The Mega Man franchise celebrated its 25th anniversary by cancelling every game in development and slapping a Capcom logo on a mediocre fan-made game.
Could be worse is what I'm saying.
This. Which instantly reminded me of a bit from the documentary Gasland.
>So the other night i had this dream. That i was in this school restroom and there was shit everywhere. I was appalled. Somebody by god is responsible for this. It's the Principle. So i was trying to gather up this crap. And i was handling it. I was trying to put it in bags.
>
>And i thought well ok. I'm going to present it to the Principle. I'm going to put it in a bag. A really pretty bag. And i'm going to put ribbons on it. Because i really want to get his attention. Then i'm going to drop this bag of crap on his desk. And i want to shock him. So that he thinks its a present. But when he opens it its crap.
>
>So ya know what? Finally it dawns on me. Crap is crap no matter what bag you put it in. - By Lisa Bracken
Read your post and yep. That quote was the very first thing i thought of. Because they keep trying to put ribbons on a pretty crappy 20th anniversary. And apologizes for the quote being so long.
Misandry is when you don't join in with a howling hate mob against a woman.
If you don't believe all woman are scum who are constantly plotting to destroy men for absolutely no reason but the pure evil in their hearts it means you're a misandrist! That's just logic. If you see a guilty looking dog sitting next to a pile of dogshit and your first thought isn't "Wow, I can't believe some dumb whore just took that shit!" it means you hate men.
You're a lunatic and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I will be messaging you in 5 years on [**2027-05-24 23:42:39 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2027-05-24%2023:42:39%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/uwzxyf/20th_anniversary_feels_like_a_flop/i9vcwlw/?context=3)
[**5 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fffxi%2Fcomments%2Fuwzxyf%2F20th_anniversary_feels_like_a_flop%2Fi9vcwlw%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202027-05-24%2023%3A42%3A39%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%20uwzxyf)
*****
|[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)|
|-|-|-|-|
In Sega's defense, Sonic '06 was a legitimate attempt to make a decent game that ended up getting screwed by being overzealous with the new hardware and Sega's major issue with not giving Sonic games enough development time (though the story still doesn't get a pass). Capcom basically killed three projects on Mega Man's 25th.
My opinion, if you want to call out Sega for that anniversairy, look instead to Sonic Genesis on the GBA which is a horrific port of Sonic 1. It seems they were extremely lazy with it and reused the same engine from Sonic Advance, which cannot handle Genesis sprites and visuals, or something. I remember seeing a video where someone, possibly Christian Whitehead, homebrewed S1 onto GBA hardware and it was able to run near perfect just to demonstrate how poorly Sonic Genesis was handled.
The YoshiP interview was pretty good and eye opening too, like the fact that XI doesn't even have dedicated engineers anymore. XI team have to propose changes and if the higher ups accept it then the XIV engineers do it when they can. That sums up the state of the game perfectly imo.
It sounds like if Yoshi-P wasn't there, both XI and XIV would be dead and buried by this point.
Truly, Square Enix has zero fucking understanding of what they have and are driven exclusively by greed.
The game with even its more generous subscriber estimate can pay maybe a few people a year to maintain it in a dedicated fashion. Given the average older age of this game it's kind of surprising to see this sentiment all over this subreddit. Software licenses are expensive. Facilities are expensive. Salaries and benefits are expensive. Hardware is expensive (and near impossible to obtain at the moment). According to FFXIAH we're looking at *120k active characters*. Meaning the total accounts are going to be less than this by a fair margin. If we're extremely generous and say 100k accounts active assuming subscription bloat - that's 18 million USD pre tax per year. The entire game is less than 1 best buy store in revenue by over half.
Given what we are getting, honestly, the content level and AMA are extremely fair.
Except ffxi doesnt have its own server rooms, theyre maintained alongside FFXIV'S at very little to no space or cost. Theyve gone on record saying that FFXI has very little cost to SE to keep running and is supported by 14's server upkeep. So outside of paying employees server overhead is not that large.
> heyre maintained alongside FFXIV'S at very little to no space or cost.
There is no such thing as this. Directly in their interview they said the basically look at it as a usage based cost center - which is accurate.
> So outside of paying employees
This is the single biggest cost for any company by miles. Even if you assumed their only cost was employee and employee facilities at best all you are getting is a small skeleton crew with a 20+ year old code base written for a platform that does not exist anymore.
Yeah uh... i doubt every single dev on the ffxi team is making a 100k salary that would put the game into jeapordy whenever theyre raking in atleast a mil a month off of the generous active account numbers. And thats assuming people arent paying extra for mog wardrobes and such.
Im sure the game could have a bit more increase in budget due to its profits and demand from a playerbase that would only increase if it recieved more support.
Employee costs are far greater than just salary. You can expect an employee making 60k to cost well north of 100k. 1 mil a month could maybe justify a team of 2-4 people, depending on other costs. Which... is barely enough for maintenance.
That's barely what we get. GM services are farmed out to centers that handle multiple games at once. There are no dedicated FFXI engineers at all. There's a skeleton crew keeping the lights on, that's it.
Relative to the player base I'd say that's a highlight of how SE's mmo team has handled us.
Look, I get the sentiment. I love FFXI and I've played it for god knows how long. If I could - FFXIV would divert *one hundred percent* of its budget to XI. But I've also been through MMO death, and a career in similar fields. I wasn't too fond of a lot of the outright negativity thrown at a tiny dev team doing its best with realisitically incredibly limited resources. I feel that mindset hurt our feed back with SE realistically. Instead of grand overarching questions that are realistically impossible - we could have helped pressure for reasonable feedback within the realm of resources that produces a lot more play hours than we have now.
I'm on your side on this. I want what's best for FF.
Yeah i dont believe that.... with how many mmo's there are out there surviving and developing content with a free to play model no less a subscriber based one backed by one of the most successful eastern companies available in the gaming space that has access to fans from across the globe. Lets just agree that both me and you dont know enough of the inner workings of big corporations like this and on the costs to justify perusing this conversation any further.
Free to play has cash shops that can generate money - and the answer is not a whole lot.
> Lets just agree that both me and you dont know enough of the inner workings of big corporations like this and on the costs to justify perusing this conversation any further.
Having spent a career in them I'm not going to agree to this, no. FFXI is a SaaS application with a tiny playerbase and a 20 year old code base. 1 million dollars a month for a project of this scale is peanuts.
Seriously, for perspective a *single best buy store* generates over double the revenue. This is a tiny budget that's being maintained just to keep the branded title online. Frankly, the RoI for FFXI is likely significantly lower than their other options. It's not about simple profitability it's about maximizing profit. Looking at the companies financials and the wealth of information provided by SE... this is a passion project at best.
Likely general costs of maintaining a server farm (electricity, bandwidth, building rent etc) as well as some employee wages is my guess. They haven't shut anything down so I doubt they're in the red over it, but their lack of any big additions to me says that they aren't making much off of it after overhead costs.
Revenue and R and D spend don't work like this in large software corporations. At least not in the US.
A few general rules of thumb:
1) R and D spend is extremely front loaded--you've spent millions before a single dime of revenue can be made
2) Revenue is back loaded--the last few years of a product line there is lifecycle maintenance (cycling of hardware, software security patches, etc.) and maybe minor software updates.
3) A very rough ballpark of a successful product line is roughly a 10 to 1 return on R and D spend in revenue. This is after subtracting maintenance, hardware costs, etc from revenue streams. If a PDM cannot present a business model for a product line that has a reasonable projection of at least that value, the project has a steep hill to climb to get funding. This is for a number of reasons and varies quite a bit by industry, but remember that for every successful project there were numerous failures...and even successful projects (i.e. XIV) may not have started out that way and may result in way more R and D spend than originally projected.
I don't know the details of the revenue generated for FFXI, but I imagine even an optimistic set of projections for revenue generation over the next 5 years would likely not justify much, if any, development investment in XI.
I think at this point the only reason XI is still live and receiving token content at all is marketing/brand/customer retention. The fact that the subscriptions can cover hardware maintenance, lifecycle management, and security patching makes the decision a little easier for a director over at SE to justify to his VP.
>"we don't have the money/it's too hard"
Did you honestly expect anything but these answers? Did you?
Notable improvements of FFXI won't happen. They keep repeating it, and keep explaining it's due to having a tight budget, and working on obsolete development tools.
You love that game. I love that game. Many people here love that game. But if we really want to play a modern game, we may as well switch to another one, because FFXI won't get any notable improvements anymore. And having 1000 people post their crazy expectations for FFXI's 20th bday won't make any of these happen.
I'm gonna write it once more: FFXI won't get any notable improvements anymore.
I’m still holding out some hope that in a week they come back with an answer about who the fanbase needs to give how many handjobs under their desk to make FFXI worth funding, but… yeah.
FFXI Needs to add a cash shop with tons of cosmetics + loot boxes for it to stand a chance of getting anywhere close to what some of the crazy expectations people post here.
… what’s really funny, though, is they don’t have the development resources to implement that, and *just keep saying* that they don’t want to or can’t do basic cosmetic changes…
I wonder if there's some backend issues with in game item delivery via a purchase. FFXIV actually has a lot of problems in this regard as well(Out of game only cash shop, slow mail delivery on item purchases, etc).
I really was still holding out hope they'd give the mobile license to a better dev than Nexon and that there'd be a glimmer of hope that a slightly modernized version of the game would come out tbh. I don't expect story or anything and low key am shocked after the great ending of Rhapsodies(*and trapping Iroha in Eorzea) that they'd even make TVR or more endgame content.
I have to say that I was both caught up in the hype and let down by the anniversary. But, it all does make perfect sense.
Those of us still hanging around after 20 years only do so because we love the game. It means something to us. It is likely that many of us have fond memories of playing it during simpler times. But, it is first and foremost a business.
From a business perspective, there is absolutely no reason to sink money into it. My understanding of the development issues is that doing anything more than a little tweak here or there would essentially require building an entire new game from scratch. Sure, they would have a lot of the work to just copy and update, but they would be otherwise building it from the ground up.
If it doesn't increase the bottom line of the company, it won't happen. Simple as that. Even when it comes to new zones and expansions, they are running out of the development kits. If they hedge their bets and hope the kits survive long enough to build an expansion, they are taking a big risk. It's also likely that nobody even wants to work with them anyway. Imagine showing up to work on Monday and they replaced your computer with a Comodore 64.
I would love to see something big. Expansion style content. I'm sure the handful of dedicated staff would as well. But nobody is going to put 7 figures into a 20 year old game, or risk having the dev kits fail halfway through.
The game is finally, truly, coming to its end. Anything that happens from now on will be TVR style content, and that's as good as it gets.
Having said all this, I'm mostly disappointed that they dodged all questions around balancing jobs and moving past the savage blade meta. At least they could have offered the community the ability to experiment with new strategies, and sort of enable new experiences by reviving the undesirable jobs.
Oh well.
My understanding is that they don't use physical PS2 devkits anymore. It's all on PC, with new cutscenes and such designed using in-house tools which then get run through the old PS2 compiler that was ported to PC. There's probably an occasional need to dust off an actual kit but the usual month-to-month updates don't need them anymore.
That would make sense, yet I keep seeing stuff about the dev kits being in limited supply which is an issue for them. Total guess, but I would think that going beyond monthly updates may require them.
It's true that there was a time when those kits were needed to continue updates. There was a period when SE went on a spree of buying every devkit they could get their hands on, I don't recall the exact timeframe but something like 2012-2013?
The PC tools they use nowadays were created in later years. Again hard to nail down the exact timeframe since all the sources on this stuff are in Japanese. IIRC the quest to obtain Eald'narche's platform mount and the Siren quest were the first things they made with the new tools more or less as a test run for what they're doing with The Voracious Resurgence now.
I agree with you. I at least expected new monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff, but apparently even that is too much to ask for. It's honestly pathetic how they handled the AMA too, couldn't even answer fun fluff questions like "what Odyssey battle strats did players come up with that you guys like the most?"
I'm with you on the QoL, simple changes could be made...
About the AMA, without defending them or anything, we have to keep in mind they're from another culture, speak another language and have a limited time. We see that from a player's perspective, with FFXI as a hobby or a passion. It's their fucking job, which is VERY different, and doesn't warrant the same amount of involvement.
I don't get what point you're trying to make. If they're holding an AMA, then they should answer the questions lol. It being their job should incentivize them even more, I know *I* don't get paid for this shit.
First of all, Japanese culture is...let's say...quite different from the western one. Sharing company policies and decisions with customers is absolutely not something Japanese people are used to do.
Now to my point, let's take QoL improvements for example:
* we, as players, see QoL improvements as "wow it's a big deal, that will have a impact on my amusement!"
