Square Enix “Won’t Make Any More Big Games Ourselves”
- Categories: Games, News
- Date: Jun 29, 2012 00:19 JST
- Tags: China, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIII, Made in China, PS3, RPG, Square Enix
Square Enix has revealed that it will likely be outsourcing all its future big releases rather than developing them itself, suggesting forthcoming Final Fantasy titles may bear the reassuring seal of China quality even more strongly than before.
None other than Motomu Toriyama, the luminary who decided Final Fantasy XIII could do without towns or confusing choices, gave a recent GDC interview in which he explained how making a big game is now just too much trouble (or just too difficult) for Square Enix to do itself:
“The development time was quite long,” admitted Motomu Toriyama, director of FFXIII and FXIII-2, at GDC Taipei.
“Within our company, developing on PlayStation for Final Fantasy XIII we required a huge amount of graphical data. … At the peak, there were over 200 people working on it.” The breakdown there was 180 artists, 30 programmers, and 36 game designers.
“With a large-scale development team, we didn’t use our time well,” he said. “How do you communicate to everyone in the department what the drive of the game is?”
The company had previously been using the story as the basis for development, but as it changed, it was tough to keep that many people abreast of the changes. “We decided we needed to create more practical milestones, not story-based ones.”
“Because it’s a large-scale project, we had to keep it secret, but this led to user testing happening way too late in the process,” he said.
“We heard a lot of feedback about things we needed to fix, and we decided we would do that with FFXIII-2. … We decided that we would have a milestone every month, and realized we needed to applied more Western technology and production techniques. We learned this not only from GDC, but also from Eidos [now owned by Square Enix].”
“We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer.” he said. “We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time.”
Square Enix’s success at outsourcing so far speaks for itself…
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THERE IS A GOD!
And we just got confirmation that he's doing nothing but crap ...
lol true
Final Fantasy XV to take 10 years and $200 million dollars to complete confirmed.
...and it will fail.
There was a rumor that they were destroying tha Fabula connections and just making Final Fantasy Versus XIII into FFXV
if you follow the "scheme" of ff games, ff vs13 couldn't become ff xv coz the bg isn't heroic-fantasy
ff 7 (hi-tech) / ff 8 (not online) / ff 9 (fantasy)
ff 10 (not hi-tech) / ff 11 (online) / ff 12 (fantasy)
ff 13 (hi-tech) / ff 14 (online) / ff 15 -> fantasy
"Final Fantasy titles may bear the reassuring seal of China quality"
It will explode. lol
And it'll still be more exciting than the current FF line up...
Mmm that china quality seal!
for sure the next final fantasy will blow the players away... literally!
I don't think it can get any worse than the chocopo crap that is FF13... we'll see.
chocopoo? Sounds awesome!
R.I.P. Kingdom Hearts 3. A grave next to Final Fantasy on the game-graveyard is waiting for you.
Years ago I would've said "and there went the greatest game/franchise SE ever got lucky creating" but with all the damn spin-offs and what not (really now, do we need 7 fucking Sora clones... grow some balls SE and give us a variety of protags please...) KH3 is due to be their final "real" entry in the series with a somewhat "high" quality assuming its still their ideas and input, even if made elsewhere... (we hope) But alas I lost all faith in them since 13 and don't plan on it ever coming back.
Assuming versus 13 and type 0 ever get a release and US release respectvely, those will be the last two games I ever buy from this shit company ever again and my journey with this company through its own personal journey is officially over.
It began with me with FF4 and it died with 12, their last great FF game, and now it'll die with versus 13/type 0.
SE sez: "“We decided we needed to create more practical milestones, not story-based ones.”"
If we can only find the point where this shit mentality began, we can finally put to rest where their quality dropped. Using this saying in movies would be like saying "we don't care about the story, we just wanna make it look good and have something bad ass happen every 30 min. in a 3 hour movie." In short, that movies gonna suck.
Why does this immediately bring up Transformers 2 in my mind? O_o
They forgot that they are not the only developers facing this problem. The other devs are saddled with the same problem and are coping just fine.
