantasy-style’ story, I’m really interested in who will be handling the scenario and dialogue writing—things like that.
Yoshida: Currently, the in-house team consists of almost 300 members. We also have outsourced a fair amount of work to third-party companies, so all-in-all, the team is fairly large.
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duckroll said:
4 years is over generous for a project that should have gotten 0 years of development after failing to get off the ground with 6 years of prep.
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I still think this is an odd way to approach what happened during those six years, but fine, I'll accept the argument.
Let's take FFXIV as an example. That was a huge embarrassing mess that was actually released to market. The team that took over in 2011 had to fix the mess live, while the game was running and had subscribers. They released 2.0 just two years after they started work on it. Getting twice that time to "fix" a game that wasn't even released to begin with and hence had less limitations seems pretty damn generous to me.
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Decisions that were made with rebooting XIV, like bringing on Yoshida, make more sense to me than some of the decisions made with XV, like bringing on Tabata. In the end, that was an amazing feat, and I'm not sure that holding XV to the standard of what XIV managed necessarily makes sense.

Hilariously though, you can look at Yoshida's GDC 2014 talk and this slide:

3steps.jpg
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Seems to remind me of problems that XV had and has. Guess they didn't learn much from that debacle after all.
 
orthodoxy1095 said:
I still think this is an odd way to approach what happened during those six years, but fine, I'll accept the argument.
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How else would you approach it from a reasonable perspective though? I mean we're not literally talking about Nomura scribbling on his napkin during lunch for 6 years here. There was clearly a small team of very senior Square Enix employees hard at work almost exclusively on Versus for 6 years. They didn't lead any other project nor did they contribute full time to assisting FFXIII. Instead they were working on something which never got to a point where the company felt comfortable with putting more manpower on to finish and release. Within these 6 years several of the staff involved left the company. As a direct consequence of the development of Versus, there was no development on Kingdom Hearts 3 in all those years.

If you feel that you have a better way to phrase it than 6 years of prep work which failed to get off the ground, by all means! I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. :)

We can't just pretend that those 6 years didn't happen, and that Tabata was someone who was totally blindsided and forced to make an epic FF game within 4 years. These are responsible adults making career choices, for better or for worse.
 
Mifec said:
Took me 2h to get bored of XIV's terrible archaic MMO combat. Especially when GW2 did it so much better and even that bored me eventually.
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It's not the best, that's for sure lol. But I'm playing it more for the story, lore and world, if I have to grind, I'll just... Watch videos on Youtube at the same time or something.
 
duckroll said:
How else would you approach it from a reasonable perspective though? I mean we're not literally talking about Nomura scribbling on his napkin during lunch for 6 years here. There was clearly a small team of very senior Square Enix employees hard at work almost exclusively on Versus for 6 years. They didn't lead any other project nor did they contribute full time to assisting FFXIII. Instead they were working on something which never got to a point where the company felt comfortable with putting more manpower on to finish and release. Within these 6 years several of the staff involved left the company. As a direct consequence of the development of Versus, there was no development on Kingdom Hearts 3 in all those years.

If you feel that you have a better way to phrase it than 6 years of prep work which failed to get off the ground, by all means! I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. :)

We can't just pretend that those 6 years didn't happen, and that Tabata was someone who was totally blindsided and forced to make an epic FF game within 4 years. These are responsible adults making career choices, for better or for worse.
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I think this was obviously terrible way to do prep work that was a holdover from their "master" structure and an awful decision to allow that to continue for years. Yes, that prep work failed to get off the ground, but I have my doubts that any game of this scale would really get off the ground with that kind of preparation structure.

Maybe another game has managed it though.
 
orthodoxy1095 said:
I think this was obviously terrible way to do prep work that was a holdover from their "master" structure and an awful decision to allow that to continue for years. Yes, the prep work failed to get off the ground, but I have my doubts that any game of this scale would really get off the ground with that kind of preparation structure.
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Sure, I completely agree. What I'm saying is, after that failed, in a normal company the game would probably be scrapped. The fact that it even got 4 years of development under a new team is already very generous for the project itself. Would you disagree?
 
Muntu said:
It's not the best, that's for sure lol. But I'm playing it more for the story, lore and world, if I have to grind, I'll just... Watch videos on Youtube at the same time or something.
Click to expand...

XIV's combat is pretty good once you get a full complement of skills at level 50 (obviously what the combat is like depends heavily on what class you're playing as well). From level 50 onwards the design of boss encounters is quite engaging as well.
 
Inuhanyou said:
FF14 2.0 had over 600+ people working on it at one time though, not including outsourcing houses.