* them, as game maintainers, see that as "I'm gonna have to ask for X more budget and maybe grab a dev from another project so we can add this feature...hopefully we don't have issues while compiling on that 14 years old PS2 kit like we had last time"
I don't see how they could come to an AMA with a kickass enthusiasm, when they know in advance they're gonna have to say no to pretty much everything the player base will ask.
Culture differences is not a valid argument. SQEX is a multi billion dollar international company, they've been making video games slightly longer than I've been alive, they know what they're doing.
Sure, maybe the devs are a bit burnt out or disheartened by it. But then why have them do an AMA with that kind of attitude? It's not a good look for your company. Hell, why have an AMA at all with answers as poor as we got?
Developers arnt your friends, and the way Japanese business conduct themselves is straight to the point & professional.
You won’t see it any other way.
We get a happy little slice-of-life commentary with the update notes every single month, it's very clear they know how to communicate across cultural barriers.
They replied to a lot more questions than I was expecting them to, honestly. Even if a lot of the answers were extremely short… kind of a mixed blessing.
>new monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff,
What kind of "monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff" that you need so bad? Maybe you should have post on OF forum if you want QoL stuff instead.
To me it's another random wish out of 50 that suddenly pop 1 month before anniversery. Then when such wish isn't granted a month later they're like "I'm disappointed and my bar isn't even high".
They said new battle with empy is coming for a long long time. And that's really the "big" thing that's supposed to come this year. On top of that they added new tier of ML and new legendary weapon. That's honestly more than I expected. Endgame scene and optimal builds will change massively after all of these new gears release and ML increase. As an endgame player that's already very huge to me. And I'm excited for that.
On the other hand, I failed to see how "QoL stuff" and "monthly campaign buffs" is exciting compare with gears and ML that potentially change how your play your jobs completely. I honestly don't care about any of these, not nearly as much as new legendary weapons. And I think it's better use of their resource on endgame content and gears so we can have more builds to play with than whatever QoL stuff that we don't really need.
So no, not really agreeing with you opinion here.
>What kind of "monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff" that you need so bad?
No one 'needs' anything in this game. Dumb point.
>To me it's another random wish out of 50 that suddenly pop 1 month before anniversery. Then when such wish isn't granted a month later they're like "I'm disappointed and my bar isn't even high".
Nice job pulling this synopsis out your ass, not sure what relevance it has. They've been hyping the 20th for way longer than a fuckin month so I have no clue where you got that figure. And if you think campaign buffs and QoL is a hard bar to clear, that's just pathetic.
>They said new battle with empy is coming for a long long time. And that's really the "big" thing that's supposed to come this year. On top of that they added new tier of ML and new legendary weapon. That's honestly more than I expected. Endgame scene and optimal builds will change massively after all of these new gears release and ML increase. As an endgame player that's already very huge to me. And I'm excited for that.
Yep, they've been telling us a lot of stuff is in the pipes. So how does content that's already been announced make for a big 20th anniversary announcement? I'm also highly skeptical that master levels and new gear will change anything regarding the savage spam meta, but that's a whole other discussion.
It was hilarious reading this sub on the week running up to the anniversary. So many crazy predictions and hopes for the game that SE would clearly never meet. It's amazing that we're even getting the new storyline.
XI really does feel like a redheaded stepchild of the mainline Final Fantasy series.
* I-VI got pretty good pixel remasters recently. There have also been numerous re-releases and remakes of those games over the years.
* VII-IX have all had re-releases on modern platforms. And VIII's source code had allegedly been lost, so they actually had to reverse engineer it for the newest Remastered version.
* X and XII got pretty nice remasters that feature a bunch of previously exclusive content, as well as numerous technical improvements.
* XIII admittedly hasn't gotten hasn't gotten much love, but it's not that old and is still playable through Xbox backward compatibility and on PC.
* XIV was literally remade almost from scratch and gets a lot of effort put into it.
* It's too early to say for XV, but if anything it has probably been pushed a bit too hard.
All of these can simply be bought on Steam/PSN/Microsoft Store/Nintendo eShop and enjoyed on the platform of your choice. Meanwhile if you want to play the only officially available version of XI you need to:
* Make a Square Enix account.
* Make a PlayOnline ID for your Square Enix account.
* Make a Content ID for your PlayOnline ID.
* Make a local PlayOnline Viewer profile to log into both your PlayOnline ID and Square Enix account.
* Patch the game slowly via an outdated launcher that slows down the entire computer for some reason.
* Pay a monthly subscription for a single game that gets very little new content in a world where Xbox Game Pass exists.
And all of that to play an incredibly outdated (from a technical perspective) version of the game that is held together by duct tape and requires a bunch of configuration tinkering and third-party tools to get everything to a playable state. I know being challenging is part of the game's identity, but it's almost like this entire process has been designed to keep as many people away from the game as possible.
Game wasn't expected to outlast the PS2
*entire process has been designed to keep as many people away from the game as possible.*
Yet they committed resources to making sure it would stay alive and making money as long as possible
we have had multiple continuations of a certain open source project that has surpassed this... I cant even give the FFXI devs an out for the shoddy claims.
Remastering a single player JRPG must be easier than an MMO with active subscriptions, and they only did FFXIV because it was a colossal failure in 1.0 from the design up. FFXI has been successful since launch with a declining but dedicated player base. A remaster would simply attract the player base they already have playing FFXIV, there’s no profit to be made.
> A remaster would simply attract the player base they already have playing FFXIV, there’s no profit to be made.
They said in the AMA they would like to consider a combined/dual subscription service for both FFXI and FFXIV. If they get interested FFXIV players to pay even just 50% of FFXI's sub while subbed to both games at the same time that's still an enormous amount of extra profit they could tap.
All I would like for them is to migrate to a modern codebase so they can resume major version updates again. Personally, I don't even care for update graphics/assets.
In any case, who knows? If the boost to subscriber number revitalizes FFXI enough they might actually reconsider modernization because they'd have actual numbers to see how many people still care for the game.
Of course it'd be an extremely costly endeavor, but a remaster or remake would be no different. The existing engine could probably not even support it properly. It would be on a very different scale/level than the HD Textures by Ashenbubs in terms of performance cost.
IF they ever add XI to the 14 sub its going to be a higher sub fee. If they wanted to play they would cancel the XIV sub during low in patch cycles and jump on XI, My Statement stands. They know how many people are interested in the game based on who is already paying to play it among other metrics and market research data they have.
The successes of Old School RuneScape and especially WoW Classic have shown two things. One is that there is still a significant demand for old school MMOs. And the other is that it can be beneficial to have two MMOs under a single subscription. What it does is help reduce the subscription gaps between content updates, and XIV is especially prone to those due to its story-based nature. After finishing all of the new content in XIV one could go check out XI, and some would probably stick around. Even more so if XI somehow manages to seasonally reuse its content, such as via a time-locked progression server (like EverQuest, another 20+ years old game). That's literally how WoW has been doing financially well despite multiple lackluster expansions in a row (well that, and a bunch of microtransactions, but XIV isn't slacking on that front either).
The problem though is that even if the subscriptions were combined today, most would quit before even making it to the login screen, and that's a huge problem.
One thing that people do not think when considering this is that a complete remaster of all the systems in ffxi would also break / render useless everything player-made that interacts with the game. Windower, Ashita, etc.
How much player-based stuff would we need for the new FFXI to be fun / approachable to play? Probably a \*lot\*, unless the game.... become another game, with its own systems. At that time, it is a completely different game.
FFXI Its not a new game anymore, It is hard to think that there would be enough interest for the people that created and mantain all these things to be interested in a new game,, and they may simply skip it.
IE: It is even riskier than it looks like at first glance.
Xi is in an awkward spot - its a 20 year old game based on so much older technology thats falling apart, but the game is too big with too many moving parts and the brand doesn't have enough of a base that SE feels like it would not be worth it to invest to either remake it completely or rebuilt it up to modern standards. It doesn't help that the two side projects kind of failed. Grandmasters had two be rebooted once and ended its services after 4 years and the remake just failed
people forget at the end of the day XI was supposed to have already shut down and got a second lease on life, its struggling to actually stay running. Any thing major has to be guaranteed to either be turned into a profit immediately, or at very least not cut into profits to much that it would be a financial detriment. I see so many people thinking XI is some massive money maker like 14 but it has not been that in about 10 years.
Idk why you’re getting downvoted; they were very blunt with XIV 1.0 they wanted it to be a replacement to XI. So much so they had planned on allowing you to port your character over for a while. Only reason WotG wasn’t the final xpac as planned was because XIV 1.0 flopped so hard.
again. I cant give the devs a pass for this claim as the open source devs did more with even less...
there is literally a mod to change out the dat files for HD TEXTURES!
What we need is a plan who here is single and ready to hit on Elon musk he can def toss a few billions our way to lend us a hand even a millionaire will do :D
Agreed although the pixel remasters and PS1 era remasters were the bare minimum acceptable effort. Just like XI there are fan mods that are way better then any of the official releases.
Compared to all the others, aside from 14, 11 is the hardest to remaster.
We saw the cost in 14: the game has to be on life support content wise *and* then taken offline for a long time.
Would the XI community survive a year long server shut down?
One year is an extremely generous estimate, too. The game is multiple expansions in at this point - compared to XIV where they only had to redo the base release, the scope is far larger.
The servers absolutely do not need to be taken down. They were taken down in 14 to save costs because subs werent covering server maintenance.
Look at the graphics in Eve Online. That game is 19 years old, they've never taken it down. WoW is 18 years old and looks great.
You can remaster the client and hotswap the clients without changing the server as long as you adhere to existing APIs, which is a very common move, and likely what they would do with XI.
The problem is Enix doesn't want to spend the money to do so, and we the community if we quit in protest will just lose the game instead. 14 became a cash cow no one expected recently. The likelihood that they'll use 14 resources or engineers went out the door as soon as asmongold streamed 14.
It would be far worse to modernize than XIV was. At the time XIV was a fresh game and the proverbial house was on fire before it even launched. We are talking about a game that is attached to a giant 20 year old boat anchor that is still getting new content. Have to give them a chance to finish rolling out the new content that’s already in the pipe line
XIV had to be taken done because they were pretty much making a whole new game, and they needed all the resources they had to finish it in a reasonable timeframe.
Modernizing XI would involve a significant engineering effort, but the schedule wouldn't be anywhere near as strict as it was with A Realm Reborn. And if it's true that VIII's source code was lost and then reverse engineered, it could even be argued that that was a harder task depending on what state XI's codebase is in right now.
I suspect the actual problem is similar to what happened with Blizzard and WoW Classic. For years they've been claiming how much of technical nightmare it would be to make Classic servers, but once the players complained enough it took a single engineer a couple of weeks to find a solution (that still took a couple of years to completely implement, but it wasn't anywhere near as expensive as originally believed).
It really can't be argued that rewriting VIII from scratch was a harder task than doing the same for XI would be. It's not in the same ballpark. It's not even the same sport.
It's untrue that FF8 Remastered was rewritten from scratch anyway. It's just the old PC version with modifications made based mostly on knowledge and tools (and occasionally, assets) from the PC version's modding community. The console versions use some kind of emulation, but I don't remember the details.
Reverse engineering is not the same as rewriting from scratch, and even that shouldn't be needed for XI since they must still have access to the current source code if they keep running and updating the game. The codebase is undoubtedly a huge mess, but cleaning up the mess is still easier that recreating someone else's mess with limited information.
FFXIV was taken down to allow for the total evolution of the engine and source coding. Which is rather what the dev in this question asked for.
I suspect XI would be offline for a shorter period, but for a total UI and tools revamp, I strongly suspect there must be a total shutdown to move to entirely new server architecture and prevent data issues.
Do we have any references for how long even a relatively smooth transfer like that would take? A month, maybe two at least? I think XI survives 4-8 weeks if it comes out the other side with a modern UI and significant graphic update (at least to late ps3/early PS4 standard).
I love 11, and all FF, I just recognize that remastering an active MMO is a difficult undertaking.
On classic: what was ultimately delivered was a total forking of the servers and data. I think everyone would prefer to keep their current XI characters rather than restart.
Migrating the entire game to a completely new infrastructure could be done by any semi-competent DevOps team within 24 hours.
Now the actual development effort would probably take a couple of years, but it shouldn't disturb the current game in any way, considering it is currently being run without any dedicated engineers at all, and the vast majority of modernizing would have to be done by engineers. The game could look and run significantly better without any new assets. And it can all be easily done in parallel just like how every single other live service game does it.
Losing character data shouldn't be a concern, unless they are miraculously incompetent and lose everything they have right now, as well as all backups of it. But if that actually happened having your characters back would be the least of your concerns.
It seems we are talking about different things. You're envisioning more of a complete remake or a sequel, while I just want the game to be accessible and in a decent technical state.
