"If you want something similar to WoW, Lotro, Warhammer, etc. then I would highly suggest that you do not buy this game. This game will only make you want to throw your monitor out the window if this is what you are looking for. And it’s not due to anything save design."
The funny thing is games like WoW, Lotro WAR, etc makes me want to throw my moniter out the window.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore) Now Playing: N/A Worst MMO: FFXIV Favorite MMO: FFXI
One other thing I find amusing is this: He writes "Oh that’s right, you have heard about that? You can only play one hour a day in this game before racking up an xp penalty. After 4 hours you hit zero."
If your going to write something atleast know what the hell your talking about.
This is just another BS preview/review from a jaded wowbie.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore) Now Playing: N/A Worst MMO: FFXIV Favorite MMO: FFXI
Behold the awesome power of Some Guy's One Man MMOGSite Review!
Well, bless him, he has to stick his nose out in order to get noticed. However, "It seems Final Fantasy XIV might not be up to the hype" won't do it. "May not be?" Hell no! Buck up you panzy, people might think you're worried the game may actually be successful after all and are trying to cover your bases.
He should have wrote, "Final Fantasy XIV has singlehandedly destroyed my will to live!" The screenshots would be replaced with pictures of things from the greatest disasters in human history. In the end, a screenshot of him with his head in his hands, wet from his own tears, in a room with "Goodbye, Cruel World" painted on every wall.
Now that's a negative review that would get some attention to his little hole-in-the-wall site!
Behold the awesome power of Some Guy's One Man MMOGSite Review!
Well, bless him, he has to stick his nose out in order to get noticed. However, "It seems Final Fantasy XIV might not be up to the hype" won't do it. "May not be?" Hell no! Buck up you panzy, people might think you're worried the game may actually be successful after all and are trying to cover your bases.
He should have wrote, "Final Fantasy XIV has singlehandedly destroyed my will to live!" The screenshots would be replaced with pictures of things from the greatest disasters in human history. In the end, a screenshot of him with his head in his hands, wet from his own tears, in a room with "Goodbye, Cruel World" painted on every wall.
Now that's a negative review that would get some attention to his little hole-in-the-wall site!
I remember you, weren't you the guy he was referencing telling everyone the same thing about Conan? lol
"Then move to Japan. They will have a slight ms lead over you on when a monster spawns, so if you think your guild... er sorry linkshell... is going to get those kills, think again. This was a big problem in Final Fantasy XI. All of the Asian guilds owned because they had the drop being that the servers were in Japan."
Yeah, I remember that in Final Fantasy XI. It sucked having to swallow that fact about asian linkshells and groups camping mobs for hours and days. I remember alot of Asian RMT used to do this for their gil-selling endeavors. Always having the upper hand over us.
I would hope that Square Enix will do something about that in Final Fantasy XIV.
In relation to the preview, that was harsh but there were a couple of valid points. However, I think the person seemed very frustrated on behalf of his experience in beta. And this seemed more like a review than a preview. Given the fact that it isn't released and final, I think the review was somewhat pre-mature. Play the finished and released version of Final Fantasy XIV and then come back with a painful review of the game.
Behold the awesome power of Some Guy's One Man MMOGSite Review!
Well, bless him, he has to stick his nose out in order to get noticed. However, "It seems Final Fantasy XIV might not be up to the hype" won't do it. "May not be?" Hell no! Buck up you panzy, people might think you're worried the game may actually be successful after all and are trying to cover your bases.
He should have wrote, "Final Fantasy XIV has singlehandedly destroyed my will to live!" The screenshots would be replaced with pictures of things from the greatest disasters in human history. In the end, a screenshot of him with his head in his hands, wet from his own tears, in a room with "Goodbye, Cruel World" painted on every wall.
Now that's a negative review that would get some attention to his little hole-in-the-wall site!
I remember you, weren't you the guy he was referencing telling everyone the same thing about Conan? lol
I don't recall telling everybody Age of Conan would be great on these forums, but seing how it's currently pulling an 8.05 on the hype meter, #32 on a list of hundreds, I'd be proud if it was since it turned out my prediction was correct.
