Final Fantasy XV - General News Thread

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Ikkin

Warrior of Light
Oct 30, 2016
1,099
1,705
As an artist, stick to your guns.
I agree with this first line, which is exactly why I think that they should have gone full-tilt for the game as it was actually delivered.

Once the decision to change the FNC fighting-fate theme was made, that's what they should have stuck with. Reverting to an earlier failed draft after finding success by abandoning it is never a good idea.

Also, it's worth considering that there was probably a reason for the failure of the failed draft beyond time constraints. =P
 

SonOfEtro

Warrior of Light
May 2, 2016
1,036
1,192
Also, it's worth considering that there was probably a reason for the failure of the failed draft beyond time constraints. =P
Sadly, there probably was. FNC was more than just a mythos, it was a project that was let down on multiple fronts and was a corporate creation rather than something with a person's passion behind it like Ivalice was. Given the troubles all three games went through, I'm not surprised they've all but dumped it. Can you blame them? XIII's still rather toxic today.

Oh, fun true story. When developing Type-0, Tabata just forgot to include FNC elements until halfway through production, and writers Chiba a d Okabe had to do an emergency-style "get it in there!" Nomura was also moving away from it by scrapping the terminology in the Versus days.
 
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mozzafaralj

SOLDIER Second Class
Apr 12, 2016
300
466
When will Square enix report its sales of its games for the fiscal year?
I heard it so close especially that there are companies that announced their financial results
I ask if you have any expectation because I would like to know how much Final Fantasy 15 sales are. The last update of sales was in November 2018. 8.4 million....
 

Hey Everyone

Keyblade Master
Dec 30, 2016
794
191
26
Unknown, Unknown
We need an extended, uncut, unedited, restored, tetsuya nomura directors cut edition.
So Final Fantasy Versus XV

I'm really not a big fan of how XV's alternate timelines just equal changing the universe.
I mean Dawn of the Future should be a divergent timeline from the point of Noct's journey to how it ends.

It really should just diverge at Chapter 9 and onwards but with this Dawn of the Future. It's as if they were trying to make an alternate universe.
I mean people were going off about how a Versus XV would just undermine the XV universe, it's lore and all that but that's exactly what Dawn of the Future did all for a happy ending. It caused actual logical errors in the main XV plotline like everything with Bahamut, the Astral war, all of it.Nomura Not To Blame for Versus XIII Cancellation Claims Lead Designer


Nomura Not To Blame for Versus XIII Cancellation Claims Lead Designer



btw the truth comes out
 
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Ikkin

Warrior of Light
Oct 30, 2016
1,099
1,705
So, I just realized how easy it would have been to make a canon-compliant happy ending, and… wow.

  1. Using Ardyn’s unmitigated defiance to turn the Starscourge into a threat too large for Providence to completely eradicate is at least somewhat viable, and it provides a perfect opportunity for a post-canon alternate timeline.
  2. Imagine this: Ardyn’s defiance increased the amount of Starscourge within him so much that his very presence at the Disc of Cauthess resurrected the Scourge’s alien source (contained within the Meteor – think something like Jenova), which hid itself within him. When Ardyn was killed, said alien source freed itself and continued spreading the Scourge, leaving the world covered in darkness.
  3. Bahamut, not being able to deal with the Scourge’s alien source himself, resurrects Noct and Luna to eradicate it using their King and Oracle powers. (He also apologizes, saying there is no one else capable of doing what he needs them to do -- hence why he doesn't bring them back in canon!)
  4. Any elements of the DotF lore that the dev team was really invested in – say, Scourge Queen Luna or the attempt to use a clash of light and darkness to destroy the world – could be the fault of the Scourge’s alien source rather than Bahamut.
  5. Because of how powerful the Scourge’s alien source is, all of the Astrals’ help is required to bring an end to it, so Ifrit would still agree to cooperate after being freed from the bonds of the Scourge.
  6. Ardyn redeems himself by refusing to cooperate with the Scourge’s alien source and sacrificing himself to bring an end to it.
  7. Cue happy ending a la DotF, except that the Crystal and the Astrals wouldn’t be destroyed and no aspect of the original lore would be damaged in the process.
 