Harden the F up, man.
12 was great? I played 20 hours of it, then forgot the game existed. I have also forgot what the game was about.
true, the story was largely forgettable, but the battle system was a great choice, it streamlined the entire exploration/battle aspect of the game wonderfully that sorta mimicked an "online feel" while playing offline. I know a lot of Americans hated on it, but it did incredibly well in Japan and I myself liked it.
The story had potential for the first third or so. Had a real FF Tactics vibe to-not surprising, seeing as Matsuno was the writer/director for both.
Then the insane amounts of pressure and interference the bosses put on him caused a nervous breakdown, and he quit the company. So they replaced him with...Kawazu. The man responsible for most of Squaresoft's biggest flops (including the Famicom FF2).
You can literally draw a line in the game when this happens-an NPC will run up and inform you that the Senate were all just assassinated, putting an abrupt end to all of Matsuno's political intrigues. From then on out, the "plot" is mostly just a series aggravating, time wasting fetch quests. It stops being FF Tactics and becomes motherfucking FF2 of all things.
Matsuno never came back to SE. Kawazu still gets work there though. That's just the kind of company it is.
It had a tactics advance feel, sort of. The game and combat system was far far removed from ff12 system. Races were really all that got pulled over, plus I think the place was called Ivalice?
"If we can only find the point where this shit mentality began, we can finally put to rest where their quality dropped."
Well, I remember Nomura basically said the same thing as far back as Advent Children (the Transformers 2 of video game movies). Which was also around the same time the last actually trained writers left the company (and still have not been replaced by real writers). So around then, I'd say.
Lose faith in them if Versus XIII sucks, because that's the mainline Kingdom Hearts team. Nomura has been busy on that project, which is why nothing has shown up these last few years beyond mobile spin-offs.
You know, they really should just stick with nostalgia.
Make sequels of Final Fantasy VII or FF VI or just remake them with that breathtaking graphic quality.
Better yet, make that fuckin' Chrono Break, and release it even for PC.
lol nerd
A nerd on Sankaku Complex? NO FUCKING WAY!
psp versions of ff v and ff vi should be made a la ff iv complete collection
I'd rather not have them on the PSP though. I rarely ever touch that system anymore. Give them to me on the 3DS or the Vita. Yeah, I realize that you could download the hypothetical PSP versions to the Vita, but I'd much rather have them as native Vita games.
close your doors already, assholes
Wish they would, but seems like they want to rape final fantasy for the last drop of blood before the corpse is no more.
I hope they don't, just let go off the whole Square part of wothless CG-movies called """rpg""". However let Enix continue to produce DQ in the tradition of unfiltered JRPG goodness that it still is.
-.- Simply Put: Square and Enix never should've gotten Married. I'm sure a rest-assured Divorce could be the company's quickest recovery.
But here is the REAL truth. This goes for ALL companies in the Gaming Business.
I ask this question: "Why were the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 generations so much more Profitable than the new PlayStation/XBox360 Era?"
Simply put: With the Enhanced Graphics and High-Definition that PlayStation and XBox is REQUIRING from companies, it's making it so much HARDER on developers to do any REAL creativity. There is so much concentration on CODING and GRAPHIC INTERFACE that there is hardly any space LEFT for the actual game itself.
Square says it themselves. The movie portion of the game was so much easier to deal with than the actual programming of FFXIII. This is the SAME reason they give for not wanting to Remake VII, VIII, IX, and X. The process is lots of hard, and very unappreciated work.
It's funny since the games of PS2 and PS1 (Though being less graphics, were always much more enjoyable to me than today's games.
As of now, I play this very competitive game called Fantasy Earth Zero HK. Sadly they tried the North American Market, but GamePotUSA had to destroy itself. (They made a lot of very bad marketing decisions costing players the game.)
Anyways. The game is 2006 Graphic Quality. But the game is much more exciting since I get to play with actual players on a large 50/50 Kingdom VS Kingdom battles... Recently they've been implementing a 75/75 wars, it's almost impossible to survive those wars.