I do not know, this review is pretty standard to others out there: In short a lot of...reviewers from a lot of sites are saying the same thing.
"A lot of work needs to be done to improve the general user experience, and I hope that Square Enix will listen to their soon-to-be consumers as in its current state Final Fantasy XIV is not worth the buying price yet alone the monthly fee. Considering the game is less than a month away from shipping, that's not a good thing."
At the end of the day you got to ask; can all these complaints be real? Is this game reallly that...incomplete? Will I be risking money on another...half done AAA state of the art, PC upgrading, controller driven MMORPG? Only your hairdresser knows for sure.
Random gamer discovers Joomla, thinks they're a web master now.
Ooooooooooh.
OK, perhaps you are correct, so show me a site that is good for such OB reviews. Give me some back up and support in dropping money on upgrades/controller/price tag.
Random gamer discovers Joomla, thinks they're a web master now.
Ooooooooooh.
OK, perhaps you are correct, so show me a site that is good for such OB reviews. Give me some back up and support in dropping money on upgrades/controller/price tag.
I'll do you one better and tell you that any site that does an open beta review is no professional review site at all.
Good, professional reviews are done after playing at least a significant amount of the retail client to get an idea of the entirety of the game. Especially when that retail client is nearly three times the size of the open beta client because the developers felt they didn't want to spoil any surprises during beta, as is the case of Final Fantasy XIV.
The good review sites will call what they get out of open beta an "impression," or "preview" and they'll generally keep it upbeat because slamming something that isn't officially announced to be in its finished state is amateurish, like telling Michaelangelo his painting sucks before he landed the final stroke that made it a masterpiece.
Random gamer discovers Joomla, thinks they're a web master now.
Ooooooooooh.
OK, perhaps you are correct, so show me a site that is good for such OB reviews. Give me some back up and support in dropping money on upgrades/controller/price tag.
To be honest, if you're worried about losing cash on game/upgrades/controller I would wait 2-3 months after the live date and see how the community and game are going then. You'll get a much more accurate idea of the game and I think that's going to be more productive than reading reviews of beta test game state now. Notice how more established sites with established/any editorial policy stay clear of doing beta-reviews of games.
If you wait a while there will established games sites such as Gamespot and IGN and associated communities able to offer more accurate feedback on a final stage product (as in published state - I am aware the game is always under development).
Random gamer discovers Joomla, thinks they're a web master now.
Ooooooooooh.
OK, perhaps you are correct, so show me a site that is good for such OB reviews. Give me some back up and support in dropping money on upgrades/controller/price tag.
I'll do you one better and tell you that any site that does an open beta review is no professional review site at all.
Good, professional reviews are done after playing at least a significant amount of the retail client to get an idea of the entirety of the game. Especially when that retail client is nearly three times the size of the open beta client because the developers felt they didn't want to spoil any surprises during beta, as is the case of Final Fantasy XIV.
The good review sites will call what they get out of open beta an "impression," and they'll generally keep it upbeat because slamming something that isn't officially announced to be in its finished state is amateurish, like telling Michaelangelo his painting sucks when it's half done.
I see, however, (having heard the same thing regarding APB) these sites are reporting their impression and I gota ask...are they all wrong? Is the information regarding the OB experince by so many a...lie? OR, can the experince of so many be (dare I say it) incorrect? So these unproffessionals expreince playing the game, saying the same thing, must have gotten togeather and formed a plan to "take out FFXIV"...yea, thats it. Then they started a secret "haters" club and send people out to say bad things about the game and ...lie about information that is not true. OR, could the information be correct? You make the call.
The game is incomplete, but I think it has it's positive side. I'm more or less desperate for something new and different in terms of MMORPGs. I doubt reviews of this game will impact it's community, simply because everyone and their mom who was interested in the game got a good taste from the open beta. HOWEVER, what WILL sway my decision is whether or not they fix the engine and the mouse hardware. The game is pretty, but it's not pretty enough to run poorly on any PC developed in the last 2 years or so. It's not even like this game drains a lot from the CPU or GPU, cause it doesn't, it just runs poorly while using max resources. Poor optimization, worse than AoC at it's launch.