Likes: SonOfEtro

llazy77

Warrior of Light
May 27, 2014
1,149
550
29
So Final Fantasy Versus XV

I'm really not a big fan of how XV's alternate timelines just equal changing the universe.
I mean Dawn of the Future should be a divergent timeline from the point of Noct's journey to how it ends.

It really should just diverge at Chapter 9 and onwards but with this Dawn of the Future. It's as if they were trying to make an alternate universe.
I mean people were going off about how a Versus XV would just undermine the XV universe, it's lore and all that but that's exactly what Dawn of the Future did all for a happy ending. It caused actual logical errors in the main XV plotline like everything with Bahamut, the Astral war, all of it.Nomura Not To Blame for Versus XIII Cancellation Claims Lead Designer


Nomura Not To Blame for Versus XIII Cancellation Claims Lead Designer



btw the truth comes out
Nomura is a genius, Square's higher up's just keep sabotaging him, Early Versus Days they took away almost all his team to work on FF13 and he was left with a skeleton crew and so progress on versus was slow, Square forced him to work on KH3 when we know he wanted to work on his dream project which was versus. KH3 in the end didn't turn out the best as well. Im sure this was because of maybe some internal promblems with disney and also with square (since they needed to change engines midway from luminous to Ue4) The production of the luminous engine was a mess. Now even with FF7 remake they put Nomura on the project and I remember he didnt even know he was director till he saw the trailer, and also I feel like this multi part thing is squares decision to milk the game for a while. People need to stop blaming Nomura, everything that has happened with him and game development is entirely on squares end for the past 10 years.
 
Jun 3, 2018
53
118
Even if your guns are not good and there are better options?
You cannot possibly know if they're good or not until they came out and people receive it. All the time, creators can make a movie or game or novel and weave it together quite well but in the lead up to release, may get nervous and start over-analyzing their stuff and being overtly critical or unfair to things that are perfectly fine because a single detail is off and therefore it's ruined.

If you make art, finish your art. Don't let the fans whine about no Moogles or flying cars and make you half-ass your product. If the devs did what they wanted, we would have gotten an open-area Cartanica. We would have had EP: Duscae combat. We would have had EP Duscae and early trailer-type cinematics and whatnot. Instead, EP: Duscae came out, they got feedback and then worked on the demo over the main game and patched it. If they didn't even try to make the demo, they could have used the three months or so to do literally anything else.

Leviathan took a year to develop because of problems with the engine; the time they spent patching a demo they could have spent working on material that isn't getting worked on due to the team that's supposed to work on it being trapped on a boss fight for a year. They desired to prove they were listening to us by adding Moogles, and flying car, and changing EP Duscae's demo. And in doing so, shot themselves in the foot and we lost a Shiva dungeon, Luna's entire role, the entire ending of the Versus epic, Ardyn's story, Royal Pack being actually part of the base game instead of finishing Chapter 14 in DLC, and much much more.

If you were an artist, you would understand. Make your art, not what others say is good. Good or bad, they will not know until release and the people like us who were only seeing trailers cannot give a fair judgement without context.

Plain and simple. You cannot in any way say with certainty that "their guns were not good". We'll never know if they were good because we never got their original plan. Just like how we cannot say if Nomura's Versus would have been any better; we were denied the right to judge the completed product ourselves, and when Tabata took over, the new team made changes based on fan judgement built upon the extremely limited footage that the game had released.

Stick to your guns. At least they'll be your guns and not some freakish frankenstein that doesn't satisfy you nor the people you changed the product for.

We need an extended, uncut, unedited, restored, tetsuya nomura directors cut edition.
Nnnnnnah. Nomura's an artist. He and Tabata should have worked together. Alone, Nomura balloons things beyond a reasonable scope and alone, Tabata changes the scope before release. They would have been a great duo.