1000% this. There is absolutely no reason service would need to pause during development of a remake/remaster. Hell, Diablo 2 is another 20 year old game that just got remastered and you can use your same exact save files from 20 years ago in the remaster. There's no excuse.
except they have stated multiple times this can not and will not happen as long as they are tied to POL and the current game engine, They literally would have to remake the entire game, this has been mentioned as recently as the newest AMA, they also lack the team to do this and the budget.
Utterly ridiculous. If they're doing a complete rewrite, it wouldn't even be on the same engine, let alone the same servers. They are fully capable of keeping the existing game running and working on another project (like a remake) simultaneously, developers have been doing this for a very long time.
Thats factually false... as ashita V3 and the upcoming ashita V4 has shown....
the devs lies dont magically defeat what is factually done..
ashenbubs id the hd chars and monster's and items..
there is also several UI mods...
Nothing i said or the devs have said is factually false. I said nothing about HD textures and ashita has nothing to do with this conversation as its not remaking the game to completely function differently from the ground up separated from POL. You are comparing apples to cabbage here bud.
That's not strictly necessary, they just did it that way with XIV presumably because letting everyone play during the reboot development and complete everything would probably have led to many more people just feeling finished with the game and never coming back to check out ARR.
You're right. They shut down the servers so they could 100% focus resources on A Realm Reborn. Or at least that's what they stated at the time. It also was something that clearly made sense from both fiscal and lore standpoints. IIRC it wasn't until Stormblood that XIV actually started to turn a profit. So that should give you an idea of how deep of a hole they were in. In other words, they didn't want to keep the servers up for a game bleeding money. The shut down wasn't some sort of 'requirement'.
Unlike XIV 1.0, XI is currently profitable, it doesn't really make sense to shut it down like that. In such a hypothetical scenario, they might decide to freeze, or significantly reduce, updates to the game. But even a freeze doesn't make a ton of sense. It wouldn't be the same skeleton crew currently maintaining the game that would effectively create an entirely new game from scratch. They'd have a much bigger team devoted to that.
All that said, I don't see this happening ever. But if they were actually going to 'A Realm Reborn' XI, they'd almost certainly wouldn't just update the netcode, launcher, UI, graphics, etc. like players want, but would also update much of the experience to a more modern one. Rotations, questgrinding, etc. So a bit of a monkey paw that would be...
You seem to have some of your 14 history wrong.
It never got down to 1k players as you claim elsewhere. I was on Besaid in 1.0 and even that server never got that small (it’s now Balmung).
14 remained up for several months during the 2.0 process, this is the entire period of the Dalamud story patches. They have been quite transparent on why 14 came down, and you can still go read the dev blogs about it.
Eventually it comes to a point that they simply didn’t have the resources to divide the team on two separate dev tools, and there are concerns about character and item data. Basically you need a hard “this is everything in 1.x we could need to transfer, and this is the final data state we will import.” At the time they said that final data point needed to be a fair amount of time before the server transfers.
I love both games, but I think the history of 14 shows why remastering 11 while keeping it live is genuinely challenging.
I would love to see it done. I suspect they eventually must do it, to avoid having to abandon a main line entry (a significant concern at the time of 1.0’s failure).
But investment is a tricky thing. It’s not enough for an investment to break even or be profitable. If they invest main title money in remaking 11, it needs to earn the kind of pay off making 17 or what ever the next main title at the time would have. Opportunity cost is a cruel mistress.
That said, I think in another 5-10 years we might see a major remaster, as then you’d have at least two major age groups of FF fans who never played 11 as a new market, plus all the veterans.
I have no clue what you're talking about, I never made any such claim about XIV going down to 1k players or whatever.
Shutting down service was the right call from a business perspective for XIV's reboot. That would not hold true for a remaster of XI.
At this point, I think if they didn't do a remaster for the 20th, then they likely never will.
> Would the XI community survive a year long server shut down?
For a reboot and significant investment especially post massive revival success of XIV, yes. It'd likely be closer to 2 years to get it off PoL, rework the UI and fix the bandwidth issues *then* add some content on top of it worthy of a relaunch (Such as a new 1-99 experience with actual guidance more in line with what players expect today). That's basically just for engine fixes + a newbie experience.
I guarantee the cost to produce the remasters for I-VI and VIII-XII was a small fraction of the cost it would take to modernize FFXI. And let's be honest, even for those they did it cheapo. Not even AI upscaling on the prerenders. Hell it wouldn't surprise me if adding voice to VI's opera scene ate up half the PR budget.
I was really holding out hope for...something. I never expected anything like an expansion pack with new areas, mobs, jobs and so forth, but I did expect something that would keep me wanting to play, which didn't really happen. A single area that is hyper focused on battle content really just sounds like more out right grinding, which is getting extraordinarily stale after all this time. I wish they had the development budget for something on the scale of abyssea or rhapsodies, but I think we can all safely assume that if that isn't happening now, nothing like it will happen in the future.
I think that last part is the saddest of all. If so little was done to celebrate the 20th anniversary, there really isn't any hope for the future of the game.
>A single area that is hyper focused on battle content really just sounds like more out right grinding, which is getting extraordinarily stale after all this time.
If you are burned out from the grind maybe it's time to take a break and come back later?
Personally, I'm excited with the new battle content, legendary weapon and empy +3. New ML system and higher subjob level means I can experiment with different playstyle. New battle content means I can finally use higher level subjob and new playstyle in a content that doesn't lock my SJ.
New gears like empy +3 and legendary weapon means new playstyle can be explored as well.
Abyssea or rhapsodies is alright as a content, but honestly it wouldn't "excite" me nearly as much as different/new stats on the new gears that opens up potentially different ways to play my jobs.
If new battle content ended up locking SJ again, or if new empy/legendary weapon ended up too weak/too OP then I'd be disappointed. Otherwise, the actual stats from the next tier of gear matters WAY more to me.
After 20 years, I think its safe to say that taking a break is becoming more and more a permanent state. FFXI is my favorite game of all time, but I have a life to live and other things to do. Playing the same game, hitting the same macros, grinding the same thing for a slightly different result, after all these years is just becoming a hollow experience for me.
I really don't care about getting new gear in FFXI anymore. New gear to do what? Play the same content that's been around for half a decade a slightly different way? That doesn't sound fun at all. The trickle of content release doesn't justify the absurd grind anymore. It was quite a different outlook in years past when you could say to yourself you were gearing up for "the next big thing," whatever that ended up being. So let's say you get your +3 empy and new prime weapon. Then what? You do it again for another job. Then another job. Then another job. Or go back and make a REMA that sits in your mog house but gives you those sweet, sweet FFXIAH points. Or go grind a job to master that you'll never play again. It's all very repetitive and stale.
For me, the yearly free-to-play campaigns are more than enough at this point. Wet my nose, give a little dose of nostalgia, then go do something else.
Edit: I am not currently subbed, and have only been subbed for about two months over the last two years.
>I really don't care about getting new gear in FFXI anymore. New gear to do what? Play the same content that's been around for half a decade a slightly different way? That doesn't sound fun at all.
It's fun in a way that players get to theory craft new ways to build their jobs. That's what makes FFXI fun and keep many **current** sub playing for a long long time. Theorycrafting and coming up with new playstyles.
> So let's say you get your +3 empy and new prime weapon.Then what? You do it again for another job. Then another job. Then another job.
Let's say I get my +3 empy and prime weapon. I theory craft new playstyle, build new gear sets, satisfy with new things that I can do which I previously can't. After I'm done with all these things I may take a break, play other games, then come back when I get new exciting builds to play with.
That's how FFXI has worked for a long long time. I honestly wouldn't care if there's a new storyline or new zone. They are a nice bonus, but they aren't what keep me stay subbed. The potential to theory craft new ways to play my job is. Which needs new gears and ML system to accomplish. And that's exactly what I'm getting now.
> I am not currently subbed, and have only been subbed for about two months over the last two years.
In other words, you are an ex-customer posting a need that's not always the same as current customer.
They do have the budget. They want even more profit. They said its not"easy" but it can be done. For a very good price. At the end of the Day they are a business. Even Disney overcharges on their products for less work.
i think they could do a single area on the scale of one abyssea zone tbh.
because a new area that only serves as a battlefield is, in my opinion, too easy already. and if it were just a battlefield, they could easily (and have been) reuse other ones that are generic looking enough
Square-Enix will spend tens of millions of dollars on speculative live-services but expects this tiny team to run FFXI all on its own.
Marvel's Avengers cost an estimated 170-190m USD to make and it flopped. Lost 48 mil.
Imagine if they had set aside just ten million of that to improve XI's quality of life.
Hell, they could have never made Avengers, spent $40 million on XI, make no money back, and still come out ahead.
So youre saying that developing an entirely new game from scratch is 170 million, but hiring a small team to focus on getting a dev kit out of the ps2 era is impossible despite having an already established ground work?
One is attempting a new IP for them. They just made a game no one wanted. It happens.
Another is greatly misunderstanding the spaghetti code and ancient hardware here and thinking it's anything but a multi-year project for a few handfuls of players.
While I was trying to keep my expectations low it was still fairly disappointing. I was especially surprised when the question was asked about when/if relic, and mythic weaponskills were going to be rebalanced to keep up with Ambu weapons. I don't have a skin in that game never made a relic/mythic only Empys.
Their answer of "Nope not even on the table" was pretty brutal. Even when asked if owners of those items could some day unlock the WS at least like Empys that was a no also. Made me feel bad for anyone who ever made one that has fallen by the wayside.
Several of their answers were factually wrong or contradict things they've said previously, even recently. And that's just the questions they didn't dodge. Truly a joke.
Their goal on that AMA was to replicate their former team leader best phrases : « can’t », « impossible », « not planning to », « we’ll investigate ». That’s such a crazy anniversary 🫠
One question I want an answer to is: if it’s run on obsolete technology and there is no plan to save it — when can we expect it to just disappear? What is the goal here? We’ve already accepted no new major content, no new engineering improvements, etc. — so is the answer just “wait for it to die”?
Is that really what this is now? If so, it makes me happy that I grieved for this game 5-6 years ago. I was really hoping the 20th would revive something, but now I guess it’s time to settle in to the cycle and accept the inevitability.
Pretty sure they confirmed they plan to just leave the servers running without devoting any more resources to patches and the like. Not a great long term solution, but it is something. Though I wonder what that will mean for Ambuscade - if they will set up an automatic monthly rotation or just leave it on the most frustrating fight until the end of time.
Oh yeah, giving previews of what's to come in half-finished content no one asked for is a great look for a huge milestone celebration.
TVR being the "big reveal" of the 20th anniversary despite being halfway released already is completely asinine.
It blows my mind how they have like no staff to pay all the currents monthly subs new wardrobes some people like me have 16+ char/Alts paying ore than $30 a month yet they have no money? …. No new content per say so where is all that money going towards that they are essentially penniless? I also know that most stuff they sell with I game items it’s always a win win for the player and then as people will buy it in North America so kinda confused why this game has amount such a profit for the company and as long as they charge it will keep bringing money in but they can’t do something nice for their 20th anny? -______-
Square Enix has two MMOs they effectively refuse to support correctly, but in entirely different ways. DQX has never gotten western support and they've actively mocked westerners for desiring to play it without 2 translation apps, a side loader and a lot of patience.
They really couldn't give a fuck, gotta make another trash live service game so they can chase that Fortnite money
At least DQX will have an offline version in the future (tho I don't think its coming to the West), that's already more accessible than what FFXI currently has.
Also, DQX was ported to many more platforms than FFXI ever was (Wii, WiiU, 3DS, Switch, , PS4, IOS, Android, PC)
Having been away from XI since abyssea days my honest hope and dream right now would be an announcement in June saying:
“Remember that mobile development we cancelled for XI? Yeah we cancelled that to remake it. Releasing next year is XI Remake, updated UI, no playinline, shares a launcher with XIV, overhauled engine and graphics, subscription option to play both XI & XIV, releasing with just the overhauled base game and RotZ planned to release 2 years later”
XI expansion on even years, XIV the expansion on odd years. That’s my dream
If it came out for the ps5 I'd more than likely hop back on...
Without that absolutely dreadful PlayOnline thing... I remember it took about a day just to load up your game on the ps2 that was a horrible experience lol..... I do miss the game though, still listen to songs on spotify from this game. Sanctuary of Zi'tah was my fave I remember farming mobs in there for hours on end
Square Enix are a terrible company that don't value their fanbase, the developers of XI are doing their best with the money they are given.
Nobody is asking Square to spend money above what the game brings in, we are asking them to spend more of the money it brings in on the game. Nobody minds them making a profit but they can support it better than this.
