Square Enix looks to be furious at faked TV reports about fanatical players of MMORPGs (Final Fantsay XI being a case in point).
Hiromichi Tanaka, lead developer for Final Fantasy XI and Senior Vice President of Software Development, tweeted thus:
“The other day we had enquiries from that station about a piece on ‘introducing online gaming’ –it was pretty suspect and we refused to participate, which seems to have been the right thing to do.
As expected the contents were completely different to what they said it would be and were totally negative.
Just what the hell were they playing at?”
At issue was a previously introduced TBS programme showing MMORPG fanatics as maniacs with no life whatsoever. A follow-up was aired showing how wretched the life of a (presumed) Final Fantasy XI player was:
2ch’s notorious detective abilities soon spotted that the date displayed on the clock was actually from December, not February as was claimed in the show.
The individual featured also made certain suspect appearances previously on the station, not at all consistent with the tragic tale given in the show itself, here as a “pro-wrestler”:
With TV stations evidently happy to manufacture reports of otaku deviance it seems little wonder they remain so despised in Japan.
I am having trouble trying to understand why a TV station would want to rip on Otaku. I would think that Otaku are a substantial source of money for them ?
Maybe they just don’t like Otaku because they hate us gaijin coming over to Japan telling everyone were going to be the Pirate King or yelling kamehameha at them or something. If I was Japanese, I would probably be annoyed at that.
The media and idiot masses simply like to rip on Otaku because they think they are inferior and weak.
Its just a mass form of bullying.
japanese tv shows trolls otaku, cheap way to sell a show indeed, and public being brainwashed to fear the otaku more, i suggest anymore troll tv station needs their station be raided by angry otakus
On the other hand, this is the game that spawned this news event as well: http://www.massively.com/2008/08/16/its-pandemonium-in-final-fantasy-xi/
18 hours and still not get the boss whittled down.
An educated individual would know by default news, report and pretty much everything shown in TV is fabricated and wouldn’t give it the time of day.
Then again educated people aren’t exactly the majority of the population.
Final Fantasy XI is worthless. There is a thread on this if your interested in reading why.
Final Fantasy XIV is looking to be a rehash of the balancer system from final fantasy II
Anti-social person who doesn’t get allong with parties (thus can’t survive in FFXI detected).
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI since 2004, its f#cking awesome and gets better with every update. You’re probably a World of Warcraft noob who played FFXI for 2 weeks and never made it past level 12.
The lack of solo play with optional grouping in FFXI killed it for me, if you have no friends to play with then be prepared to progress no more! This is how WoW succeeded by not doing something horribly frustrating, instead people enjoy the game for its broad accessibility.
On the other hand, FF14 looks very promising at the moment.
Yeah it’s quite awesome with its pathetically infrequent endgame content updates and new mini-expansion whoring. Not to mention the original no-life 10 hour plus fights they incorporated such as Pandemonium Warden mentioned below, or Absolute Virtue. The latter, to my knowledge, STILL to this day, some 3 years later, has yet to be defeated without some kind of glitch. Not to mention the abhorrent original state of Jailers leading up to AV with JoL being unkillable and the pop item droprate being around ~30%. I have never seen a development team that sneered so much at its playerbase with some completely horrible design decisions. But I guess it all works out in the end since there’s always some addicted fanboy who runs to their defense whenever someone dares to question whether the game is any good or not. Which is kind of funny because the mini-expansions planned for this year are a direct about face to everything that FFXI was designed to be:
“In Abyssea, concerns such as the over-population of battle areas and the need for large time investments will be a thing of the past. The development team is hard at work creating a world where parties can engage in rewarding battles with powerful foes and collect prized equipment with the least of fuss.”
They’re tossing away the integrity of their (bad, myopic) design after 7 years to make some quick bucks as the server population collapses before FF14 comes out.
And all of the above ignores the endless treadmill that the game is with its 1% drop rates, which is nothing but a cleverly crafted game mechanism to keep you recycling the same tired content over and over in a poor excuse to obfuscate the lack of new content while keeping you paying forever. How are those HNMs, Kirin, and Dynamis that you’ve been doing since 2004 treating you? Is your Linkshell capped on those items yet?
Hope you’re still enjoying your Wings of the Goddess expansion which has yet to be finished over 2 years later while S-E releases some more mini-expansions. Cha-ching!
And seriously, what kind of game DOESN’T get better with each update? Is that even a defense? Seems you forgot about that worthless fish ranking update.
Thats business for you.
Most big shot companies have seen and done the stunts of having DLC locked onto disks (Resident Evil 5).
Deliberately releasing multiplatform games that clearly do not work on another console (Bayonetta).
Rehashing decade old game interfaces and play styles(White Knight Chonicles).
Not beta testing a game or attempt major gameplay and multiplay fixes before said game releases to the public(Modern Warfare 2).
Redesigning games to appeal to a different market rather than the original fanbase(C&C 4 Tiberium Twilight).
Those just listed above are what most gaming companies have done or will try because at the end of the day they could hardly care less because they get your money and you get their product.