If Square Enix Really wanted to save itself - they just need to visit what made 7, 8, 9 and 10 so successful and do that. If they need to go back to Text-scrolling storyline and Cutscenes that last 1.5 minutes then do that.
Just give us Versus without it being turned to crap already.
You weren't already assuming it would be crap back when they first announced it ages ago? You give them much more credit than I do.
Anyway, at this point I think Versus can safely be declared vaporware.
Sadly yeah :(
sux that and type 0 are the last two games i'm actually looking forward from them now.
KH was turned into a cash cow and before anyone chimes in with the "It's popular, now it sucks" line then yeah, when things get popular, companies like SE get big headed and think they can do no wrong. All the KH spin-offs called, they want their 'original' protagonist they were promised, not sora clones.
Well look at them now, kinda bit them in the ass to make that many games at the same time eh? (Fabula Nova Crystallis games)
You're probably right, but I guess I thought that since it was being made by a team that wasn't a part of XIII's development, it might actually be good.
Blame QA/QC departments of SE Japan for their games' poor quality and performance. Japanese and Western developers outsource their games to China all the time... KOEI, Bandai, Banpresto, UbiSoft, EA, NaughtyDogs, etc. Never seen anyone complain about games like SRW@3, Dynasty Warriors, Uncharted 3, etc.
that sucks, that means even less jrpg released in the usa. american and other countries rpg just sucks in story tell or character development.
No there plenty of othre dev make jrpgs and there not not makeing them the not doing big buget tittle by them self
"No there plenty of othre dev make jrpgs and there not not makeing them the not doing big buget tittle by them self"
What?
So it has come to this...
so square-enix became enix-square
No more Kingdom Hearts 3. All these years of waiting go down the drain.
Welp , there's still Atlus and they aren't disappointing me rather, they're really surprising me with their progress :D
Atlus NIS GUst, etc. those companies there were my salvation once "Squaresoft" disappeared.
There is no square, just an empty hole with nothing to fill it now.
The Kingdom Hearts console team has been working on Final Fantasy Versus XIII for years now. They've already said repeatedly that's why there hasn't been a mainline third game. I suspect it will be the first project they're given to try and recoup costs by making KH3 with Versus XIII's engine.
Not if you're European...
Kingdom Hearts is the worst SE game franchise ever!
Okay that's it. Somebody needs to go to Japan and kill Motomu.
Please excuse my bad english:
In my Opinion, Square Enix chose the wrong approach with the current console gen. They try to compete in too many aspects of Game Development. For example:
-The graphics of FF XIII are good. SE claimed due to the ressources such graphics demand from a Dev, no Cities were implemented.
-They develop JRPGs which are primarily (or should primarily)be story driven. They somewhat failed here with the last 2 core games of FF.
-The music is always top notch.
etc.
Now with points like these, where you want to compete with other Devs, you won't be able to keep up with Games which concentrate on fewer aspects. A 3D benchmark will look better than a whole game, because ressources are concentrated in only one aspect.
The wrong approach i mentioned earlier was going for photo-realism. I can understand SE's decision because the graphics of FF games have been good in the past (pre-rendered videos) but when they realized, FF XIII's graphics consume too much ressources, they should have skipped on photo realism altogether and choose an aesthetic approach by manipulating realism to an extent, that makes their games appealing, yet easier to implement (see Okami, Journey etc.). This would partially concentrate their Ressources on their Artists. The JRPG crowd, with the japanese in particular, is an audience which is highly responsive (?) to aesthetic approaches rather than photo realism.
thx
problem is that you announce stuff when you can't even complete it in time. gamers can wait as long as you can announce a date that the company can carry out. FF series stood out cuz of the story and quality graphics, don't lose it now
They had 200 people working on FFXII game I wonder why it was expensive to make games in HD console.Indegame developers can make a game with less then 20 if possible to develop a game that large scale it would cost more money but still get the job done.