Sadly, there probably was. FNC was more than just a mythos, it was a project that was let down on multiple fronts and was a corporate creation rather than something with a person's passion behind it like Ivalice was. Given the troubles all three games went through, I'm not surprised they've all but dumped it. Can you blame them? XIII's still rather toxic today.

Oh, fun true story. When developing Type-0, Tabata just forgot to include FNC elements until halfway through production, and writers Chiba a d Okabe had to do an emergency-style "get it in there!" Nomura was also moving away from it by scrapping the terminology in the Versus days.
The Fabula Nova Crystallis was coined by Nomura, Shinji Hashimoto and Yoshinori Kitase, with Kazushige Nojima penning the initial FNC draft in early 2004. Nomura, Tabata, and Motomu Toriyama all provided creative input on the lore itself and with all this, Nojima created the series bible. It was absolutely a work of passion, as Nomura sank a chunk of his life into Versus, almost eight years of his time; Tabata worked on Agito/Type-0 presumably from 2005 onward as his team completed Before Crisis in 2004, and spent six years working on Type-0. Toriyama dedicated five years of his life to FFXIII alone, and continuously worked on XIII up to 2013, 9 years of his life.

FNC was 100% a passion product of the people involved. The issue was nothing to do with corporate or a lack of passion from the outset; Type-0 developed rather normally, making the move to PSP because phones couldn't handle it (something Tabata handled well). It was XIII and Versus, the big games on the new, infamously-hard-to-develop-for PS3, that ran into development problems; XIII's due to its engine and again, the fact that PS3 was super hard to develop for until near 2011 when most companies figured out how to exploit it, and Versus's crew had to aid on FFXIII due to this.

After that, we have Nomura wanting to uproot Versus into a musical as well as doing major changes to the story every three months, this after FFXIII released with its controversy regarding the game's linearity and the "milking" of its world, and also right after FFXIV had a super infamously awful launch. Plus, Roen signed a contract with SE in 2008; that gave Nomura eight years to work on Versus, and considering he wanted to uproot it multiple times and would likely not even make the PS3's lifespan (Versus was 25% done when Tabata took over in 2012, PS4 took prominence in late 2013). Nomura squandered his time and because XIII got sequels, ballooned his story up to match the trilogy, which led to the situation we find ourselves in; single game with all extra material added in as DLC.

FNC was a labour of love. It didn't become corporate until FFXIII and XIV launched within a year and got obliterated on the internet, and with Nomura facing similar development problems, no wonder SE got scared. Yoichi Wada resigned in early 2013, notably after Tabata was internally made FFXV's director in 2012. It's highly likely that in the final year of his tenure, Yoichi Wada made choices based on the performance of FFXIV and XIII and development patterns for those games being repeated with Versus, and arranged for Tabata to take over because he realized Nomura was going to force them into crunch time, for a game developing with sequels in mind on a console that is about to be background noise.

There's much pointing to the fact that 2010-2012 SE was utter chaos and one of the first things to happen under Yosuke Matsuda's term was to create the FF committee in late 2013 to help maintain quality for FF; that's why XV has a ton more nods and leitmotifs from earlier games and is chalk-full of stuff for FF fans to gorge themselves on nostalgia. The XV we got we were lucky to get given they were already forced to develop a triple A FF game in three years and not repeat the mistakes that the previous four titles had made.

FFXV as it is now is a gorgeous mess. It has heart, it has soul, but it could have had more. Tabata only managed to get FFXV out after changing the structure of game development and doing something completely new; if he stuck to the method that Nomura, or his team or the XIII team had, we'd have likely gotten a a "straight road" to mirror XIII's "hallways".

It's simple; we need to accept what we do get and stop building up this picture-perfect ideal "Nomura version" or "if-they-had-time Tabata version". What happened happened for a reason and they dealt with the consequences, foolishly but with reason.
 