They had so many people working on it that they actively shut down the rest of their AAA development to work on that title from start to finish.

I don't think its fair to compare the amount of time spent.
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After a point, discussing the amount of people does not really mean much.

In fact, I am even more impressed they were able to salvage anything with such a mammoth team.

Managing 300+ people effectively is not an easy task. You actually need to know what the fuck you are doing and be entirely on point.
 
duckroll said:
Sure, I completely agree. What I'm saying is, after that failed, in a normal company the game would probably be scrapped. The fact that it even got 4 years of development under a new team is already very generous for the project itself. Would you disagree?
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Yeah, if Versus XIII had been totally eliminated and someone had started from scratch on a new idea for FF XV it probably would have led to a better end product. I figure what happened is the sunk cost fallacy at work.
 
~Cross~ said:
On an agile yearly series sure, but pulling that many people to do a rush job is all sorts of bad management that ALWAYS ends badly. This just sounds like the usual internet hyperbole that turns into fact because enough people repeated it.
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If you believe my claim or not is not the question, but that's what i heard, so take it or leave it
 
duckroll said:
Sure, I completely agree. What I'm saying is, after that failed, in a normal company the game would probably be scrapped. The fact that it even got 4 years of development under a new team is already very generous for the project itself. Would you disagree?
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I agree that with a normal company, you would scrap the game totally, or at the least just stick it way, way, way on the backburner to maybe revisited as a concept in a decade.

"Generous" is just an odd word to me, because it implies some kind of benevolence from the Suits. Honestly, it sounds more like incompetence to me.
 
MartyStu said:
After a point, discussing the amount of people does not really mean much.

In fact, I am even more impressed they were able to salvage anything with such a mammoth team.

Managing 300+ people effectively is not an easy task. You actually need to know what the fuck you are doing and be entirely on point.
Click to expand...

Well you have to know what you want to focus on and put staff on those tasks yes.

As said though, Ubisoft does it all the time, so someone has to have a handle on doing it
 
MartyStu said:
Managing 300+ people effectively is not an easy task. You actually need to know what the fuck you are doing and be entirely on point.
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Yoshida was totally on point, and actually knew how to run an MMO.

Like I said, there has to be a difference in bringing a Yoshida onto your MMO and a Tabata onto your console RPG.
 
hosannainexcelsis said:
Didn't Tabata have more experience leading projects before taking over Versus/XV than Yoshida had before taking over XIV?
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Portable games are a whole different ball game compared to AAA console RPG, but yes.

And while YoshiP is more talented, he was also not tied to anything, quite literally got to nuke the world and start over keeping whatever he wanted and not having to worry about leaving anything behind because there was no nostalgia connected to any of it like there is with XV
 
orthodoxy1095 said:
I agree that with a normal company, you would scrap the game totally, or at the least just stick it way, way, way on the backburner to maybe revisited as a concept in a decade.

"Generous" is just an odd word to me, because it implies some kind of benevolence from the Suits. Honestly, it sounds more like incompetence to me.
Click to expand...

(I'm just being silly now, don't mind me)

generous
/ˈdʒɛn(ə)rəs/
adjective
1. showing a readiness to give more of something, especially money, than is strictly necessary or expected.
2. (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary.

There is no implication of benevolence in the definition of the word, nor was there any intended from my use of it. :)
 
hosannainexcelsis said:
Didn't Tabata have more experience leading projects before taking over Versus/XV than Yoshida had before taking over XIV?
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A wealth of experience developing handheld and mobile projects, sure. Yoshida was a chief planner on a modern MMO. Yoshida's experience seems more directly relevant to me to what he went on to do than Tabata's experience.
duckroll said:
(I'm just being silly now, don't mind me)

generous
/ˈdʒɛn(ə)rəs/
adjective
1. showing a readiness to give more of something, especially money, than is strictly necessary or expected.
2. (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary.

There is no implication of benevolence in the definition of the word, nor was there any intended from my use of it. :)
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Look, if you're going to quote the Oxford Dictionary definitions:

generous
ADJECTIVE

1) Showing a readiness to give more of something, especially money, than is strictly necessary or expected:
1.1) Showing kindness towards others:
2) (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary:
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You can't skip definition 1.1 :p

But enough semantics!
 
Look, I think it goes without saying that there is no kindness towards others involved in the definition I am using here, because making anyone work on this game for 4 years is not kind. :P
 
pashmilla said:
She deserved so much better :'(
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Seeing DarklordMalik's reactions tho. Haven't been that satisfied since seeing S4ke type in all caps "Where the fuck is the story Kojima?!" while playing MGSV. No streams or youtube links today?
 
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