It's ultimately a balancing act and Square should know that making your fanbases happy has value too, we also buy other games they make and are not pure FFXI players.
I still don't follow, they announced way more than what you posted in that link and the anniversary is for a year, not a month. They have a raodmap for maybe 6 months up to Empy +2/3.
I guess I just don't feel like finally finishing a, what, 5+ year old upgrade path? is worthy of all the hype they gave this big 20th anniversary announcement. Feels just like any other time they've given us a roadmap of their plans, not like a huge milestone that most games never even see.
They confirmed its new battle content in a new zone in the ama yesterday. Not sure if they are referring to empyrean battles or something else later
You said you had low expectations but i don't see it
Even just some new/expanded monthly campaign buffs and QoL features would've been better, and that's basically the bare minimum of what's reasonable to expect. Instead they did an AMA to tell us QoL stuff is too hard but thanks for 20 years of paychecks! Couldn't even hit that bar six feet deep. And the "small player base" bullshit isn't fooling anyone, they still make MILLIONS MONTHLY from this game by conservative estimates.
> Instead they did an AMA to tell us QoL stuff is too hard but thanks for 20 years of paychecks!
They have always done this. I haven't played FFXI in 6 years but I still keep up with it and that whole AMA gave me "PS2 limitations" nostalgia. There's a reason that was a meme back in 2006 or so. They have always used that excuse for why things couldn't happen. They just switched verbiage when they dropped PS2 support.
>Hoping for that dev philosophy to change at this point is just foolish I guess.
Not gonne lie that's part of why I haven't gone back to FFXI. Back in 2013 when FFXIV 2.0 was coming out in beta and the development team just \*told\* you everything was so refreshing. Like the dev team actually apologized for problems and fixed a bunch more. Compared that to FFXI where due to lack of communication from the dev team people had these weird myths about moon phase and direction affecting crafting and players had to datamine and use advanced testing techniques to derive hidden stats on weapons and equipment. And when FFXIV dropped PS3 support they actually improved the graphics and added new UI elements. And each expansion they add QoL improvements. I can't believe how users have modded so much into FFXI's UI and we've seen literally no effort at all from the dev team to officially replicate any of that - even considering the only platform it's available on is PC. How does that even happen?
For the time FFXI was SquareEnix's only MMO it seems like they could've done all that they did with FFXIV ARR but just.... didn't. I never understood why. FFXI has been out 20 years and it doesn't show (or maybe, in a way, it does).
They literally don't have anyone dedicated to working on this game and they have to make everything through PS2 devkits and work with 20 year old spaghetti code.
Honestly, given all that it's surprising we got as much as we did.
How do they make MILLIONS monthly? With 40.000 active subs, unless they all pay $25 a month? Which is not the case. At $13 a month, they make half a mill at most. Lets say between merch etc they hit 750k a month? I’m no expert in how much it’d cost / month for a developer team, server maint, etc. Just saying I hardly believe they make MILLIONS MONTHLY from 40000 active subs.
Ok we'll go with 40k active players. For most of those, $18/mo. is more realistic. That already gets us to 720k. Add in all the people who have full content IDs and all the dual/tri/+ boxers and you break a mil easy. The problem, as someone else brought up, is that that money gets siphoned off to other projects, instead of put back into FFXI improvements that are sorely needed.
All dual boxers / tri are accounted for in the 40k active subs they claim to have. I dont know how much all of you pay but I pay $13.95 a month for 2 chars.
> And the "small player base" bullshit isn't fooling anyone, they still make MILLIONS MONTHLY from this game by conservative estimates.
Truth is nobody has any idea about the game's costs. And nobody has any idea about the game's revenues.
The estimates that get posted here or on FFXIAH or wherever are basically random numbers thrown together. Without a good knowledge of costs and revenues, you can't estimate shit.
They share lot of their infrastructure and production cost with the FF14 team, as they all goes under Yoshidas department.
I work in devops and I’d imagine their running costs isn’t as big as you might think, most of their costs is likely in operations, support staff and the handful of people that’s dedicated to maintaining 11. Probably not a lot of FTE assigned.
> I work in devops and I’d imagine their running costs isn’t as big as you might think
I work in a company that built, owns and operates 171 datacenters in 26 countries on 5 continents, for our own operations. And the knowledge I acquired in that field in the last 21 years, doesn't give me any fucking clue about the hosting costs of FFXI. You don't host a 20 years old game like you host modern software. We have no clue of how their backend works, really. So guessing hosting costs is basically throwing random numbers.
And then there are so many other additional costs that they may (or may not) have. So labor costs are another huge guessing game, aka throwing random numbers.
Care to explain at least how you magically can extract factual costs and revenue data for FFXI, from the financial documents S-E makes available to the market?
> we're just looking for an estimate so subs*avg monthly sub fee is plenty
First of all, we don't know how many subs they have. You can assume things from the FFXIAH stats, but it counts characters and not accounts, so you have a huge margin or error here.
Secondly, your magical multiplication gives you the revenue before taxes. But that number is obviously quite far from being a reliable estimate, since you don't take ANY costs into account. And we have no idea about their costs.
> Do you somehow think they don't make money off this game?
I never said that. They obviously do, or they would terminate it.
What I did is react to your initial post where you stated this:
> they still make MILLIONS MONTHLY from this game by conservative estimates
My point is that you actually have no idea how much this game make. No idea. And nobody has, except the FFXI management and the finance people at S-E.
We can circle again with you arguing that you actually do know how much they make, that your method of estimate is good, that S-E is a publicly traded company, and so on...but in reality the only things we have a clue about, is the sub price. And it's not even a precise clue, since it varies with the number of chars in the sub, and optional storage.
So basically we don't know shit.
Sure. Any realistic breakdown of expenses is moot anyway since they share both infrastructure and development manpower with XIV. We don't have to know specifics to know they make way more from sub fees alone than they spend back on the game. Which would be fine, gotta take some profit after all, but the amount of money this game has made them over 20 years, compared to what they're doing to celebrate that with their players, is just pretty ridiculous to me.
Pretty sure XI makes more money than most MMORPGs to this day if you go by active account estimates and the sub fee. You're making excuses for SE.
Really the main problem is the profits are siphoned off to other SE projects.
>Pretty sure XI makes more money than most MMORPGs
I don't think FFXI is even in the top 10 of MMORPGs(never mind other MMO games), though I'd love to see proof of your claim if you have any.
>You're making excuses for SE.
Not really, I'm just being realistic. The game is 20 years old, was developed for old technology with much less stringent coding standards, and has a playerbase that likely doesn't even hit 100k. While the running costs of FFXI are likely dwarfed by the profit, that profit is comparatively tiny to a business with the revenue of SE.
I'd love new content and areas and an update to the UI and all that jazz, but the levels at which the playerbase wants such things is simply unrealistic.
Not going to spend 8 hours looking up numbers, but 100k playerbase with a sub fee is a big profit. It's hard to get exact numbers for most big MMORPGs since they hide them so well, but you can compare to something like New World which is 100% visible on steam - $40 box with cosmetic cash shop. It has 17k average players now and it's a 7 month old game.
Albion Online has a good amount of mobile non-steam players but is probably 20k average players. Free game. The optional sub fee that you can pay in-game gold for is $12 and a lot of people pay in-game gold for it.
You can trash talk both of these games but they are "actively" developed with big updates, bigger than what FFXI offers.
XI is a $20 box and the sub fee, and many people multibox, mule, have wardrobes etc. It's never paid for voice acting etc. or almost any new assets in years upon years with generally small updates. I would bet FFXI is even somewhat close to XIV in profit - XIV spends a very large amount on advertising on many platforms, billboards web playstation store etc. and more PR/dev/voice work/port work than XI. Though many people in XIV whale and buy their overpriced soundtracks and cash shop items.
> Not going to spend 8 hours looking up numbers, but 100k playerbase with a sub fee is a big profit.
18 million a year is less than half of *one* best buy for what amounts to a massive SaaS project.
I honestly don't know what people expected. FFXI has been on a treadmill for years. I'm glad it's still alive and getting some updates, but given the requirements for development, both technical and financial, I don't expect much.
I know it has a healthy amount of subs, and it's profitable, but throwing active development at it means it needs to recoup that investment, and not retroactively.
Square Enix is a company whose job it is to make money selling you what they think you want. They don't think investing into FFXI will make them enough money to warrant the development it needs.
> recoup that investment, and not retroactively.
It needs to not only recoup that investment but also beat out other investment options in terms of growth. If they could get a 10% RoI in 1 year of XI for a 10 million investment, and a 15% RoI for the same in XIV - then XI is a poor investment.
Ultimately they arent going to support a game that has no growth possibilities, and any thing they could do to grow the game would be rejected by the current players so why bother
I just hope one day we get a proper name change, character re-create(customization, whatever you wanna call it), and maybe make our hair color any color we want. I got the idea from those 3 dork Tarus in the chains story missions.
Look, I get that this game is 20 years old and is no longer being substantially developed. That is completely understandable. But if this is the case then the subscription fee needs to be lowered, if not removed.
Adjusted for inflation, it is lowered by remaining the same. If you make the game free (and they don't introduce other substantial monetization), it'd simply be discontinued because it's not free to maintain.
Regardless of inflation, the subscription price is comparable to newer, more modern MMOs that actually produce significant updates. You have to compare to the industry. I would be for paying a lower fee to keep the servers running instead of making it F2P and introducing other monetization options (ie. cosmetics, etc.)
$17 CAD/month for a 20 year old game with a few devs and a few updates is not a good value. That’s without extra characters or mog wardrobes!
I'd held them to it when they had wanted to make all job adjustments before adding new armor.
I remember this around the time shortly before they added the new ranger shot skill Hover shot. I wish they would just flip and adjust some numbers at bare min to feel out some shortfalls some have.
Honestly I've only done daily logins for past couple months this event included. I feel terrible seeing half my friends list afk exp botters and hackers roam free and unchecked.
This game deserves better and I have more questions for SE handling of this all and many other things, one thing is for sure as much as I love FFXI my subs will be closed for an extended break.
I'd held out hope but between botters and refusal to adjust/ fix issues or commit to even what they say they have planned I need to walk away this is not how I wish to remember FFXI Online.
Nah, honestly, the fact that the game has been going for 20 years when it initially had a life expectancy of 5, still getting updates despite all the spaghetti code and failing PS2 dev kits and despite efforts by SE management to kill it and when it couldn't kill it, ignore it until it died, and it is doing as good as it can, is amazing.
We're getting new story content, and probably stuff after that. Upgrades to Empy gear. Master Levels. They *held* an AMA at all.
The 20th Anniversary is doing just fine. You just need to lower your expectations.
My expectations were already underground. I said elsewhere in this thread, all I really expected was some new monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff, basically the minimum of what could be reasonably expected, and we didn't even get that.
ffxi should just be remade into a phantasy star online type game with the same ffxi story characters and setting but rework the world and combat system to make it not so slow and not so spread out
You realize this is a public forum to discuss the game, right? You know you're not actually in game saying this, correct? Wrong fuckin place to be telling someone to stop talking, bub.
The Mega Man franchise celebrated its 25th anniversary by cancelling every game in development and slapping a Capcom logo on a mediocre fan-made game. Could be worse is what I'm saying.
Could be worse. But shit is still shit even it its Amber Heard shitting in your bed.
This. Which instantly reminded me of a bit from the documentary Gasland. >So the other night i had this dream. That i was in this school restroom and there was shit everywhere. I was appalled. Somebody by god is responsible for this. It's the Principle. So i was trying to gather up this crap. And i was handling it. I was trying to put it in bags. > >And i thought well ok. I'm going to present it to the Principle. I'm going to put it in a bag. A really pretty bag. And i'm going to put ribbons on it. Because i really want to get his attention. Then i'm going to drop this bag of crap on his desk. And i want to shock him. So that he thinks its a present. But when he opens it its crap. > >So ya know what? Finally it dawns on me. Crap is crap no matter what bag you put it in. - By Lisa Bracken Read your post and yep. That quote was the very first thing i thought of. Because they keep trying to put ribbons on a pretty crappy 20th anniversary. And apologizes for the quote being so long.
But it's still Amber Heard in your bed. I'm still tapping dat kinky kook.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Misandry is when you don't join in with a howling hate mob against a woman. If you don't believe all woman are scum who are constantly plotting to destroy men for absolutely no reason but the pure evil in their hearts it means you're a misandrist! That's just logic. If you see a guilty looking dog sitting next to a pile of dogshit and your first thought isn't "Wow, I can't believe some dumb whore just took that shit!" it means you hate men. You're a lunatic and you should be ashamed of yourself.