I see, however, (having heard the same thing regarding APB) these sites are reporting their impression and I gota ask...are they all wrong? Is the information regarding the OB experince by so many a...lie? OR, can the experince of so many be (dare I say it) incorrect? So these unproffessionals expreince playing the game, saying the same thing, must have gotten togeather and formed a plan to "take out FFXIV"...yea, thats it. Then they started a secret "haters" club and send people out to say bad things about the game and ...lie about information that is not true. OR, could the information be correct? You make the call.
It wouldn't do me any good to make the call. In the end, you either are willing to objectively question every little premise they said and decide for yourself based off of your personal experiences if it is correct, or you're simply accepting everything they say at face value unquestionably.
I will tell you these things, however:
Everybody has an opinion. You can find reviews that pan the most critically raved about games and movies of our time. It doesn't mean the reviews are wrong, it means the reviewer had an atypical opinion.
Nothing you've linked here was universally bad. There was a great deal of praise mixed in with the criticism, though you may have chosen to overlook it because you were predisposed to find things that agreed with you.
I can find little wrongs here and there in either article, neither article was 100% correct, but neither were they 100% wrong.
Considering that it's unprofessional to release an objective opinion on the game until a considerable amount of the release state has been played, it seems unlikely you will see the genuinely objective reviews for a few weeks yet.
Considering how much Final Fantasy XIV does right, and how Final Fantasy is an internationally lauded series, I would be surprised if most reviews deviate below 70%.
Hrmph, I sure didn't think I'd be having this conversation 20 years ago when I booted up Final Fantasy 2 US for the first time.
I still have an active CE pre order, and I plan on playing this game with friends. However, I also agree with most of this reviewer's comments. As an HCI graduate student, I have to say that FFXIV's menu driven interface flies against the most fundamental HCI/UI/usability principles.
However, I understand that SE, like many Japanese companies, have not appreciated the importance of usability in their hardware and software, simply because the Japanese market doesn't care about usability as much as the western market. Case study: the iPhone does not sell well in Japan because while it offers a very user friendly experience with great interaction when compared to Japanese phones, Japanese phones have more features, even though they're often hidden, have poor discoverability, and are not user friendly.
Still, the money is not that big of a deal to me, and I think there is some hope that the game won't flop. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the game flops like APB either.
I still have an active CE pre order, and I plan on playing this game with friends. However, I also agree with most of this reviewer's comments. As an HCI graduate student, I have to say that FFXIV's menu driven interface flies against the most fundamental HCI/UI/usability principles.
However, I understand that SE, like many Japanese companies, have not appreciated the importance of usability in their hardware and software, simply because the Japanese market doesn't care about usability as much as the western market. Case study: the iPhone does not sell well in Japan because while it offers a very user friendly experience with great interaction when compared to Japanese phones, Japanese phones have more features, even though they're often hidden, have poor discoverability, and are not user friendly.
Still, the money is not that big of a deal to me, and I think there is some hope that the game won't flop. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the game flops like APB either.
You've also made a sweeping generalisation about usability and Japanese companies there. Nintendo brought us the DS and especially the Wii for example, which catapulted interactive gaming into more living rooms across the globe than many would've imagine. Many people, including middle aged and pensioners are now playing video games who previously wouldn't have thanks to intuitive controls and highly usable interfaces of that console.
I still have an active CE pre order, and I plan on playing this game with friends. However, I also agree with most of this reviewer's comments. As an HCI graduate student, I have to say that FFXIV's menu driven interface flies against the most fundamental HCI/UI/usability principles.
However, I understand that SE, like many Japanese companies, have not appreciated the importance of usability in their hardware and software, simply because the Japanese market doesn't care about usability as much as the western market. Case study: the iPhone does not sell well in Japan because while it offers a very user friendly experience with great interaction when compared to Japanese phones, Japanese phones have more features, even though they're often hidden, have poor discoverability, and are not user friendly.