Ikkin

Warrior of Light
Oct 30, 2016
1,099
1,705
You cannot possibly know if they're good or not until they came out and people receive it. All the time, creators can make a movie or game or novel and weave it together quite well but in the lead up to release, may get nervous and start over-analyzing their stuff and being overtly critical or unfair to things that are perfectly fine because a single detail is off and therefore it's ruined.
It isn't possible to know whether a work of art is well-executed until it's released and received, no. But it's entirely possible to judge a theme on its own merits, regardless of any impact that execution might or might not have had, and for a lot of us, the theme of FFXV as it released was much more appealing than the theme that appears to have been planned for its FNC incarnation.

If you make art, finish your art. Don't let the fans whine about no Moogles or flying cars and make you half-ass your product. If the devs did what they wanted, we would have gotten an open-area Cartanica. We would have had EP: Duscae combat. We would have had EP Duscae and early trailer-type cinematics and whatnot. Instead, EP: Duscae came out, they got feedback and then worked on the demo over the main game and patched it. If they didn't even try to make the demo, they could have used the three months or so to do literally anything else.
Criticizing the existence of Episode Duscae suggests a lack of understanding of how game development works. The creation of what's called a "vertical slice" is something that a lot of development teams use to get their core systems in place... and the lack of a vertical slice was a major reason why development on FFXIII went practically nowhere until the team was ordered to create a demo.

Furthermore, combat is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be refined using player critique, because it's almost always designed to feel good to the players rather than to convey some sort of artistic point. Episode Duscae's combat was changed because it wasn't working as intended, and there's nothing wrong with that. (There's nothing wrong with using the demo to see how players react to changes, either -- multiplayer games have public beta tests all the time for that very reason.)

Leviathan took a year to develop because of problems with the engine; the time they spent patching a demo they could have spent working on material that isn't getting worked on due to the team that's supposed to work on it being trapped on a boss fight for a year. They desired to prove they were listening to us by adding Moogles, and flying car, and changing EP Duscae's demo. And in doing so, shot themselves in the foot and we lost a Shiva dungeon, Luna's entire role, the entire ending of the Versus epic, Ardyn's story, Royal Pack being actually part of the base game instead of finishing Chapter 14 in DLC, and much much more.
You do realize that the Royal pack and "the entire ending of the Versus epic" can't actually coexist, right?

It also seems kind of silly to assume that, just because the inclusion of Moogles and a flying car were used to demonstrate a willingness to listen to fans, the devs themselves weren't actually invested in the creation of Moogles and the flying car. I rather expect that there were people on the development team that were pushing for their inclusion just as strongly as the fans were.

If you were an artist, you would understand. Make your art, not what others say is good. Good or bad, they will not know until release and the people like us who were only seeing trailers cannot give a fair judgement without context.

Plain and simple. You cannot in any way say with certainty that "their guns were not good". We'll never know if they were good because we never got their original plan. Just like how we cannot say if Nomura's Versus would have been any better; we were denied the right to judge the completed product ourselves, and when Tabata took over, the new team made changes based on fan judgement built upon the extremely limited footage that the game had released.

Stick to your guns. At least they'll be your guns and not some freakish frankenstein that doesn't satisfy you nor the people you changed the product for.
I suppose the last question I have to ask is, in the context of a game made by an entire team of people over an extended period of time, whose guns do you stick to? What if different voices on the team disagree with each other? What if the director changes his mind and decides to take things in a different direction? What if -- like what happened in FFVI -- someone has a lot more free time than they thought and realizes they can use it to take the story in a direction that hadn't been considered? Or, what if there's no way the full scope of one's initial plan can fit in the time and space allotted, but an alternate path could result in a more satisfying conclusion? What if you implemented your plan the way you thought you wanted and ended up unhappy with the way it came out?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it's important to stand up for an artistic vision you truly believe in, there are any number of factors that can make change both inevitable and beneficial, and it's hard to argue that that's not the case for FFXV given the difference in quality between the game itself and the sneak peek at the cutting room floor provided by DotF.
 