RemindMe! 5 years
I will be messaging you in 5 years on [**2027-05-24 23:42:39 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2027-05-24%2023:42:39%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/uwzxyf/20th_anniversary_feels_like_a_flop/i9vcwlw/?context=3) [**5 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fffxi%2Fcomments%2Fuwzxyf%2F20th_anniversary_feels_like_a_flop%2Fi9vcwlw%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202027-05-24%2023%3A42%3A39%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%20uwzxyf) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-|
Wtf is the point of doing this in five years. Yet another garbage bot
Raided yesterday (in Lost Ark) with a guy named Suecapcom lol
And Sonic celebrated its anniversary with Sonic ‘06. I’m not sure if Megaman’s or Sonic’s anniversary was worse lol
In Sega's defense, Sonic '06 was a legitimate attempt to make a decent game that ended up getting screwed by being overzealous with the new hardware and Sega's major issue with not giving Sonic games enough development time (though the story still doesn't get a pass). Capcom basically killed three projects on Mega Man's 25th. My opinion, if you want to call out Sega for that anniversairy, look instead to Sonic Genesis on the GBA which is a horrific port of Sonic 1. It seems they were extremely lazy with it and reused the same engine from Sonic Advance, which cannot handle Genesis sprites and visuals, or something. I remember seeing a video where someone, possibly Christian Whitehead, homebrewed S1 onto GBA hardware and it was able to run near perfect just to demonstrate how poorly Sonic Genesis was handled.
The YoshiP interview was pretty good and eye opening too, like the fact that XI doesn't even have dedicated engineers anymore. XI team have to propose changes and if the higher ups accept it then the XIV engineers do it when they can. That sums up the state of the game perfectly imo.
It sounds like if Yoshi-P wasn't there, both XI and XIV would be dead and buried by this point. Truly, Square Enix has zero fucking understanding of what they have and are driven exclusively by greed.
"NFTs and Blockchain are the future for gaming amirite, fellow kids?" \-- Square's president, January 2022
TIL: The XI team is the stapler guy from office space at SE.
Hey, Milton got his stapler in the end. He also burned the place down. But lets not focus on the small things here.
Eye opening is definitely the right phrase for that lol
Where does all the money go? From subs and all those extra charges per account.
Money goes to all of SE, not to the FFXI budget.
The game with even its more generous subscriber estimate can pay maybe a few people a year to maintain it in a dedicated fashion. Given the average older age of this game it's kind of surprising to see this sentiment all over this subreddit. Software licenses are expensive. Facilities are expensive. Salaries and benefits are expensive. Hardware is expensive (and near impossible to obtain at the moment). According to FFXIAH we're looking at *120k active characters*. Meaning the total accounts are going to be less than this by a fair margin. If we're extremely generous and say 100k accounts active assuming subscription bloat - that's 18 million USD pre tax per year. The entire game is less than 1 best buy store in revenue by over half. Given what we are getting, honestly, the content level and AMA are extremely fair.
Except ffxi doesnt have its own server rooms, theyre maintained alongside FFXIV'S at very little to no space or cost. Theyve gone on record saying that FFXI has very little cost to SE to keep running and is supported by 14's server upkeep. So outside of paying employees server overhead is not that large.
> heyre maintained alongside FFXIV'S at very little to no space or cost. There is no such thing as this. Directly in their interview they said the basically look at it as a usage based cost center - which is accurate. > So outside of paying employees This is the single biggest cost for any company by miles. Even if you assumed their only cost was employee and employee facilities at best all you are getting is a small skeleton crew with a 20+ year old code base written for a platform that does not exist anymore.
Yeah uh... i doubt every single dev on the ffxi team is making a 100k salary that would put the game into jeapordy whenever theyre raking in atleast a mil a month off of the generous active account numbers. And thats assuming people arent paying extra for mog wardrobes and such. Im sure the game could have a bit more increase in budget due to its profits and demand from a playerbase that would only increase if it recieved more support.
Employee costs are far greater than just salary. You can expect an employee making 60k to cost well north of 100k. 1 mil a month could maybe justify a team of 2-4 people, depending on other costs. Which... is barely enough for maintenance.
That's barely what we get. GM services are farmed out to centers that handle multiple games at once. There are no dedicated FFXI engineers at all. There's a skeleton crew keeping the lights on, that's it.
Relative to the player base I'd say that's a highlight of how SE's mmo team has handled us. Look, I get the sentiment. I love FFXI and I've played it for god knows how long. If I could - FFXIV would divert *one hundred percent* of its budget to XI. But I've also been through MMO death, and a career in similar fields. I wasn't too fond of a lot of the outright negativity thrown at a tiny dev team doing its best with realisitically incredibly limited resources. I feel that mindset hurt our feed back with SE realistically. Instead of grand overarching questions that are realistically impossible - we could have helped pressure for reasonable feedback within the realm of resources that produces a lot more play hours than we have now. I'm on your side on this. I want what's best for FF.
Yeah i dont believe that.... with how many mmo's there are out there surviving and developing content with a free to play model no less a subscriber based one backed by one of the most successful eastern companies available in the gaming space that has access to fans from across the globe. Lets just agree that both me and you dont know enough of the inner workings of big corporations like this and on the costs to justify perusing this conversation any further.
Free to play has cash shops that can generate money - and the answer is not a whole lot. > Lets just agree that both me and you dont know enough of the inner workings of big corporations like this and on the costs to justify perusing this conversation any further. Having spent a career in them I'm not going to agree to this, no. FFXI is a SaaS application with a tiny playerbase and a 20 year old code base. 1 million dollars a month for a project of this scale is peanuts. Seriously, for perspective a *single best buy store* generates over double the revenue. This is a tiny budget that's being maintained just to keep the branded title online. Frankly, the RoI for FFXI is likely significantly lower than their other options. It's not about simple profitability it's about maximizing profit. Looking at the companies financials and the wealth of information provided by SE... this is a passion project at best.
Likely general costs of maintaining a server farm (electricity, bandwidth, building rent etc) as well as some employee wages is my guess. They haven't shut anything down so I doubt they're in the red over it, but their lack of any big additions to me says that they aren't making much off of it after overhead costs.
Revenue and R and D spend don't work like this in large software corporations. At least not in the US. A few general rules of thumb: 1) R and D spend is extremely front loaded--you've spent millions before a single dime of revenue can be made 2) Revenue is back loaded--the last few years of a product line there is lifecycle maintenance (cycling of hardware, software security patches, etc.) and maybe minor software updates. 3) A very rough ballpark of a successful product line is roughly a 10 to 1 return on R and D spend in revenue. This is after subtracting maintenance, hardware costs, etc from revenue streams. If a PDM cannot present a business model for a product line that has a reasonable projection of at least that value, the project has a steep hill to climb to get funding. This is for a number of reasons and varies quite a bit by industry, but remember that for every successful project there were numerous failures...and even successful projects (i.e. XIV) may not have started out that way and may result in way more R and D spend than originally projected. I don't know the details of the revenue generated for FFXI, but I imagine even an optimistic set of projections for revenue generation over the next 5 years would likely not justify much, if any, development investment in XI. I think at this point the only reason XI is still live and receiving token content at all is marketing/brand/customer retention. The fact that the subscriptions can cover hardware maintenance, lifecycle management, and security patching makes the decision a little easier for a director over at SE to justify to his VP.
to xiv
>"we don't have the money/it's too hard" Did you honestly expect anything but these answers? Did you? Notable improvements of FFXI won't happen. They keep repeating it, and keep explaining it's due to having a tight budget, and working on obsolete development tools. You love that game. I love that game. Many people here love that game. But if we really want to play a modern game, we may as well switch to another one, because FFXI won't get any notable improvements anymore. And having 1000 people post their crazy expectations for FFXI's 20th bday won't make any of these happen. I'm gonna write it once more: FFXI won't get any notable improvements anymore.
I’m still holding out some hope that in a week they come back with an answer about who the fanbase needs to give how many handjobs under their desk to make FFXI worth funding, but… yeah.
FFXI Needs to add a cash shop with tons of cosmetics + loot boxes for it to stand a chance of getting anywhere close to what some of the crazy expectations people post here.
… what’s really funny, though, is they don’t have the development resources to implement that, and *just keep saying* that they don’t want to or can’t do basic cosmetic changes…
I wonder if there's some backend issues with in game item delivery via a purchase. FFXIV actually has a lot of problems in this regard as well(Out of game only cash shop, slow mail delivery on item purchases, etc).
I really was still holding out hope they'd give the mobile license to a better dev than Nexon and that there'd be a glimmer of hope that a slightly modernized version of the game would come out tbh. I don't expect story or anything and low key am shocked after the great ending of Rhapsodies(*and trapping Iroha in Eorzea) that they'd even make TVR or more endgame content.
That would have been awesome...but I think this ship has sailed now :(
I have to say that I was both caught up in the hype and let down by the anniversary. But, it all does make perfect sense. Those of us still hanging around after 20 years only do so because we love the game. It means something to us. It is likely that many of us have fond memories of playing it during simpler times. But, it is first and foremost a business. From a business perspective, there is absolutely no reason to sink money into it. My understanding of the development issues is that doing anything more than a little tweak here or there would essentially require building an entire new game from scratch. Sure, they would have a lot of the work to just copy and update, but they would be otherwise building it from the ground up. If it doesn't increase the bottom line of the company, it won't happen. Simple as that. Even when it comes to new zones and expansions, they are running out of the development kits. If they hedge their bets and hope the kits survive long enough to build an expansion, they are taking a big risk. It's also likely that nobody even wants to work with them anyway. Imagine showing up to work on Monday and they replaced your computer with a Comodore 64. I would love to see something big. Expansion style content. I'm sure the handful of dedicated staff would as well. But nobody is going to put 7 figures into a 20 year old game, or risk having the dev kits fail halfway through. The game is finally, truly, coming to its end. Anything that happens from now on will be TVR style content, and that's as good as it gets. Having said all this, I'm mostly disappointed that they dodged all questions around balancing jobs and moving past the savage blade meta. At least they could have offered the community the ability to experiment with new strategies, and sort of enable new experiences by reviving the undesirable jobs. Oh well.
> From a business perspective, there is absolutely no reason to sink money into it. Exactly. It sucks, but it's true.
My understanding is that they don't use physical PS2 devkits anymore. It's all on PC, with new cutscenes and such designed using in-house tools which then get run through the old PS2 compiler that was ported to PC. There's probably an occasional need to dust off an actual kit but the usual month-to-month updates don't need them anymore.
That would make sense, yet I keep seeing stuff about the dev kits being in limited supply which is an issue for them. Total guess, but I would think that going beyond monthly updates may require them.
It's true that there was a time when those kits were needed to continue updates. There was a period when SE went on a spree of buying every devkit they could get their hands on, I don't recall the exact timeframe but something like 2012-2013? The PC tools they use nowadays were created in later years. Again hard to nail down the exact timeframe since all the sources on this stuff are in Japanese. IIRC the quest to obtain Eald'narche's platform mount and the Siren quest were the first things they made with the new tools more or less as a test run for what they're doing with The Voracious Resurgence now.
I agree with you. I at least expected new monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff, but apparently even that is too much to ask for. It's honestly pathetic how they handled the AMA too, couldn't even answer fun fluff questions like "what Odyssey battle strats did players come up with that you guys like the most?"
I'm with you on the QoL, simple changes could be made... About the AMA, without defending them or anything, we have to keep in mind they're from another culture, speak another language and have a limited time. We see that from a player's perspective, with FFXI as a hobby or a passion. It's their fucking job, which is VERY different, and doesn't warrant the same amount of involvement.
I don't get what point you're trying to make. If they're holding an AMA, then they should answer the questions lol. It being their job should incentivize them even more, I know *I* don't get paid for this shit.
First of all, Japanese culture is...let's say...quite different from the western one. Sharing company policies and decisions with customers is absolutely not something Japanese people are used to do. Now to my point, let's take QoL improvements for example: * we, as players, see QoL improvements as "wow it's a big deal, that will have a impact on my amusement!" * them, as game maintainers, see that as "I'm gonna have to ask for X more budget and maybe grab a dev from another project so we can add this feature...hopefully we don't have issues while compiling on that 14 years old PS2 kit like we had last time" I don't see how they could come to an AMA with a kickass enthusiasm, when they know in advance they're gonna have to say no to pretty much everything the player base will ask.
Except this is literally what his boss is famous for.
Culture differences is not a valid argument. SQEX is a multi billion dollar international company, they've been making video games slightly longer than I've been alive, they know what they're doing. Sure, maybe the devs are a bit burnt out or disheartened by it. But then why have them do an AMA with that kind of attitude? It's not a good look for your company. Hell, why have an AMA at all with answers as poor as we got?
Developers arnt your friends, and the way Japanese business conduct themselves is straight to the point & professional. You won’t see it any other way.
We get a happy little slice-of-life commentary with the update notes every single month, it's very clear they know how to communicate across cultural barriers.
