Hello Eorzeans, welcome to The Fall and Rise of FFXIV, a deep dive into how the game we now know and love as FFXIV A Realm Reborn, Heavensward and soon to be Stormblood, used to be called one of the worst MMORPGs on the 2010 market. I’m Lukile Bravestone and I’ll be your research guide! So let’s begin! To fully understand the game and it’s faults, we must pop the time back all the way to 2002 – the year Queen Elisabeth II celebrates her Golden Jubilee, The war in Afghanistan is raging on following the previous year’s terrible 9/11 attacks on the United States and the Mars Oddysey finds signs of large water ice deposits on Mars. Amidst all this chaos and wonder, Final Fantasy XI stepped out of the Square Enix factory and--- well, I know it’s not a factory per-se, but… it just sounds cooler than… oh you get the point. Anyway, Final Fantasy XI was announced for the PS2 (that’s Playstation 2) on May 16th 2002 in Japan, and in November the same year for PC.
(Just an important sidenote for those of you that haven’t played FFXI – you had to add a Hard Drive to your PS2…. And it looked… well, let’s just say it looked “early 2000 tech-ish”) The game was a big hit in Japan, where it didn’t really have a lot of competition, with the exception of games like Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot and the very successful game Runescape released in 2001. Following the game’s release on PC, it picked up speed and in 2006, the game reported that it had somewhere around 200 to 300 000 active players logging in every day. The game was praised for its graphics and battle system, the two things Square Enix, or Squaresoft at the time, would pride themselves with on pretty much every Final Fantasy game…. Ehm… There are exceptions though. *cough* MOVING ON. Fast forward to 2005. Squaresoft is now Square Enix, and the company is eager to create a successor to Final Fantasy XI. There were speculation internally wether or not to make it a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XI, a Final Fantasy XI-2 check this website. This had worked before with Final Fantasy X, but it was unclear how this would work in practice. At this time, Final Fantasy XI was on its second Expansion, Chains of Promathia, and the active player numbers were still rising. However, it was eventually decided it would become a main title Final Fantasy game, and work on the game started sometime that year. Codenamed Rapture, the developers were still worried that making it a main series title would be risky, as the features they were planning to implement were considered “too radical” internally. And also, just to clarify, the “too radical” part means that they were trying to make it a little bit more different from Final Fantasy XI. A little bit. The staff hired for Codename Rapture was Producer Hiromichi Tamaka – the head honcho and original producer of Final Fantasy XI. The director was Nobuaki Komoto who himself was the director of Final Fantasy XI. The game’s writer, Yeako Sato had been the main scenario writer for… you guessed it, FF XI. Are you noticing a pattern here? Cause…. Cause I… am. So, let’s go over the battle plan. The game was to be built around a main story, complemented by SIDE- stories. Also, leves. Guildleves were supposed to be the future of MMOs according to Square Enix. The godsdamned leve plates were plastered on pretty much every promotional material for the game. But we’ll get to that later. Unfortunately for Sato, the incredibly inefficient work environment and lack of communication between departments, the setting and gameplay had already been decided before she was brought on board as the main scenario writer, which meant that she had to consult the rest of the team every time she wished to use any of Eorzea’s main locations in a certain way. The story of Final Fantasy XIV was supposed to focus on the conflict between the five main races of Eorzea and the troublesome Beast Tribes and their stupid primals…. Looking at you, TITA—oh wait you didn’t make it to 1.0, HAH. Anyway, the story would also feature a third conflict with the mighty Garlean Empire, serving as the title’s iconic bad guys. Speaking of iconic, the game’s logo was to once again be designed by the extremely talented Yoshitaka Amano. Seriously, this is the guy behind pretty much every single Final Fantasy logo. LOOK AT IT IT’S BEAUTIFUL. ALL OF IT. *ahem* The logo for Final Fantasy XIV was designed around the importance of weapons and take a look at this logo for a second. When I first read what the concept was I got confused, but don’t worry, it will make sense a few seconds later. The concept for this logo is… a wheel. Okay, so, the wheel in question was a wheel of adventurers, arranged so their backs were exposed and the needed to rely on their comrades and friends for support. Pretty neat huh. So back to the game development. Art Director Akihiko Yoshida was one of the few department leaders that had no previous experience from MMOs. So he had to adjust from working on a single static project where what was done was done, to creating artwork assets for a game that was supposed to be constantly updated and expanded. Needless to say, he had some serious work ahead of him. Now, when the team finally sat down and started planning the actual game world, they quickly decided to once again use a high fantasy