Apr 23, 2018
62
128
Nomura is a genius, Square's higher up's just keep sabotaging him, Early Versus Days they took away almost all his team to work on FF13 and he was left with a skeleton crew and so progress on versus was slow, Square forced him to work on KH3 when we know he wanted to work on his dream project which was versus. KH3 in the end didn't turn out the best as well. Im sure this was because of maybe some internal promblems with disney and also with square (since they needed to change engines midway from luminous to Ue4) The production of the luminous engine was a mess. Now even with FF7 remake they put Nomura on the project and I remember he didnt even know he was director till he saw the trailer, and also I feel like this multi part thing is squares decision to milk the game for a while. People need to stop blaming Nomura, everything that has happened with him and game development is entirely on squares end for the past 10 years.
Nomura just gets dealt a lot of bad hands unfortunately. It doesn't help that Square only seems to have like 3 directors, or that's what you'd think with the way they get thrown around to different projects all the time. It's still not looking good though because once again Nomura has been forced onto another project against his will, it's no secret that the public knew he was directing VII Remake before he did, it's ridiculous. Given how important he seems to the company, you'd think he'd have more sway with the higher-ups to do what he wants, but he's probably too polite to say anything sadly.
 
May 15, 2018
45
28
that "original battle" was target render and far to be anything close to "created" (as in, programmed and playable).
Source?
It isn't possible to know whether a work of art is well-executed until it's released and received, no. But it's entirely possible to judge a theme on its own merits, regardless of any impact that execution might or might not have had, and for a lot of us, the theme of FFXV as it released was much more appealing than the theme that appears to have been planned for its FNC incarnation.



Criticizing the existence of Episode Duscae suggests a lack of understanding of how game development works. The creation of what's called a "vertical slice" is something that a lot of development teams use to get their core systems in place... and the lack of a vertical slice was a major reason why development on FFXIII went practically nowhere until the team was ordered to create a demo.

Furthermore, combat is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be refined using player critique, because it's almost always designed to feel good to the players rather than to convey some sort of artistic point. Episode Duscae's combat was changed because it wasn't working as intended, and there's nothing wrong with that. (There's nothing wrong with using the demo to see how players react to changes, either -- multiplayer games have public beta tests all the time for that very reason.)



You do realize that the Royal pack and "the entire ending of the Versus epic" can't actually coexist, right?

It also seems kind of silly to assume that, just because the inclusion of Moogles and a flying car were used to demonstrate a willingness to listen to fans, the devs themselves weren't actually invested in the creation of Moogles and the flying car. I rather expect that there were people on the development team that were pushing for their inclusion just as strongly as the fans were.



I suppose the last question I have to ask is, in the context of a game made by an entire team of people over an extended period of time, whose guns do you stick to? What if different voices on the team disagree with each other? What if the director changes his mind and decides to take things in a different direction? What if -- like what happened in FFVI -- someone has a lot more free time than they thought and realizes they can use it to take the story in a direction that hadn't been considered? Or, what if there's no way the full scope of one's initial plan can fit in the time and space allotted, but an alternate path could result in a more satisfying conclusion? What if you implemented your plan the way you thought you wanted and ended up unhappy with the way it came out?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it's important to stand up for an artistic vision you truly believe in, there are any number of factors that can make change both inevitable and beneficial, and it's hard to argue that that's not the case for FFXV given the difference in quality between the game itself and the sneak peek at the cutting room floor provided by DotF.
You also have to aknowledge that equally big group was NOT happy with story/narrative of ffxv and that was the reason we even got DotF. As for the argument, that the mentioned,along with ep Ardyn ruins the 'cannon', I see it exactly as you described the changing content during the development. FFXV was squares attempt in GaaS, so it could be said that the developent circle wasn't closed until recently.
 

SonOfEtro

Warrior of Light
May 2, 2016
1,036
1,192
I've discovered something interesting, a relationship between Lightning Returns and XV.

I've always wondered why the localisation of Lightning Returns went so completely off the deep end when it came to altering characterisations and butchering terminology. And I came across something; the main localisation team has the same staff as the ones who translated Final Fantasy XV. The translator/localiser for XIII and XIII-2 was Tom Slattery, who wasn't involved in Lightning Returns at all.