Still, the money is not that big of a deal to me, and I think there is some hope that the game won't flop. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the game flops like APB either.
FFXI receives all the same complaints from anyone who is trying to get into the game these days, but see the difference is... FFXI was released before World of Warcraft and thus acquired a playerbase that hadn't yet been beaten with the dumbstick, and that playerbase is far more loyal than that of any other AAA MMO currently released or in development.
FFXIV in a post-WoW world is going to be lambasted by the majority of drooling plebeians who are used to glowing yellow exclamation points over anything even remotely of interest. These mental giants scream bloody murder when faced with the prospect of figuring anything out on their own, and god help us all if they run into a game that has no instances and where questing actually is NOT the primary method of advancement.
All of you people who are bitching incessantly that you don't want another WoW clone are completely and utterly full of shit. Simply admit that you all want WoW with better graphics and 1 or 2 new features and leave the people who want depth to themselves.
FFXIV will fail and flop like APB? You're seriously comparing a smallish european developer with two games under their belt to one of the most successful developers in the history of gaming? Really?
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't play FFXIV in its current form, but it will not fail or flop just like any game released by Blizzard at this point wouldn't flop either. In six months, FFXIV will be a solid, successful game with the same niche community that made FFXI one of the best PvE experiences in the industry and I thank Square-Enix for leaving difficulty intact to ward off the gangrenous WoW zombies staggering about searching for their Blizzard trademarked brains.
I still have an active CE pre order, and I plan on playing this game with friends. However, I also agree with most of this reviewer's comments. As an HCI graduate student, I have to say that FFXIV's menu driven interface flies against the most fundamental HCI/UI/usability principles.
However, I understand that SE, like many Japanese companies, have not appreciated the importance of usability in their hardware and software, simply because the Japanese market doesn't care about usability as much as the western market. Case study: the iPhone does not sell well in Japan because while it offers a very user friendly experience with great interaction when compared to Japanese phones, Japanese phones have more features, even though they're often hidden, have poor discoverability, and are not user friendly.
Still, the money is not that big of a deal to me, and I think there is some hope that the game won't flop. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the game flops like APB either.
You've also made a sweeping generalisation about usability and Japanese companies there. Nintendo brought us the DS and especially the Wii for example, which catapulted interactive gaming into more living rooms across the globe than many would've imagine. Many people, including middle aged and pensioners are now playing video games who previously wouldn't have thanks to intuitive controls and highly usable interfaces of that console.
Oh awesome. The case study I read was year 2007, with the first iPhone. This is a vindication that good usability DOES make a difference!
A better theory I suppose is that SE doesn't have the competence yet to design interfaces for the PC medium.
EDIT: By the way, your Nintendo point is a great point. For better or worse, incorporating motion into game control was great HCI.
Behold the awesome power of Some Guy's One Man MMOGSite Review!
Well, bless him, he has to stick his nose out in order to get noticed. However, "It seems Final Fantasy XIV might not be up to the hype" won't do it. "May not be?" Hell no! Buck up you panzy, people might think you're worried the game may actually be successful after all and are trying to cover your bases.
He should have wrote, "Final Fantasy XIV has singlehandedly destroyed my will to live!" The screenshots would be replaced with pictures of things from the greatest disasters in human history. In the end, a screenshot of him with his head in his hands, wet from his own tears, in a room with "Goodbye, Cruel World" painted on every wall.
Now that's a negative review that would get some attention to his little hole-in-the-wall site!
I remember you, weren't you the guy he was referencing telling everyone the same thing about Conan? lol
I don't recall telling everybody Age of Conan would be great on these forums, but seing how it's currently pulling an 8.05 on the hype meter, #32 on a list of hundreds, I'd be proud if it was since it turned out my prediction was correct.
Hrmph, I sure didn't think I'd be having this conversation 20 years ago when I booted up Final Fantasy 2 US for the first time.
You booted up the game?
