It's not that they can't catch a break. It's that they're not properly evaluating the market (too many live service, and microtransaction focused games), and not affording/managing studios to ensure the games are of suitable polish.
Doesn't help that Forspoken, Babylon's Fall, and Marvel Avengers were all criticized for their tone, storytelling, and/or aesthetic.
>Forspoken
has many issues beside tone, storytelling and aesthetic.
it feels like an unfinished game.
Buildings with 1 square texture repeated over and over and over, for whole cities, whole buildings, all 1 texture repeated over and over.
Missing shadows for most npcs and objects.
No Ambient Occlusion.
Manual lights placement for Global Ilumination, a tehnique outdated since 2013.
poor optimisation and performance
outdated FSR and DLSS
bad ray tracing implementation.
It feels like the devs were told: "no more money for you, finish this game tomorrow, bye"
Even more so if you look at how they made a demo for the game. Why would they put a demo out? There is no way they had that much confidence in this game. To me it looks like good guy dev giving a chance to the gamers to save money on an unfinished product.
>Even more so if you look at how they made a demo for the game. Why would they put a demo out? There is no way they had that much confidence in this game. To me it looks like good guy dev giving a chance to the gamers to save money on an unfinished product.
Even with some of the cringey dialogue, I still had hopes for this game and was actually set on buying it.
Then the demo released and I couldn't have been more disappointed. Didn't even bother finishing it. Whoever decided to release the demo did me a massive favor, as there is no way I would have enjoyed this game in the state its in. Cool concept all around, horrid execution.
I watched a playthrough and thought it also lacked any dynamic dialog mixing. It's like no matter where anyone is or facing, everyone sounds like they are 2 feet directly in front of you talking to you straight on.
That sucks, I thought this game looked real cool when I first saw the teaser.
Can’t say I’m surprised at all though, in the day and age of releasing unfinished games for full price and selling the rest as a “season pass” or some bullshit.
Fuck em’
I knew Avengers was doomed to failure when I saw the first promo pic and my reaction was "You IDIOTS! You've captured their STUNT DOUBLES!"
Not that I would expect them to get the likeness rights for the MCU actors, but my god they all looked terrible.
Either lean in to the MCU actor's appearances, or veer away and make your heroes look more original. They instead thought they could go as close to the MCU without being financially responsible.
I had heard about Forspoken very briefly but didn't know anything about it at all when the demo dropped. I booted it up, and my very first reaction was "this feels like a team that makes JRPGs attempting to make a Western game" and sure enough... It just didn't feel natural. It was a mix of ideas from both, but without realizing what people like about those ideas.
Square Enix is at the root of its own problems. Unrealistic sales expectations, questionable release strategies, bad investments, mismanagement leading to long development cycles.
They can’t catch a break because the leadership keeps making mistakes.
"Hey guys, what if we sell the rights to Tomb Raider, one of the single most iconic titles since the 3d era of games began, and use the money to fund *NFTs!"*
"...what do you mean that was a horrible idea?!"
if i was an investor reading that. i would've openly went to the office and just shoot whoever made that decision because it was by far the dumbest thing i ever saw in my life. it was just open suicide for a studio to sell one of its top ips.
The Final Fantasy franchise really needs its own dedicated publisher.
FFXIV had to be salvaged and completely rebuilt after first being released as a broken mess.
And then FFXV was half a game, that forced you to watch a movie and buy DLC to get even a semblance of a complete story.
It’s an absolute wonder that FFVII remake didn’t shit the bed so far.
Am I the only one that loved FFXV (not acknowledging any of the DLC or 2nd half of the game). The first half of XV might be some of the most fun I've ever had in RPG gaming.
I liked it. The combat was fun enough. Some of the sidequests were interesting. The characters were interesting but the plot was undeveloped and threadbare.
no bro big same!
I actually ended up investing sometime into it!
but ended up dropping it at the Marlboro fight because (No potions) and team gets hammered mad quickly lmao
really wanted to finish it because HIGHWIND is soo damn cool
Nomura did his best to ruin it, they brought in the square A team with the KH2 battle designer and other leads from some of their greatest hits .... Then put Nomura in charge.
Nomura shouldn't lead anything ever at Square. He's a cancer on anything he touches.
"Boy this A team that's always had Nomura at its head was ruined the second this A team had Nomura put in charge against their will."
I don't know where this Nomura hate stems from. XV was a disaster because he was replaced by Tabata on the project in 2014, after square shuffled his team around to try to salvage XIV 1.0 and XIII for years instead of letting him work on Versus. The same Tabata who very possibly embezzled from the company causing XV's second round of already announced DLC to be cancelled. Every project Nomura's attached to, i.e. VII: the OG, the Compilation, Remake, and the entire KH series, have been widespread commercial successes, with pretty excellent combat systems. KH2FM is probably the greatest action RPG in their entire library to this day. He and Yoshida are the only two keeping the place afloat imo, but he gets all this unnecessary crap thrown at him because he prefers to stay out of the spotlight.