Sort of makes sense. And it also puts the English script for XV into more context. It's not just how the team wrote the story. It's how that particular localisation team chose to render it into English. Explains why LR's English script was so strange when compared with its predecessors.

Looks like the latest team have a penchant for inserting Abrahamic symbolism and terminology into the story.

EDIT: I don't mean the story was altered as drastically for XV, but stuff that was presented in a fairly bald fashion was touted up for the English version with pseudo-Biblical language.
 
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Bazztek

Keyblade Master
May 26, 2014
719
1,890
You see Versus was the best game ever made but no one ever played it. Nomura actually had the whole game already, it was just in his head so that means it was complete we just couldn't play it. If only he moved to a new engine and platform that wasn't holding back his epic amazing never once changed vision, then he could have just transfered his consciousness to the game engine and the game would already be done. It takes a true visionary to never once change your vision or even a single thing for your game, because then you'd compromise your vision. Nomura had the right idea in wanting to make it a musical, because clearly that was always his true vision.
 
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Ikkin

Warrior of Light
Oct 30, 2016
1,099
1,705
You also have to aknowledge that equally big group was NOT happy with story/narrative of ffxv and that was the reason we even got DotF.
As far as I can tell, the people who weren't happy with FFXV's story/narrative weren't so much upset at the ending as they were upset because they wanted more content from the original release. Some of them grabbed onto DotF as further evidence of that complaint -- "see, the real ending isn't even part of the original game!" -- but that's not so much because they thought the original ending was a problem as that they thought it "proved" that the devs had a different idea all along that they didn't put in the game.

The only people who really wanted DotF was a small subset of the fanbase who either really wanted a happy ending or really wanted to smite Bahamut due to misconceptions about his characterization. =P

As for the argument, that the mentioned,along with ep Ardyn ruins the 'cannon', I see it exactly as you described the changing content during the development. FFXV was squares attempt in GaaS, so it could be said that the developent circle wasn't closed until recently.
You can call it an "attempt in GaaS," but serialized fiction has been a thing since the dawn of time, and it's generally accepted that any new release in a serialized story has a responsibility to ensure that it doesn't contradict things that were set down in earlier releases.
 
Apr 23, 2018
62
128
You see Versus was the best game ever made but no one ever played it. Nomura actually had the whole game already, it was just in his head so that means it was complete we just couldn't play it. If only he moved to a new engine and platform that wasn't holding back his epic amazing never once changed vision.
Wasn't the decision unanimous to move Versus XIII to next-gen and rebrand it as XV? I figure that's when the constant rewrites began because they had to cut down what was supposedly a trilogy or duology into one game AND rework the lore because the focus on death was unsuitable for a mainline title, while also learning how to use the new luminous engine. So the 2011-2013 period seems to be when the script changes and preparation for XV really started to occur, with Tabata coming in to assist in 2012.

It's true perhaps that Nomura didn't have a fully fleshed out script and everything laid out, but it seems there was a completed scenario judging by what he stated in 2010, generally when you write a story you do have the beginning, middle and end in mind at the very least. But any plans Nomura had for Versus likely needed to be altered for being too ambitious for one game. Tabata was left with a real conundrum to figure out, I don't envy him. If Nomura was in the same position I don't know it would've gone much better.

But we do know that the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythology was created by Nojima early 2004, with contributions from Nomura, Tabata and Toriyama, which I assume is because they were all planning to develop FF titles within the mythos eventually. So Nomura had like 6 years to come up with the scenario for Versus before things changed, so he definitely had a blueprint at least. Of course, whatever he wasn't able to explore in Versus, like certain themes or concepts, he can always weave into Verum Rex, which is it's own thing, but will likely explore death, sleep, urban fantasy and maybe a romeo and juliet/hamlet type of storyline. I don't want a Versus ripoff, but anything that can capture a similar tone and feel is fine by me.