Final Fantasy 2 US is just another name for Final Fantasy 4 and it takes like one second to load the game on your nintendo game console.
And the game was initally developed for the 8-bit console but it was ported over to the 16-bit and the graphics looked like a 8-bit game as a result of it.
The only really good Final Fantasy games are number 5,6,7,9 and 12.
1-4 looks like a piece of shit and number 8 is too girly about love and crap and 11 is not that good for a MMORPG.
I haven't played number 13 since I don't own a current gen game console but as I understand it people are very disappointed about it in Japan.
Oh and number 10 has a very annoying protagonist hes basically like a retarded spoiled brat.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Comments
haha I enjoyed this part from the article:
"If you want something similar to WoW, Lotro, Warhammer, etc. then I would highly suggest that you do not buy this game. This game will only make you want to throw your monitor out the window if this is what you are looking for. And it’s not due to anything save design."
The funny thing is games like WoW, Lotro WAR, etc makes me want to throw my moniter out the window.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
Now Playing: N/A
Worst MMO: FFXIV
Favorite MMO: FFXI
More of a Abjective Pre-view than a review.
Core i5 13600KF, BeQuiet Pure Loop FX 360, 32gb DDR5-6000 XPG, WD SN850 NVMe ,PNY 3090 XLR8, Asus Prime Z790-A, Lian-Li O11 PCMR case (limited ed 1045/2000), 32" LG Ultragear 4k Monitor, Logitech G560 LightSync Sound, Razer Deathadder V2 and Razer Blackwidow V3 Keyboard
One other thing I find amusing is this: He writes "Oh that’s right, you have heard about that? You can only play one hour a day in this game before racking up an xp penalty. After 4 hours you hit zero."
If your going to write something atleast know what the hell your talking about.
This is just another BS preview/review from a jaded wowbie.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
Now Playing: N/A
Worst MMO: FFXIV
Favorite MMO: FFXI
Behold the awesome power of Some Guy's One Man MMOGSite Review!
Well, bless him, he has to stick his nose out in order to get noticed. However, "It seems Final Fantasy XIV might not be up to the hype" won't do it. "May not be?" Hell no! Buck up you panzy, people might think you're worried the game may actually be successful after all and are trying to cover your bases.
He should have wrote, "Final Fantasy XIV has singlehandedly destroyed my will to live!" The screenshots would be replaced with pictures of things from the greatest disasters in human history. In the end, a screenshot of him with his head in his hands, wet from his own tears, in a room with "Goodbye, Cruel World" painted on every wall.
Now that's a negative review that would get some attention to his little hole-in-the-wall site!
You heard it here folks. If it's about FFXIV, and it isn't positive, it's a conspiracy!
*scoots to kitchen for fresh tin-foil
To be fair, he does seem a bit ignorant, and I've never heard of or seen that site before. Meh.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
I remember you, weren't you the guy he was referencing telling everyone the same thing about Conan? lol
"Then move to Japan. They will have a slight ms lead over you on when a monster spawns, so if you think your guild... er sorry linkshell... is going to get those kills, think again. This was a big problem in Final Fantasy XI. All of the Asian guilds owned because they had the drop being that the servers were in Japan."
Yeah, I remember that in Final Fantasy XI. It sucked having to swallow that fact about asian linkshells and groups camping mobs for hours and days. I remember alot of Asian RMT used to do this for their gil-selling endeavors. Always having the upper hand over us.
I would hope that Square Enix will do something about that in Final Fantasy XIV.
In relation to the preview, that was harsh but there were a couple of valid points. However, I think the person seemed very frustrated on behalf of his experience in beta. And this seemed more like a review than a preview. Given the fact that it isn't released and final, I think the review was somewhat pre-mature. Play the finished and released version of Final Fantasy XIV and then come back with a painful review of the game.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
I don't recall telling everybody Age of Conan would be great on these forums, but seing how it's currently pulling an 8.05 on the hype meter, #32 on a list of hundreds, I'd be proud if it was since it turned out my prediction was correct.