aesthetic, and the world was supposed to encourage exploration. *sigh* we’ll get back to that later as well, don’t worry. With the more abstract ideas ready, they started with the actual world. The team created a detailed profile of Hydaelyn including its relation with other planets, ecosystems, climate and geography to promote a sense of realism. Seriously, I know the team would soon get a lot of flak for the game, but my gods their attention to detail is admirable. As development continued, the world was being sculpted by the art department. It was decided that larger seamless zones were more desirable than a series of smaller zones with zone dividers, to stick with their realism mantra. In addition to this, they supposedly put a lot of effort into the topography and varied lighting of environment to ensure they didn’t seem repetitive….. *ahem* It would appear however, that they would make one asset, say, this passage right here in La Noscea, and evenly distribute this all over the zone, sometimes mirrored, other times at an odd angle, but always the same asset. Take a look at this map. This is Thanalan as it appeared in the original release of the game. Look at this area right here, then notice how many times this exact asset is repeated!! Not only that, but the lighting they put so much effort in was not actual light, it was a very simple light map put straight onto the ground textures, and yeah, the environment didn’t have any shadows…. It didn’t have SHADOWS! Yeah, I’m gonna say that again. It didn’t have SHADOWS! This made day/night cycles awkward, as there was no actual global illumination on the environment, so to solve this, they…. They added a blue tint at night time…. A… blue tint. This made things such as campfires and lamp posts look dull and not really lighting up anything at all. SERIOUSLY SQUARE WHAT WERE YOU THINKING THIS LOOKS RIDICULOUS! Let’s look at some map designs again, shall we? Like this one, for La Noscea. It’s actually one of the less horrible ones. Still a lot of copy paste in this one… but… there is one map that all 1.0 players dread. One so cruel, so evil, few even bear to listen to the zone’s soundtrack… Oh no… Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you… The Black Shroud, 1.0 style…. SERIOUSLY look at this. Look at this and remember that someone at Square Enix gave this design a thumbs up. This is the worst case of copy/paste/corridor/waffle maze design crime I have ever seen! The only open areas in this map are these… things… and they are just lazily copy pasted throughout the intestine that is the 1.0 black shroud. And this river. This godsdammed river section….. Anyway, the cutscenes for the game were especially good, in fact they might be the best part of the entire game. They were first drafted using a storyboard followed by motion capture to create the scene in a digitized format. And let’s be honest guys, FFXIV 1.0’s cutscenes were impeccable, even by today’s standards. Most impressive were the scenes that were voiced, as the lips were synced to the voice, making the scene look just like one you’d see in a good single player game. However, the dev’s almost obsessive attention to graphical fidelity was one of the many reasons why this game was destined to fail. Take the opening cutscene for Limsa Lominsa, for example. It was one of the most challenging cutscenes for the devs to create, as it featured a real time rendering of a scene involving multiple NPCs running around with monsters swarming the deck all happening at once while a giant sea serpent jumps out of the sea and over the ship. The cherry on top with this scene is that each of the giant sea serpent’s fins were individually animated, causing most computers at the time to either struggle past 10 fps, or flat out crashing to desktop due to the strain on the system. The engine responsible for this mess, was Square Enix’s own middleware engine “Crystal Tools”, originally used in Final Fantasy XIII. The engine was customized to better fit Final Fantasy XIV, but… as you’ve just seen countless examples of, it proved unsuitable to the needs of the game, rendering its internal structure… broken. Yeah. This is all in hindsight of course, as back in 2009, when the game was about to be revealed, Square Enix had already approved of the designs and was ready to announce the game. But nothing, nothing would make FFXIV players shiver more than this thing. This monstrosity was responsible for frame drops so significant, you’d think the game was made by Skrillex. ….. get it? Dropping the bass, dropping frames…. Skrillex… *sigh* Yeah, yeah I knew it was a bad idea. BACK TO THE MONSTER. This monster not only made the game run slower than your grandma, it was EVERYWHERE in the main cities. This monstrosity is known by many names, but the most common name used for it is….. FLOWER POT! Seriously…. Flower pots. But that’s all we have time for in this video. In the next episode we will look closer at the flower pots and the rest of the world design, sot thank you so much for watching, I hope I didn’t bore you to death. If you’re still alive, make sure to thumbs up this video if you liked it and crave for the continuation, and leave a comment with your best/worst memory of 1.0, or just let me know what you think of the article, that works too.
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