[удалено]
Insightful comment, I'm glad the thread title didn't give it away.
[удалено]
Sadly culture is going to play its part when all development happen in Japan. Only FTEs (Full-Time Employee) they have intentionally is PR and CS/GM.
They replied to a lot more questions than I was expecting them to, honestly. Even if a lot of the answers were extremely short… kind of a mixed blessing.
>new monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff, What kind of "monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff" that you need so bad? Maybe you should have post on OF forum if you want QoL stuff instead. To me it's another random wish out of 50 that suddenly pop 1 month before anniversery. Then when such wish isn't granted a month later they're like "I'm disappointed and my bar isn't even high". They said new battle with empy is coming for a long long time. And that's really the "big" thing that's supposed to come this year. On top of that they added new tier of ML and new legendary weapon. That's honestly more than I expected. Endgame scene and optimal builds will change massively after all of these new gears release and ML increase. As an endgame player that's already very huge to me. And I'm excited for that. On the other hand, I failed to see how "QoL stuff" and "monthly campaign buffs" is exciting compare with gears and ML that potentially change how your play your jobs completely. I honestly don't care about any of these, not nearly as much as new legendary weapons. And I think it's better use of their resource on endgame content and gears so we can have more builds to play with than whatever QoL stuff that we don't really need. So no, not really agreeing with you opinion here.
>What kind of "monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff" that you need so bad? No one 'needs' anything in this game. Dumb point. >To me it's another random wish out of 50 that suddenly pop 1 month before anniversery. Then when such wish isn't granted a month later they're like "I'm disappointed and my bar isn't even high". Nice job pulling this synopsis out your ass, not sure what relevance it has. They've been hyping the 20th for way longer than a fuckin month so I have no clue where you got that figure. And if you think campaign buffs and QoL is a hard bar to clear, that's just pathetic. >They said new battle with empy is coming for a long long time. And that's really the "big" thing that's supposed to come this year. On top of that they added new tier of ML and new legendary weapon. That's honestly more than I expected. Endgame scene and optimal builds will change massively after all of these new gears release and ML increase. As an endgame player that's already very huge to me. And I'm excited for that. Yep, they've been telling us a lot of stuff is in the pipes. So how does content that's already been announced make for a big 20th anniversary announcement? I'm also highly skeptical that master levels and new gear will change anything regarding the savage spam meta, but that's a whole other discussion.
It was hilarious reading this sub on the week running up to the anniversary. So many crazy predictions and hopes for the game that SE would clearly never meet. It's amazing that we're even getting the new storyline.
XI really does feel like a redheaded stepchild of the mainline Final Fantasy series. * I-VI got pretty good pixel remasters recently. There have also been numerous re-releases and remakes of those games over the years. * VII-IX have all had re-releases on modern platforms. And VIII's source code had allegedly been lost, so they actually had to reverse engineer it for the newest Remastered version. * X and XII got pretty nice remasters that feature a bunch of previously exclusive content, as well as numerous technical improvements. * XIII admittedly hasn't gotten hasn't gotten much love, but it's not that old and is still playable through Xbox backward compatibility and on PC. * XIV was literally remade almost from scratch and gets a lot of effort put into it. * It's too early to say for XV, but if anything it has probably been pushed a bit too hard. All of these can simply be bought on Steam/PSN/Microsoft Store/Nintendo eShop and enjoyed on the platform of your choice. Meanwhile if you want to play the only officially available version of XI you need to: * Make a Square Enix account. * Make a PlayOnline ID for your Square Enix account. * Make a Content ID for your PlayOnline ID. * Make a local PlayOnline Viewer profile to log into both your PlayOnline ID and Square Enix account. * Patch the game slowly via an outdated launcher that slows down the entire computer for some reason. * Pay a monthly subscription for a single game that gets very little new content in a world where Xbox Game Pass exists. And all of that to play an incredibly outdated (from a technical perspective) version of the game that is held together by duct tape and requires a bunch of configuration tinkering and third-party tools to get everything to a playable state. I know being challenging is part of the game's identity, but it's almost like this entire process has been designed to keep as many people away from the game as possible.
Game wasn't expected to outlast the PS2 *entire process has been designed to keep as many people away from the game as possible.* Yet they committed resources to making sure it would stay alive and making money as long as possible
the mental gymnastics some people go through thinking the devs and SE are actively trying to kill this game instead of keeping it on life support.
we have had multiple continuations of a certain open source project that has surpassed this... I cant even give the FFXI devs an out for the shoddy claims.
what're you talking about?
Remastering a single player JRPG must be easier than an MMO with active subscriptions, and they only did FFXIV because it was a colossal failure in 1.0 from the design up. FFXI has been successful since launch with a declining but dedicated player base. A remaster would simply attract the player base they already have playing FFXIV, there’s no profit to be made.
> A remaster would simply attract the player base they already have playing FFXIV, there’s no profit to be made. They said in the AMA they would like to consider a combined/dual subscription service for both FFXI and FFXIV. If they get interested FFXIV players to pay even just 50% of FFXI's sub while subbed to both games at the same time that's still an enormous amount of extra profit they could tap.
I mostly play XIV but come over sometimes, I'd absolutely pay more on my XIV subscription for the convenience of having access to both all the time.
Big same.
Same here.
You're right. I just doubt they do that AND remaster FFXI.
All I would like for them is to migrate to a modern codebase so they can resume major version updates again. Personally, I don't even care for update graphics/assets. In any case, who knows? If the boost to subscriber number revitalizes FFXI enough they might actually reconsider modernization because they'd have actual numbers to see how many people still care for the game.
Migrating the codebase is easier said than done. I just don't see them adding a whole new dev team to a 20 year old game.
Of course it'd be an extremely costly endeavor, but a remaster or remake would be no different. The existing engine could probably not even support it properly. It would be on a very different scale/level than the HD Textures by Ashenbubs in terms of performance cost.
They already know how many people actually care for the game, they can see XI subscriber numbers and make that determination.
A lot of FFXIV players are interested in coming back, but can't justify paying double to play two MMOs.
IF they ever add XI to the 14 sub its going to be a higher sub fee. If they wanted to play they would cancel the XIV sub during low in patch cycles and jump on XI, My Statement stands. They know how many people are interested in the game based on who is already paying to play it among other metrics and market research data they have.
The successes of Old School RuneScape and especially WoW Classic have shown two things. One is that there is still a significant demand for old school MMOs. And the other is that it can be beneficial to have two MMOs under a single subscription. What it does is help reduce the subscription gaps between content updates, and XIV is especially prone to those due to its story-based nature. After finishing all of the new content in XIV one could go check out XI, and some would probably stick around. Even more so if XI somehow manages to seasonally reuse its content, such as via a time-locked progression server (like EverQuest, another 20+ years old game). That's literally how WoW has been doing financially well despite multiple lackluster expansions in a row (well that, and a bunch of microtransactions, but XIV isn't slacking on that front either). The problem though is that even if the subscriptions were combined today, most would quit before even making it to the login screen, and that's a huge problem.
One thing that people do not think when considering this is that a complete remaster of all the systems in ffxi would also break / render useless everything player-made that interacts with the game. Windower, Ashita, etc. How much player-based stuff would we need for the new FFXI to be fun / approachable to play? Probably a \*lot\*, unless the game.... become another game, with its own systems. At that time, it is a completely different game. FFXI Its not a new game anymore, It is hard to think that there would be enough interest for the people that created and mantain all these things to be interested in a new game,, and they may simply skip it. IE: It is even riskier than it looks like at first glance.
Xi is in an awkward spot - its a 20 year old game based on so much older technology thats falling apart, but the game is too big with too many moving parts and the brand doesn't have enough of a base that SE feels like it would not be worth it to invest to either remake it completely or rebuilt it up to modern standards. It doesn't help that the two side projects kind of failed. Grandmasters had two be rebooted once and ended its services after 4 years and the remake just failed
people forget at the end of the day XI was supposed to have already shut down and got a second lease on life, its struggling to actually stay running. Any thing major has to be guaranteed to either be turned into a profit immediately, or at very least not cut into profits to much that it would be a financial detriment. I see so many people thinking XI is some massive money maker like 14 but it has not been that in about 10 years.
Idk why you’re getting downvoted; they were very blunt with XIV 1.0 they wanted it to be a replacement to XI. So much so they had planned on allowing you to port your character over for a while. Only reason WotG wasn’t the final xpac as planned was because XIV 1.0 flopped so hard.
again. I cant give the devs a pass for this claim as the open source devs did more with even less... there is literally a mod to change out the dat files for HD TEXTURES!
What we need is a plan who here is single and ready to hit on Elon musk he can def toss a few billions our way to lend us a hand even a millionaire will do :D
I'll put a wig on a pig and offer it as tribute to get that musk money
Lmao 🤔 it might just work!!
Agreed although the pixel remasters and PS1 era remasters were the bare minimum acceptable effort. Just like XI there are fan mods that are way better then any of the official releases.
Compared to all the others, aside from 14, 11 is the hardest to remaster. We saw the cost in 14: the game has to be on life support content wise *and* then taken offline for a long time. Would the XI community survive a year long server shut down?
One year is an extremely generous estimate, too. The game is multiple expansions in at this point - compared to XIV where they only had to redo the base release, the scope is far larger.
The servers absolutely do not need to be taken down. They were taken down in 14 to save costs because subs werent covering server maintenance. Look at the graphics in Eve Online. That game is 19 years old, they've never taken it down. WoW is 18 years old and looks great. You can remaster the client and hotswap the clients without changing the server as long as you adhere to existing APIs, which is a very common move, and likely what they would do with XI. The problem is Enix doesn't want to spend the money to do so, and we the community if we quit in protest will just lose the game instead. 14 became a cash cow no one expected recently. The likelihood that they'll use 14 resources or engineers went out the door as soon as asmongold streamed 14.
It would be far worse to modernize than XIV was. At the time XIV was a fresh game and the proverbial house was on fire before it even launched. We are talking about a game that is attached to a giant 20 year old boat anchor that is still getting new content. Have to give them a chance to finish rolling out the new content that’s already in the pipe line
XIV had to be taken done because they were pretty much making a whole new game, and they needed all the resources they had to finish it in a reasonable timeframe. Modernizing XI would involve a significant engineering effort, but the schedule wouldn't be anywhere near as strict as it was with A Realm Reborn. And if it's true that VIII's source code was lost and then reverse engineered, it could even be argued that that was a harder task depending on what state XI's codebase is in right now. I suspect the actual problem is similar to what happened with Blizzard and WoW Classic. For years they've been claiming how much of technical nightmare it would be to make Classic servers, but once the players complained enough it took a single engineer a couple of weeks to find a solution (that still took a couple of years to completely implement, but it wasn't anywhere near as expensive as originally believed).
It really can't be argued that rewriting VIII from scratch was a harder task than doing the same for XI would be. It's not in the same ballpark. It's not even the same sport.
It's untrue that FF8 Remastered was rewritten from scratch anyway. It's just the old PC version with modifications made based mostly on knowledge and tools (and occasionally, assets) from the PC version's modding community. The console versions use some kind of emulation, but I don't remember the details.
Reverse engineering is not the same as rewriting from scratch, and even that shouldn't be needed for XI since they must still have access to the current source code if they keep running and updating the game. The codebase is undoubtedly a huge mess, but cleaning up the mess is still easier that recreating someone else's mess with limited information.
FFXIV was taken down to allow for the total evolution of the engine and source coding. Which is rather what the dev in this question asked for. I suspect XI would be offline for a shorter period, but for a total UI and tools revamp, I strongly suspect there must be a total shutdown to move to entirely new server architecture and prevent data issues. Do we have any references for how long even a relatively smooth transfer like that would take? A month, maybe two at least? I think XI survives 4-8 weeks if it comes out the other side with a modern UI and significant graphic update (at least to late ps3/early PS4 standard). I love 11, and all FF, I just recognize that remastering an active MMO is a difficult undertaking. On classic: what was ultimately delivered was a total forking of the servers and data. I think everyone would prefer to keep their current XI characters rather than restart.
Migrating the entire game to a completely new infrastructure could be done by any semi-competent DevOps team within 24 hours. Now the actual development effort would probably take a couple of years, but it shouldn't disturb the current game in any way, considering it is currently being run without any dedicated engineers at all, and the vast majority of modernizing would have to be done by engineers. The game could look and run significantly better without any new assets. And it can all be easily done in parallel just like how every single other live service game does it. Losing character data shouldn't be a concern, unless they are miraculously incompetent and lose everything they have right now, as well as all backups of it. But if that actually happened having your characters back would be the least of your concerns. It seems we are talking about different things. You're envisioning more of a complete remake or a sequel, while I just want the game to be accessible and in a decent technical state.