I do not know, this review is pretty standard to others out there: In short a lot of...reviewers from a lot of sites are saying the same thing.
"A lot of work needs to be done to improve the general user experience, and I hope that Square Enix will listen to their soon-to-be consumers as in its current state Final Fantasy XIV is not worth the buying price yet alone the monthly fee. Considering the game is less than a month away from shipping, that's not a good thing."
http://www.onrpg.com/MMO/Final-Fantasy-XIV/interview/Final-Fantasy-XIV-Beta-Preview-The-Game-So-Far
At the end of the day you got to ask; can all these complaints be real? Is this game reallly that...incomplete? Will I be risking money on another...half done AAA state of the art, PC upgrading, controller driven MMORPG? Only your hairdresser knows for sure.
lol @ that site. Talk about amateur hour.
Random gamer discovers Joomla, thinks they're a web master now.
Ooooooooooh.
OK, perhaps you are correct, so show me a site that is good for such OB reviews. Give me some back up and support in dropping money on upgrades/controller/price tag.
I'll do you one better and tell you that any site that does an open beta review is no professional review site at all.
Good, professional reviews are done after playing at least a significant amount of the retail client to get an idea of the entirety of the game. Especially when that retail client is nearly three times the size of the open beta client because the developers felt they didn't want to spoil any surprises during beta, as is the case of Final Fantasy XIV.
The good review sites will call what they get out of open beta an "impression," or "preview" and they'll generally keep it upbeat because slamming something that isn't officially announced to be in its finished state is amateurish, like telling Michaelangelo his painting sucks before he landed the final stroke that made it a masterpiece.
That site has been around five years and they are changing their name, site, etc.
To be honest, if you're worried about losing cash on game/upgrades/controller I would wait 2-3 months after the live date and see how the community and game are going then. You'll get a much more accurate idea of the game and I think that's going to be more productive than reading reviews of beta test game state now. Notice how more established sites with established/any editorial policy stay clear of doing beta-reviews of games.
If you wait a while there will established games sites such as Gamespot and IGN and associated communities able to offer more accurate feedback on a final stage product (as in published state - I am aware the game is always under development).
I see, however, (having heard the same thing regarding APB) these sites are reporting their impression and I gota ask...are they all wrong? Is the information regarding the OB experince by so many a...lie? OR, can the experince of so many be (dare I say it) incorrect? So these unproffessionals expreince playing the game, saying the same thing, must have gotten togeather and formed a plan to "take out FFXIV"...yea, thats it. Then they started a secret "haters" club and send people out to say bad things about the game and ...lie about information that is not true. OR, could the information be correct? You make the call.
The game is incomplete, but I think it has it's positive side. I'm more or less desperate for something new and different in terms of MMORPGs. I doubt reviews of this game will impact it's community, simply because everyone and their mom who was interested in the game got a good taste from the open beta. HOWEVER, what WILL sway my decision is whether or not they fix the engine and the mouse hardware. The game is pretty, but it's not pretty enough to run poorly on any PC developed in the last 2 years or so. It's not even like this game drains a lot from the CPU or GPU, cause it doesn't, it just runs poorly while using max resources. Poor optimization, worse than AoC at it's launch.
It wouldn't do me any good to make the call. In the end, you either are willing to objectively question every little premise they said and decide for yourself based off of your personal experiences if it is correct, or you're simply accepting everything they say at face value unquestionably.
I will tell you these things, however:
Everybody has an opinion. You can find reviews that pan the most critically raved about games and movies of our time. It doesn't mean the reviews are wrong, it means the reviewer had an atypical opinion.
Nothing you've linked here was universally bad. There was a great deal of praise mixed in with the criticism, though you may have chosen to overlook it because you were predisposed to find things that agreed with you.
I can find little wrongs here and there in either article, neither article was 100% correct, but neither were they 100% wrong.
Considering that it's unprofessional to release an objective opinion on the game until a considerable amount of the release state has been played, it seems unlikely you will see the genuinely objective reviews for a few weeks yet.