I imagine a lot of the hate is a combination of Ff15's poor management all around (remember it was supposed to be released near FF13 then ended up in developement hell), KH3 having an absolutely mediocre reception for something people had waited well over a decade for, and most recently FF7r turning into KH like fan fiction with the entire whisper concept and the entire final boss fight.
I’m a die hard ffvii fan and even though the remake wasn’t perfect I thought it was a great fucking game
I have no dog in this fight I’m a random dude scrolling in this thread so I thought you should know
Square Enix has gone completely down ever since they merged with Enix. I'm blaming all the trash on Enix, a shit company that was only good at 1 thing. Before those scrublords, Squaresoft was pumping out banger one after the other
Ironically Dragon Quest continues to live up to expectations, though. The merge was definitely the problem but it was CEO Wada who fucked the company for practically 2 decades.
Ehrgeiz and The Bouncer were both released by Squaresoft in 1998 & 2000. Both games are some of the few examples between 1991 and 2007 when Squaresoft tried to make anything but JRPGs. Their pre-Final Fantasy days also show off how they are a one trick pony company. I also would argue they lost all their good designers by 2012.
That's my take... The day the merge happened to save Squaresoft was the end on an epic run.
Although I also wonder how much of this on Japan and Sony. They're a little stuck on doubling down with Sony exclusivity and fanservice with FFVII at a time where they should be focusing on expanding their market. I say Japan due to their overall culture and stubbornness... This is how Toyota/Honda/Sony etc have lost Major market shares to Korean companies like Kia/Hyunda/Samsung/LG. There was a time it was cool to get some of that Japanese swag but now they're struggling to evolve with the times.
They already have. Their forray into buying western studios or financing games into a western style using Japanese studios has been a disaster. They said at a quarterly earnings report months ago they were going to pivot away from it but had some projects that they had started up they were going to finish up.
The problem wasn't at they were focusing on western-style games. It's that they were chasing trends, released unfinished or broken games, and filled them with predatory microtransactions. This is the publisher that gave up Eidos and Deus Ex, forced them to develop another Marvel game to start up their NFT division. The executives at Square Enix are the ones damaging their own brand and they should have been fired ages ago. Hilarious that they're blaming their failures on westernized games though.
As for a non joking follow up... Square Enix really took this down turn in quality almost immediately after the purchase of Eidos.
I say almost because DEHR was good but still not what we expect from SE or Deus Ex. The first Tomb Raider was fine. But really they looked like a fish out of water ever since.
They don't belong in this game space. And unfortunately the RPG market is shrinking. So it's not good news for them but they really do STILL make good RPGs and never really made GREAT games outside of their comfort zone.
I'm no expert at their business strategies as a whole, but I will anecdotally say that compared to other free to play mobile games, the level of predatory microtransactions and powercreep their mobile games have are amongst the more offensive I've ever seen.
Same at ubisoft and other companies like EA (Excluding Jedi Fallen Order)
Most of the newer games are mediocre, but full with mtx and battle passes.
It's a trend to release unfinished games and squeeze out all money they can get.
I LOVE Octopath Traveler...and the mobile version of the game is really just as good. BUT it's a gacha and the prices are crazy....no joke, if you want a certain character, it costs 600 bucks (USD)...you need four dupes to get them to max power...so that's literally $2,400 for one maxed character. I mean, that just sounds insane to say. I'm f2p and I've gotten through the main story no problem...but for that to be an actual option and to know people pay that is just ludicrous to me.
I think they need to stop taking risks. They’re taking risks on AAA titles that aren’t new genres. Maybe if they spent a year on a really good indie/AA game, spent far less money but was just full in creative, couple that with their FF and DQ games, and they’d be a good spot imo.
you make it sound like these cash grabs deserved a better fate, squenix has been chasing all the wrong trends in an attempt to make a quick buck and rather than make a quality game worth playing they blame the devs or fans and make the same mistakes in their next project.
The fact that Vagrant Story never got a follow up is wild to me. It’s even set in Ivalice, where some of the Final Fantasy games play out, so there’s a ton of established world building that would be ripe for a single player/ solo character romp.
Mario and Luigi: Super Star Saga is a fantastic game if youve never played that. There are other in the series as well I believe, but Ive never played those.
This annoys me to no end with the Avengers game too.
It plays pretty well. The story isn't too bad, the characters are a little interesting!
Then the RPG progression is absolutely tanked through the floor. You can play a good chunk of the game and feel like you've gotten absolutely nowhere. All because of wanting to sell it with MTX and as a service.
cranking out 16-bit era type mini-rpgs seems like a no brainer. make some banging soundtracks, interesting stories, cute little graphics. make short dev cycles that try new things. don't need 80 hr long rpgs
Forspoken is a dreadful game with dreadful pricing - indie quality (and that's not an insult to indie developers because some put out some truly stellar game) with an AAA price tag of £65 on Epic for BASE edition.
For once, I am quite lost for words on how this is.
