Square Enix Finally Scraps FF14 “Fatigue” System
- Categories: Games, News
- Date: Jul 15, 2011 21:18 JST
- Tags: Final Fantasy, MMORPG, PC Gaming, Production Controversy, PS3, Square Enix
Square Enix’s controversial decision to implement a “fatigue” system in Final Fantasy XIV in order to pander to casuals and the Chinese government has finally been revoked.
The change comes by way of the 1.18 patch:
Removal of the Fatigue System
Fatigue is the means whereby playing for prolonged periods of time progressively yields less and less skill and experience points, eventually reaching a point where neither can be obtained.
Patch 1.18 will see the removal of this system, meaning players will no longer be subjected to a reduction in skill and experience point awards even after long hours of play.
In light of this change, accumulated surplus points will also be done away with.
The stated reason for implementing the system was to make the game more friendly to casual players, although some also suspected the system was introduced in order to comply with the Chinese government’s onerous regulations on MMORPGs, as Square Enix has lately been noted for entertaining fantasies of success in China.
Whether any actual hardcore players are left to appreciate the change is another matter – even the brave soul who stayed on to produce unofficial estimates of the server populations has become fed up and quit; his last estimate, published at the end of June, showed the population on the most popular server had sunk to 1,339, down from a peak of 4,000 in the week after release.
Square Enix for its part still maintains a PS3 version “will definitely come, so don’t worry!” – though this of course rather optimistically supposes anyone was still worrying about the game.
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They should just scrap the whole thing and hire a new crew of young game designers.
Good game designers don't need to be young, sexy or whatever, they just have to make good games.
It just needs to be good. Anything good will be played. Simple as that.
Now say that the Final Fantasy series couldn't do with some fresh air.
Old game designers aren't necessary bad, but they've been making games for a living for so long that they can forget what it's like to play them and what players are looking for in a game. They also are sometimes unable to make new bold moves or come up with new ideas. FFXIII and FFXIV are perfect examples of that. I personally enjoyed some aspects of FFXIII, but the combat system was crap and the story/characters recycled a million times over. While well written storyline and characters can make a game enjoyable for some it does not make it a great game. A great game delivers well in all compartments and a game designer must know that.
Its time to scrap the company itself.
Square Enix has plenty of young inexperienced designers as well as a fair share of money grubbing fools who have no interest in playing games.
The experienced game designers quit Square a long...long...time ago.
I concur, since the original producers called it "Final Fantasy" because Square inc. was going to go belly up and that was to be its swan song. It blew off the charts and they where saved!~~~ to remake/reprint the original over and over.. and over and over... and over and over and over and over and over and over~~~~ again. What truly murdered Square inc-Soft was the deluded idea to make a CG movie with "Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within" WITHOUT the "Fantasy" and That is what crippled them to the point of merging with another company and ended up being called sqenix..
+
There should be a true FINAL fantasy game with a complete overhaul on the system - story - music - game mechanics - what have you as a Grand FINAL farewell to the fans~ when running birds fly will this happen of course
Time to make the next Final Fantasy the real Final Final Fantasy.
an overhaul of the system, so you mean final fantasy versus amrite, because that's the only FF game I'm really waiting for now.
Well, they have someone who is fresh and new now; Naoki Yoshida. As much as I hate to say it, we're going to have to give him more time.
I think it's the new ideas that are killing rpgs these days. Hell I love old reused cliche stories, battle systems and characters.
I think that's what they did with FF14: young, inexperience game designers who come up with, in their OWN opinion, the coolest ideas (fatigue system, freaking huge worlds, horse bird, etc), but are incapable of actually pulling it off.
I have a better idea for them: hire a group of experienced software engineers, an experienced producer, an experienced game artist, an experienced game designer (basically experienced people for all the important roles), and leave the tedious, menial tasks (creating model/music/art duplicates/variants, testing, coffee, etc) to the Chinese.
Square Enix could learn a thing or two from sweatshops in China.
Most of the young game designers create casual shit, one-dozen-a-dime shit (Crysis, CoD, etc), and flash shit for facebook (which might or might not be a carbon copy of another flash shit).
They should get the creators of Chrono Trigger or Xenogears and do some "old Squaresoft" magic.
"They should get the creators of Chrono Trigger or Xenogears and do some "old Squaresoft" magic."
Are you kidding with this? They don't want to be with Square Enix and for good reason.
@ Anon 9:45
It's their own fault for putting him on an MMO. He should be writing games with story. The MMO bullshit makes me want to kill kittens... and I even worked on one, so I have the credentials to say that shit...
Oh, and he ended up getting canned for this atrocity.
Umm... Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer and game designer of Chrono Cross and Xenogears, was the guy who produced this game in the first place.
dumbass...Tanaka has been working on MMO's for SE for the last 11 yrs...
People behind Xenogears actually came up with Xenoblade, which sucks ass. Oh yeah, they did Xenosaga too, that sucked ass.
People, they don't know when to stop, do they ?
@ Anon 21:19
No wonder he's lost his flair then. MMOs are a sinkhole of willpower. They really don't do anything artistically, they add nothing new to anything really.
@ Anon 22:27
Xenosaga didn't suck at all. It was just more cutscenes than some people wanted. I would have been happy for even more cutscenes as far as I care. I enjoyed all three of them. Some parts could always be improved of course, but that's true for everything.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. I hate the idea of a 'game designer.' In my experience all the new ones come from schools that have 'game designer' mean 'weak programmer, can't write, and think they're going to make the next big thing' when they don't know shit about shit. I'm an animator and a better designer than many of the ones I've seen. I've yet to meet a designer in the industry who knows anything about architecture, or even a decent knowledge of history. At least Bioware only goes for published authors for their writers, that's a start.