Considering how much Final Fantasy XIV does right, and how Final Fantasy is an internationally lauded series, I would be surprised if most reviews deviate below 70%.
Hrmph, I sure didn't think I'd be having this conversation 20 years ago when I booted up Final Fantasy 2 US for the first time.
I still have an active CE pre order, and I plan on playing this game with friends. However, I also agree with most of this reviewer's comments. As an HCI graduate student, I have to say that FFXIV's menu driven interface flies against the most fundamental HCI/UI/usability principles.
However, I understand that SE, like many Japanese companies, have not appreciated the importance of usability in their hardware and software, simply because the Japanese market doesn't care about usability as much as the western market. Case study: the iPhone does not sell well in Japan because while it offers a very user friendly experience with great interaction when compared to Japanese phones, Japanese phones have more features, even though they're often hidden, have poor discoverability, and are not user friendly.
Still, the money is not that big of a deal to me, and I think there is some hope that the game won't flop. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the game flops like APB either.
The first para I won't argue with. But...
I don't know where you got your iPhone information from. Per Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-captures-72-of-japan-smartphone-market-update3-.html
You've also made a sweeping generalisation about usability and Japanese companies there. Nintendo brought us the DS and especially the Wii for example, which catapulted interactive gaming into more living rooms across the globe than many would've imagine. Many people, including middle aged and pensioners are now playing video games who previously wouldn't have thanks to intuitive controls and highly usable interfaces of that console.
FFXI receives all the same complaints from anyone who is trying to get into the game these days, but see the difference is... FFXI was released before World of Warcraft and thus acquired a playerbase that hadn't yet been beaten with the dumbstick, and that playerbase is far more loyal than that of any other AAA MMO currently released or in development.
FFXIV in a post-WoW world is going to be lambasted by the majority of drooling plebeians who are used to glowing yellow exclamation points over anything even remotely of interest. These mental giants scream bloody murder when faced with the prospect of figuring anything out on their own, and god help us all if they run into a game that has no instances and where questing actually is NOT the primary method of advancement.
All of you people who are bitching incessantly that you don't want another WoW clone are completely and utterly full of shit. Simply admit that you all want WoW with better graphics and 1 or 2 new features and leave the people who want depth to themselves.
FFXIV will fail and flop like APB? You're seriously comparing a smallish european developer with two games under their belt to one of the most successful developers in the history of gaming? Really?
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't play FFXIV in its current form, but it will not fail or flop just like any game released by Blizzard at this point wouldn't flop either. In six months, FFXIV will be a solid, successful game with the same niche community that made FFXI one of the best PvE experiences in the industry and I thank Square-Enix for leaving difficulty intact to ward off the gangrenous WoW zombies staggering about searching for their Blizzard trademarked brains.
My blog:
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Strayfe/
Oh awesome. The case study I read was year 2007, with the first iPhone. This is a vindication that good usability DOES make a difference!
A better theory I suppose is that SE doesn't have the competence yet to design interfaces for the PC medium.
EDIT: By the way, your Nintendo point is a great point. For better or worse, incorporating motion into game control was great HCI.
ahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha
You booted up the game?
Final Fantasy 2 US is just another name for Final Fantasy 4 and it takes like one second to load the game on your nintendo game console.
And the game was initally developed for the 8-bit console but it was ported over to the 16-bit and the graphics looked like a 8-bit game as a result of it.
The only really good Final Fantasy games are number 5,6,7,9 and 12.
1-4 looks like a piece of shit and number 8 is too girly about love and crap and 11 is not that good for a MMORPG.
I haven't played number 13 since I don't own a current gen game console but as I understand it people are very disappointed about it in Japan.
Oh and number 10 has a very annoying protagonist hes basically like a retarded spoiled brat.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Are you saying the whole NES generation of games aren't good because "they look like crap"?
I've played a HUGE amount of them, and it had to be the golden years of the entire industry. Great games all around, and FF1 and 4 were great as well.
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FF1 didn't even have any real heroes you the player created and named all the heroes in the game and yes if a game looks like crap then it is crap.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.