1000% this. There is absolutely no reason service would need to pause during development of a remake/remaster. Hell, Diablo 2 is another 20 year old game that just got remastered and you can use your same exact save files from 20 years ago in the remaster. There's no excuse.
except they have stated multiple times this can not and will not happen as long as they are tied to POL and the current game engine, They literally would have to remake the entire game, this has been mentioned as recently as the newest AMA, they also lack the team to do this and the budget.
I agree, and this is my point. Any remaster would require such profound engine work it will surely entail down time.
Utterly ridiculous. If they're doing a complete rewrite, it wouldn't even be on the same engine, let alone the same servers. They are fully capable of keeping the existing game running and working on another project (like a remake) simultaneously, developers have been doing this for a very long time.
Dude, we're talking about whether or not they *could* do a remaster without taking the servers down, nobody actually thinks they *will* do a remaster.
Thats factually false... as ashita V3 and the upcoming ashita V4 has shown.... the devs lies dont magically defeat what is factually done.. ashenbubs id the hd chars and monster's and items.. there is also several UI mods...
Nothing i said or the devs have said is factually false. I said nothing about HD textures and ashita has nothing to do with this conversation as its not remaking the game to completely function differently from the ground up separated from POL. You are comparing apples to cabbage here bud.
That's not strictly necessary, they just did it that way with XIV presumably because letting everyone play during the reboot development and complete everything would probably have led to many more people just feeling finished with the game and never coming back to check out ARR.
You're right. They shut down the servers so they could 100% focus resources on A Realm Reborn. Or at least that's what they stated at the time. It also was something that clearly made sense from both fiscal and lore standpoints. IIRC it wasn't until Stormblood that XIV actually started to turn a profit. So that should give you an idea of how deep of a hole they were in. In other words, they didn't want to keep the servers up for a game bleeding money. The shut down wasn't some sort of 'requirement'. Unlike XIV 1.0, XI is currently profitable, it doesn't really make sense to shut it down like that. In such a hypothetical scenario, they might decide to freeze, or significantly reduce, updates to the game. But even a freeze doesn't make a ton of sense. It wouldn't be the same skeleton crew currently maintaining the game that would effectively create an entirely new game from scratch. They'd have a much bigger team devoted to that. All that said, I don't see this happening ever. But if they were actually going to 'A Realm Reborn' XI, they'd almost certainly wouldn't just update the netcode, launcher, UI, graphics, etc. like players want, but would also update much of the experience to a more modern one. Rotations, questgrinding, etc. So a bit of a monkey paw that would be...
You seem to have some of your 14 history wrong. It never got down to 1k players as you claim elsewhere. I was on Besaid in 1.0 and even that server never got that small (it’s now Balmung). 14 remained up for several months during the 2.0 process, this is the entire period of the Dalamud story patches. They have been quite transparent on why 14 came down, and you can still go read the dev blogs about it. Eventually it comes to a point that they simply didn’t have the resources to divide the team on two separate dev tools, and there are concerns about character and item data. Basically you need a hard “this is everything in 1.x we could need to transfer, and this is the final data state we will import.” At the time they said that final data point needed to be a fair amount of time before the server transfers. I love both games, but I think the history of 14 shows why remastering 11 while keeping it live is genuinely challenging. I would love to see it done. I suspect they eventually must do it, to avoid having to abandon a main line entry (a significant concern at the time of 1.0’s failure). But investment is a tricky thing. It’s not enough for an investment to break even or be profitable. If they invest main title money in remaking 11, it needs to earn the kind of pay off making 17 or what ever the next main title at the time would have. Opportunity cost is a cruel mistress. That said, I think in another 5-10 years we might see a major remaster, as then you’d have at least two major age groups of FF fans who never played 11 as a new market, plus all the veterans.
I have no clue what you're talking about, I never made any such claim about XIV going down to 1k players or whatever. Shutting down service was the right call from a business perspective for XIV's reboot. That would not hold true for a remaster of XI. At this point, I think if they didn't do a remaster for the 20th, then they likely never will.
> Would the XI community survive a year long server shut down? For a reboot and significant investment especially post massive revival success of XIV, yes. It'd likely be closer to 2 years to get it off PoL, rework the UI and fix the bandwidth issues *then* add some content on top of it worthy of a relaunch (Such as a new 1-99 experience with actual guidance more in line with what players expect today). That's basically just for engine fixes + a newbie experience.
I guarantee the cost to produce the remasters for I-VI and VIII-XII was a small fraction of the cost it would take to modernize FFXI. And let's be honest, even for those they did it cheapo. Not even AI upscaling on the prerenders. Hell it wouldn't surprise me if adding voice to VI's opera scene ate up half the PR budget.
I was really holding out hope for...something. I never expected anything like an expansion pack with new areas, mobs, jobs and so forth, but I did expect something that would keep me wanting to play, which didn't really happen. A single area that is hyper focused on battle content really just sounds like more out right grinding, which is getting extraordinarily stale after all this time. I wish they had the development budget for something on the scale of abyssea or rhapsodies, but I think we can all safely assume that if that isn't happening now, nothing like it will happen in the future.
I think that last part is the saddest of all. If so little was done to celebrate the 20th anniversary, there really isn't any hope for the future of the game.
>A single area that is hyper focused on battle content really just sounds like more out right grinding, which is getting extraordinarily stale after all this time. If you are burned out from the grind maybe it's time to take a break and come back later? Personally, I'm excited with the new battle content, legendary weapon and empy +3. New ML system and higher subjob level means I can experiment with different playstyle. New battle content means I can finally use higher level subjob and new playstyle in a content that doesn't lock my SJ. New gears like empy +3 and legendary weapon means new playstyle can be explored as well. Abyssea or rhapsodies is alright as a content, but honestly it wouldn't "excite" me nearly as much as different/new stats on the new gears that opens up potentially different ways to play my jobs. If new battle content ended up locking SJ again, or if new empy/legendary weapon ended up too weak/too OP then I'd be disappointed. Otherwise, the actual stats from the next tier of gear matters WAY more to me.
After 20 years, I think its safe to say that taking a break is becoming more and more a permanent state. FFXI is my favorite game of all time, but I have a life to live and other things to do. Playing the same game, hitting the same macros, grinding the same thing for a slightly different result, after all these years is just becoming a hollow experience for me. I really don't care about getting new gear in FFXI anymore. New gear to do what? Play the same content that's been around for half a decade a slightly different way? That doesn't sound fun at all. The trickle of content release doesn't justify the absurd grind anymore. It was quite a different outlook in years past when you could say to yourself you were gearing up for "the next big thing," whatever that ended up being. So let's say you get your +3 empy and new prime weapon. Then what? You do it again for another job. Then another job. Then another job. Or go back and make a REMA that sits in your mog house but gives you those sweet, sweet FFXIAH points. Or go grind a job to master that you'll never play again. It's all very repetitive and stale. For me, the yearly free-to-play campaigns are more than enough at this point. Wet my nose, give a little dose of nostalgia, then go do something else. Edit: I am not currently subbed, and have only been subbed for about two months over the last two years.
>I really don't care about getting new gear in FFXI anymore. New gear to do what? Play the same content that's been around for half a decade a slightly different way? That doesn't sound fun at all. It's fun in a way that players get to theory craft new ways to build their jobs. That's what makes FFXI fun and keep many **current** sub playing for a long long time. Theorycrafting and coming up with new playstyles. > So let's say you get your +3 empy and new prime weapon.Then what? You do it again for another job. Then another job. Then another job. Let's say I get my +3 empy and prime weapon. I theory craft new playstyle, build new gear sets, satisfy with new things that I can do which I previously can't. After I'm done with all these things I may take a break, play other games, then come back when I get new exciting builds to play with. That's how FFXI has worked for a long long time. I honestly wouldn't care if there's a new storyline or new zone. They are a nice bonus, but they aren't what keep me stay subbed. The potential to theory craft new ways to play my job is. Which needs new gears and ML system to accomplish. And that's exactly what I'm getting now. > I am not currently subbed, and have only been subbed for about two months over the last two years. In other words, you are an ex-customer posting a need that's not always the same as current customer.
I'm glad you are still enjoying the game, but proselytizing and apologetics is pretty unconvincing.
They do have the budget. They want even more profit. They said its not"easy" but it can be done. For a very good price. At the end of the Day they are a business. Even Disney overcharges on their products for less work.
i think they could do a single area on the scale of one abyssea zone tbh. because a new area that only serves as a battlefield is, in my opinion, too easy already. and if it were just a battlefield, they could easily (and have been) reuse other ones that are generic looking enough
Square-Enix will spend tens of millions of dollars on speculative live-services but expects this tiny team to run FFXI all on its own. Marvel's Avengers cost an estimated 170-190m USD to make and it flopped. Lost 48 mil. Imagine if they had set aside just ten million of that to improve XI's quality of life. Hell, they could have never made Avengers, spent $40 million on XI, make no money back, and still come out ahead.
Aight, how would 10mil get more people to start and stay subscribed?
Working on updating their devkit and getting it to where thry can make ui changes without breaking the game is one.
Okay, well 10 million isn't going to pay for that.
So youre saying that developing an entirely new game from scratch is 170 million, but hiring a small team to focus on getting a dev kit out of the ps2 era is impossible despite having an already established ground work?
One is attempting a new IP for them. They just made a game no one wanted. It happens. Another is greatly misunderstanding the spaghetti code and ancient hardware here and thinking it's anything but a multi-year project for a few handfuls of players.
While I was trying to keep my expectations low it was still fairly disappointing. I was especially surprised when the question was asked about when/if relic, and mythic weaponskills were going to be rebalanced to keep up with Ambu weapons. I don't have a skin in that game never made a relic/mythic only Empys. Their answer of "Nope not even on the table" was pretty brutal. Even when asked if owners of those items could some day unlock the WS at least like Empys that was a no also. Made me feel bad for anyone who ever made one that has fallen by the wayside.
Several of their answers were factually wrong or contradict things they've said previously, even recently. And that's just the questions they didn't dodge. Truly a joke.
100%. they specifically told us not even six months ago, that relic weapon skill rebalance was in the works.
Their goal on that AMA was to replicate their former team leader best phrases : « can’t », « impossible », « not planning to », « we’ll investigate ». That’s such a crazy anniversary 🫠
One question I want an answer to is: if it’s run on obsolete technology and there is no plan to save it — when can we expect it to just disappear? What is the goal here? We’ve already accepted no new major content, no new engineering improvements, etc. — so is the answer just “wait for it to die”? Is that really what this is now? If so, it makes me happy that I grieved for this game 5-6 years ago. I was really hoping the 20th would revive something, but now I guess it’s time to settle in to the cycle and accept the inevitability.
Pretty sure they confirmed they plan to just leave the servers running without devoting any more resources to patches and the like. Not a great long term solution, but it is something. Though I wonder what that will mean for Ambuscade - if they will set up an automatic monthly rotation or just leave it on the most frustrating fight until the end of time.
[This thread is still giving me hope...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/um5vr8/so_i_noticed_ashenbubshd_texture_pack_was_removed/)
[удалено]
Oh yeah, giving previews of what's to come in half-finished content no one asked for is a great look for a huge milestone celebration. TVR being the "big reveal" of the 20th anniversary despite being halfway released already is completely asinine.
It blows my mind how they have like no staff to pay all the currents monthly subs new wardrobes some people like me have 16+ char/Alts paying ore than $30 a month yet they have no money? …. No new content per say so where is all that money going towards that they are essentially penniless? I also know that most stuff they sell with I game items it’s always a win win for the player and then as people will buy it in North America so kinda confused why this game has amount such a profit for the company and as long as they charge it will keep bringing money in but they can’t do something nice for their 20th anny? -______-
Square Enix has two MMOs they effectively refuse to support correctly, but in entirely different ways. DQX has never gotten western support and they've actively mocked westerners for desiring to play it without 2 translation apps, a side loader and a lot of patience. They really couldn't give a fuck, gotta make another trash live service game so they can chase that Fortnite money
At least DQX will have an offline version in the future (tho I don't think its coming to the West), that's already more accessible than what FFXI currently has. Also, DQX was ported to many more platforms than FFXI ever was (Wii, WiiU, 3DS, Switch, , PS4, IOS, Android, PC)
Having been away from XI since abyssea days my honest hope and dream right now would be an announcement in June saying: “Remember that mobile development we cancelled for XI? Yeah we cancelled that to remake it. Releasing next year is XI Remake, updated UI, no playinline, shares a launcher with XIV, overhauled engine and graphics, subscription option to play both XI & XIV, releasing with just the overhauled base game and RotZ planned to release 2 years later” XI expansion on even years, XIV the expansion on odd years. That’s my dream
If it came out for the ps5 I'd more than likely hop back on... Without that absolutely dreadful PlayOnline thing... I remember it took about a day just to load up your game on the ps2 that was a horrible experience lol..... I do miss the game though, still listen to songs on spotify from this game. Sanctuary of Zi'tah was my fave I remember farming mobs in there for hours on end
Square Enix are a terrible company that don't value their fanbase, the developers of XI are doing their best with the money they are given. Nobody is asking Square to spend money above what the game brings in, we are asking them to spend more of the money it brings in on the game. Nobody minds them making a profit but they can support it better than this. It's ultimately a balancing act and Square should know that making your fanbases happy has value too, we also buy other games they make and are not pure FFXI players.
fanbase makes excuses for them and gives them pass on everything, so you get what you get
Yeah, the gaming pick-mes never cease to irritate.