So all the whiny bitches who seem to think Squeenix needs to die just because they tried some things that didn't work are the same complete fucking morons who think everyone should resign when they make a mistake that takes any company in any direction that didn't work out. THAT'S CALLED EXPERIENCE! THEY WON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE! You don't fire everyone who ever made a mistake, or you never have any fucking experience left to recognize that history repeats itself.
Only short-sighted idiots are the ones who somehow think a long-established company needs to end because of some mistakes. And get over the fact that Final Fantasy is a series. The only real similarity between any of them is the names and a few gameplay basics. If they changed the name, everyone would still complain about all their games being like Final Fantasy, because they did a LOT of changes each game. Even shifting genres a bit a few times.
If you have to be considered a fanboy just to recognize the lack in logic of destroying a good company, then so be it. You idiots who know nothing about the games industry don't seem to recognize that we need the big companies. Their ability to survive is the ability to survive for the entirety of the RPG genre, as well as do new ideas.
If they died every time they did something foolish, every game would be 5 hours long and play like Gears of fucking War, or be Facebook games. Grow up.
"THEY WON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE"
I don't know *points to final fantasy 13-2*
I look forward to seeing what they do with it, I couldn't care less what people thought about FF13. I ignore anyone who whined about it, because of all the ones I've ever heard, only two had valid reasons for disliking it that they could articulate. The game was absolutely wonderful. Just because everyone's spoiled by exploration, and as such can't take a game at face value anymore, is not a reason to call that a bad game. Nearly all the complaints I've heard are simply opinions, and what's funny is most of those opinions aren't even the opinions of the people using them. They're taken from others because people are sheep and things like Sankaku's article showing the corridors made everyone already judge it. Most of them never finished the game or tried to. They judged it, and threw it away, then pretended they could judge the whole game on what they saw.
Do I want more exploration? Yes. Did I let it ruin FF13 for me? Hell no, in fact for once I could actually go through the plot and remember what was happening instead of forgetting the last scene after 20 hours of doing other random shit. So I considered that an improvement.
What have you animated?
I'm not sharing here publicly. But I've worked on an MMO and a couple console titles.
I blame the old codgers who own the company and the publishers. And the fact that the series doesn't belong to the original creators anymore.
I think the new director is actually pissing off the old codgers with his changes. That can only be a good thing. the 1.18 patch is actually quite massive and changing how a lot of the events are going to work not just remove fatigue.
Lost Odyssey is proof to me that the apple didn't fall far from the tree. The tree itself punted the ripe apple thinking it was doing it a favor. And then the tree was left with fruit that just wasn't as nice.
Strange analogy, but I admit to being weak about those at 2 Am ^^
They did, the team working on FF14 right now is a new team, some of which come from the old FF11. They have implemented a bunch of fixes and tweaks that has improved the game, to the point I decided to check it out.
All I can say is the game is not as bad when it came out, still feels like a beta though, but more improvements are coming, and they even have an open schedule to see what is coming on which up date.
However they seem to focus a lot on solo-play rather then multiplay, and that forces the game to take a turn to the antisocial, as getting in a guild (linkshell) is one of the hardest accomplishments in the game, and getting in a guild that actually is sociable is even harder.
Personally I'm really looking forward to this update, as it will improve a substantial amount of the game, in implement a series of features new to the game, I think right now the only thing that really needs to improve is the community, the team could really stimulate this by implementing for guild based objectives, quests and perks.
I think the only reason people still hate this game so much, is that they think it is the same game from release, and it is not. Still not a perfect game or even a great game, it may never even become either of these, but to be honest I find that it is currently an okay game, and rather playable.
tl;dr FF14 (under new management) is much better now then when it came out.
"tl;dr FF14 (under new management) is much better now then when it came out."
ANYTHING ANYONE did to FF14 would have been an improvement, so that isn't saying much. There were literally dozens of people I knew who were anticipating this game. Currently, I know one person playing.
And I don't know how you can call an MMORPG with no raids playable when it's been out for 10 months. Maybe, just maybe, this is why most guilds are not sociable.
I tried it again yesterday and a couple of my old friends (some since FFXI) were still on, not the best but still entertaining.
They did replace the whole crew of designers including the director.
FFXI got the old fools and fucked up several standard events, like Dynamis.
i dont think people even play enough of this game to care about the fatigue system
Unfortunately some people do. Some even have all classes capped <_<
What else is there to do? There's no raids, no PVP...
Is there still players on FF14 servers?
A wise man once said,
"When a horse is dead, stop beating it."
haha, a similar proverb also goes liek this:
"what'll you do with the grass if the horse is dead?"
Raise sheep
Nah, raise cows
What about horsebirds?
There's still a server?
This game is still in existence? I thought we all swore to forget this game ever happened....or did I miss something in the memo somewhere?
"showed the population on the most popular server had sunk to 1,339, down from a peak of 4,000"
Those numbers are pretty similar to international Ragnarok Online (the game that came out 10 years ago) but still alive and probably actually earning more money than FF14, pretty ironic.
At this point there's little danger of people "playing for prolonged periods of time" anyway...
There's still a danger of bots playing for prolonged periods of time. >.>
I don't think there's enough of a market in a few hundred people to justify bot farming.
This is indeed a good news for the bots.
At least they're "trying" to make the game stop at sucking but even with the removal of the Fatigue system, the fact that its taking forever to show up on PS3 (if it ever does) means that they lose... "potential" (I did say potential...) people that would want to give it a shot.
Its still kind of funny that even with these graphics, it can't even compare to FFXI.
FFXI actually has content. The funny thing is, since FF14 was released, FFXI has had more content added than FF14.
With that said, FFXI isn't thriving, there were more server merges earlier this year.
Too little too late. I didn't even care for it and SC must mentions it.