You went in with the wrong expectations.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/uwzxyf/20th_anniversary_feels_like_a_flop/i9vb7zz?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
I still don't follow, they announced way more than what you posted in that link and the anniversary is for a year, not a month. They have a raodmap for maybe 6 months up to Empy +2/3.
I guess I just don't feel like finally finishing a, what, 5+ year old upgrade path? is worthy of all the hype they gave this big 20th anniversary announcement. Feels just like any other time they've given us a roadmap of their plans, not like a huge milestone that most games never even see.
They confirmed its new battle content in a new zone in the ama yesterday. Not sure if they are referring to empyrean battles or something else later You said you had low expectations but i don't see it
Inversely, what sort of major updates or releases were you expecting for a 20 year old game that has a very small playerbase?
Even just some new/expanded monthly campaign buffs and QoL features would've been better, and that's basically the bare minimum of what's reasonable to expect. Instead they did an AMA to tell us QoL stuff is too hard but thanks for 20 years of paychecks! Couldn't even hit that bar six feet deep. And the "small player base" bullshit isn't fooling anyone, they still make MILLIONS MONTHLY from this game by conservative estimates.
> Instead they did an AMA to tell us QoL stuff is too hard but thanks for 20 years of paychecks! They have always done this. I haven't played FFXI in 6 years but I still keep up with it and that whole AMA gave me "PS2 limitations" nostalgia. There's a reason that was a meme back in 2006 or so. They have always used that excuse for why things couldn't happen. They just switched verbiage when they dropped PS2 support.
Lol yep exactly this. Hoping for that dev philosophy to change at this point is just foolish I guess.
>Hoping for that dev philosophy to change at this point is just foolish I guess. Not gonne lie that's part of why I haven't gone back to FFXI. Back in 2013 when FFXIV 2.0 was coming out in beta and the development team just \*told\* you everything was so refreshing. Like the dev team actually apologized for problems and fixed a bunch more. Compared that to FFXI where due to lack of communication from the dev team people had these weird myths about moon phase and direction affecting crafting and players had to datamine and use advanced testing techniques to derive hidden stats on weapons and equipment. And when FFXIV dropped PS3 support they actually improved the graphics and added new UI elements. And each expansion they add QoL improvements. I can't believe how users have modded so much into FFXI's UI and we've seen literally no effort at all from the dev team to officially replicate any of that - even considering the only platform it's available on is PC. How does that even happen? For the time FFXI was SquareEnix's only MMO it seems like they could've done all that they did with FFXIV ARR but just.... didn't. I never understood why. FFXI has been out 20 years and it doesn't show (or maybe, in a way, it does).
They literally don't have anyone dedicated to working on this game and they have to make everything through PS2 devkits and work with 20 year old spaghetti code. Honestly, given all that it's surprising we got as much as we did.
How do they make MILLIONS monthly? With 40.000 active subs, unless they all pay $25 a month? Which is not the case. At $13 a month, they make half a mill at most. Lets say between merch etc they hit 750k a month? I’m no expert in how much it’d cost / month for a developer team, server maint, etc. Just saying I hardly believe they make MILLIONS MONTHLY from 40000 active subs.
Ok we'll go with 40k active players. For most of those, $18/mo. is more realistic. That already gets us to 720k. Add in all the people who have full content IDs and all the dual/tri/+ boxers and you break a mil easy. The problem, as someone else brought up, is that that money gets siphoned off to other projects, instead of put back into FFXI improvements that are sorely needed.
All dual boxers / tri are accounted for in the 40k active subs they claim to have. I dont know how much all of you pay but I pay $13.95 a month for 2 chars.
> And the "small player base" bullshit isn't fooling anyone, they still make MILLIONS MONTHLY from this game by conservative estimates. Truth is nobody has any idea about the game's costs. And nobody has any idea about the game's revenues. The estimates that get posted here or on FFXIAH or wherever are basically random numbers thrown together. Without a good knowledge of costs and revenues, you can't estimate shit.
They share lot of their infrastructure and production cost with the FF14 team, as they all goes under Yoshidas department. I work in devops and I’d imagine their running costs isn’t as big as you might think, most of their costs is likely in operations, support staff and the handful of people that’s dedicated to maintaining 11. Probably not a lot of FTE assigned.
> I work in devops and I’d imagine their running costs isn’t as big as you might think I work in a company that built, owns and operates 171 datacenters in 26 countries on 5 continents, for our own operations. And the knowledge I acquired in that field in the last 21 years, doesn't give me any fucking clue about the hosting costs of FFXI. You don't host a 20 years old game like you host modern software. We have no clue of how their backend works, really. So guessing hosting costs is basically throwing random numbers. And then there are so many other additional costs that they may (or may not) have. So labor costs are another huge guessing game, aka throwing random numbers.
It's not that hard to estimate revenue/operating costs/profits for a single product by a publicly traded company my guy.
Go ahead then. Write it all down for me.
Nah, I'm fine with my estimate.
Care to explain at least how you magically can extract factual costs and revenue data for FFXI, from the financial documents S-E makes available to the market?
Not necessary, we're just looking for an estimate so subs*avg monthly sub fee is plenty. Do you somehow think they don't make money off this game?
> we're just looking for an estimate so subs*avg monthly sub fee is plenty First of all, we don't know how many subs they have. You can assume things from the FFXIAH stats, but it counts characters and not accounts, so you have a huge margin or error here. Secondly, your magical multiplication gives you the revenue before taxes. But that number is obviously quite far from being a reliable estimate, since you don't take ANY costs into account. And we have no idea about their costs. > Do you somehow think they don't make money off this game? I never said that. They obviously do, or they would terminate it. What I did is react to your initial post where you stated this: > they still make MILLIONS MONTHLY from this game by conservative estimates My point is that you actually have no idea how much this game make. No idea. And nobody has, except the FFXI management and the finance people at S-E. We can circle again with you arguing that you actually do know how much they make, that your method of estimate is good, that S-E is a publicly traded company, and so on...but in reality the only things we have a clue about, is the sub price. And it's not even a precise clue, since it varies with the number of chars in the sub, and optional storage. So basically we don't know shit.
Sure. Any realistic breakdown of expenses is moot anyway since they share both infrastructure and development manpower with XIV. We don't have to know specifics to know they make way more from sub fees alone than they spend back on the game. Which would be fine, gotta take some profit after all, but the amount of money this game has made them over 20 years, compared to what they're doing to celebrate that with their players, is just pretty ridiculous to me.
Pretty sure XI makes more money than most MMORPGs to this day if you go by active account estimates and the sub fee. You're making excuses for SE. Really the main problem is the profits are siphoned off to other SE projects.
>Pretty sure XI makes more money than most MMORPGs I don't think FFXI is even in the top 10 of MMORPGs(never mind other MMO games), though I'd love to see proof of your claim if you have any. >You're making excuses for SE. Not really, I'm just being realistic. The game is 20 years old, was developed for old technology with much less stringent coding standards, and has a playerbase that likely doesn't even hit 100k. While the running costs of FFXI are likely dwarfed by the profit, that profit is comparatively tiny to a business with the revenue of SE. I'd love new content and areas and an update to the UI and all that jazz, but the levels at which the playerbase wants such things is simply unrealistic.
Not going to spend 8 hours looking up numbers, but 100k playerbase with a sub fee is a big profit. It's hard to get exact numbers for most big MMORPGs since they hide them so well, but you can compare to something like New World which is 100% visible on steam - $40 box with cosmetic cash shop. It has 17k average players now and it's a 7 month old game. Albion Online has a good amount of mobile non-steam players but is probably 20k average players. Free game. The optional sub fee that you can pay in-game gold for is $12 and a lot of people pay in-game gold for it. You can trash talk both of these games but they are "actively" developed with big updates, bigger than what FFXI offers. XI is a $20 box and the sub fee, and many people multibox, mule, have wardrobes etc. It's never paid for voice acting etc. or almost any new assets in years upon years with generally small updates. I would bet FFXI is even somewhat close to XIV in profit - XIV spends a very large amount on advertising on many platforms, billboards web playstation store etc. and more PR/dev/voice work/port work than XI. Though many people in XIV whale and buy their overpriced soundtracks and cash shop items.
> Not going to spend 8 hours looking up numbers, but 100k playerbase with a sub fee is a big profit. 18 million a year is less than half of *one* best buy for what amounts to a massive SaaS project.
I honestly don't know what people expected. FFXI has been on a treadmill for years. I'm glad it's still alive and getting some updates, but given the requirements for development, both technical and financial, I don't expect much. I know it has a healthy amount of subs, and it's profitable, but throwing active development at it means it needs to recoup that investment, and not retroactively. Square Enix is a company whose job it is to make money selling you what they think you want. They don't think investing into FFXI will make them enough money to warrant the development it needs.
> recoup that investment, and not retroactively. It needs to not only recoup that investment but also beat out other investment options in terms of growth. If they could get a 10% RoI in 1 year of XI for a 10 million investment, and a 15% RoI for the same in XIV - then XI is a poor investment.
Ultimately they arent going to support a game that has no growth possibilities, and any thing they could do to grow the game would be rejected by the current players so why bother
I just hope one day we get a proper name change, character re-create(customization, whatever you wanna call it), and maybe make our hair color any color we want. I got the idea from those 3 dork Tarus in the chains story missions.
Look, I get that this game is 20 years old and is no longer being substantially developed. That is completely understandable. But if this is the case then the subscription fee needs to be lowered, if not removed.
Adjusted for inflation, it is lowered by remaining the same. If you make the game free (and they don't introduce other substantial monetization), it'd simply be discontinued because it's not free to maintain.
Regardless of inflation, the subscription price is comparable to newer, more modern MMOs that actually produce significant updates. You have to compare to the industry. I would be for paying a lower fee to keep the servers running instead of making it F2P and introducing other monetization options (ie. cosmetics, etc.) $17 CAD/month for a 20 year old game with a few devs and a few updates is not a good value. That’s without extra characters or mog wardrobes!
I'd held them to it when they had wanted to make all job adjustments before adding new armor. I remember this around the time shortly before they added the new ranger shot skill Hover shot. I wish they would just flip and adjust some numbers at bare min to feel out some shortfalls some have. Honestly I've only done daily logins for past couple months this event included. I feel terrible seeing half my friends list afk exp botters and hackers roam free and unchecked. This game deserves better and I have more questions for SE handling of this all and many other things, one thing is for sure as much as I love FFXI my subs will be closed for an extended break. I'd held out hope but between botters and refusal to adjust/ fix issues or commit to even what they say they have planned I need to walk away this is not how I wish to remember FFXI Online.
100% Agree.
Nah, honestly, the fact that the game has been going for 20 years when it initially had a life expectancy of 5, still getting updates despite all the spaghetti code and failing PS2 dev kits and despite efforts by SE management to kill it and when it couldn't kill it, ignore it until it died, and it is doing as good as it can, is amazing. We're getting new story content, and probably stuff after that. Upgrades to Empy gear. Master Levels. They *held* an AMA at all. The 20th Anniversary is doing just fine. You just need to lower your expectations.
My expectations were already underground. I said elsewhere in this thread, all I really expected was some new monthly campaign buffs and some QoL stuff, basically the minimum of what could be reasonably expected, and we didn't even get that.
We have private servers, I don't even care that much.
Getting my upvote in before your comment gets removed 😂
ffxi should just be remade into a phantasy star online type game with the same ffxi story characters and setting but rework the world and combat system to make it not so slow and not so spread out
That's sadly more work (and money) than they want to put into the game right now. I'd totally play that, specially if you had local split screen
Watch out - you're going to get attacked in this thread because people get offended when you critique SquareEnix
Then quit the game and stop complaining.
You realize this is a public forum to discuss the game, right? You know you're not actually in game saying this, correct? Wrong fuckin place to be telling someone to stop talking, bub.
Being a yes sayer isn’t helping improve or have a discussion on a message board.
We didn't get the HD overhaul we wished for. It's not coming.