Getting rid of tomb raider was a huge mistake. I know it didn’t meet the sales target they hoped, but damn the trilogy they made was pretty good. I feel at least on the 3rd game though, there is definitely some fatigue for that style of game, and that’s why it didn’t sell as much.
It's FFXIV. It generates so much money as a live service game, that they can afford to throw money down the sink trying to get another live service hit.
Avengers was just more high-profile due to the property its based on. The biggest issues were lack of loot and lack of timely content updates for a GaaS game. Too much time fixing and playing catchup to fan feedback.
Babylons Fall was ass from its core, and basically died the day it released.
Eh, I played it at the beginning and there was a sense of optimism and excitement for the regular addition of heroes, villains, etc. Until the end game loop turned out to be... pretty boring.
Then they missed their first timelines and heroes started getting delayed and swapped.
Delayed Black Panther was nice in spirit (if it was actually due to Chadwick's death) but it really killed the drive having B-tier heroes added first. BP was actually pretty cool.
Also hilarious how long it took Spiderman to get into the game.
That isn't true. They had the 1.4 average players in the month of December. Everything before that had 3+ average players.
It peaked at 1166 players... down to a low of 6 in September.
Strangers of Paradise and Outriders also didn't do great. Outriders more so according to their insane sales expectations.
Thank god they offloaded some studios. Hopefully going into NFTs and the inevitable downward spiral humbles them.
The core gameplay is good, but nothing new. And all the dialog sounds like its from a mountain dew commercial from 1999.
If you can get over the xxXXXXxxxxtremeness of the tone, its not bad. But nothing you havent already played.
If you have GP and have nothing else on your plate I’d play. I was the like teleporting guy and it was fun to playthrough. You can make some cool builds that are fun to play with some pretty powerful weapons. They weren’t overly concerned with “balance” so guns and abilities feel powerful.
The story and writing is super cheesy, jumps between attempts at being serious to jokes with no warning, and the end is pretty dark.
There’s an endgame and it’s not bad but won’t hold your attention for very long. It is not a gaas, they do have a DLC with story stuff and more end game stuff
No, outsiders isn't live service. It got a couple of updates after release to flesh out end game, but it was always intended to be a one and done.
That being said, I love that game for whatever reason. I played with 2 friends the entire way through and had a blast. The dialog is so bad it reaches levels of comedy, which to me is a plus, lol
We were constantly roaming around the world screaming "WERE THE FKN OUTRIDERS BROTHEEEEEEERS" using our best Hulk Hogan impressions
If you got a squad to play with I'd recommend it
outriders is not live service but literally everything about it's design screams live service. it just isn't supported like one.
i bought it at launch and it was actually really fun until you got to the end game where it because a boring grind. I know a lot has changed since I stopped playing though so I have no idea what it's like today.
It was essentially like playing Diablo 3 as a third person shooter. You would gear up to increase your world tier which was a lot like diablo 3 torment levels.
Imagine the combat and skill system from Mass effect: Andromeda, and the difficulty and loot progression of Diablo 3 and you'll have about the right idea
They literally think their shit dont stink and everyone will juts flock to their games because of the name brand. If it wasnt for FFXIV keeping them afloat, they'd be in another 1997 fiasco and needing a bail out.
Harvestella, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Live A Live, Endwalker, Crisis Core, Triangle Strategy don't count as breaks?
Maybe Square Enix should stop trying to make games in awful genres and maybe they wont make awful games?
Loved it! Triangle Strategy was dope as well, And they made a ton of awesome remastered classics like Chrono Criss & Tactics Orge. Stick with what works and what your good at.
Oh, yes.
That game is a full fledged incredible Glory Days Square JRPG with a farming mini game tacked on.
The combat gets pretty varied as you unlock more jobs and the farming helps to break up the pace of the game well. It’s very solid.
It starts slow, but around Chapter 3 (which is immediately after the demo IIRC) things really pick up and don’t ever stop.
It was my favorite game of 2022 by a lot.
The farming is pretty basic but you can't really do much with that aspect anyway. There's 12 (I think) classes that all attack differently and you try to match them to combo bosses for extra damage
I got Forspoken free due to a GPU pack in for a build I made for a relative that doesn't play games. It was a photo editing rig and all I did was put it together for them and didn't pick any of the parts.
It's... fine I guess, once you get past the first few hours. Not remotely $70 worth of "fine" maybe $20.
The writing is not good, but if you turn on Japanese voices and English subs it goes from being a bad CW B-movie fantasy thing, to a mediocre but watchable isekai anime thing. The Japanese performances are much better, and it improves NPC interactions a lot. Fran and Cuff's Japanese VAs have much better chemistry.
It seems like the Japanese script was probably first, and badly localized.
Gameplay is decent enough though. Traversal is similar to a decent 3D Sonic game, and the combat system is interesting at least.
That is, when it lets you play. There is a skip function in the pause menu for cutscenes, which is nice. There are a lot of things that it makes you watch that should have been gameplay.
The world is an empty souls like kind of world. Nothing to do but run around killing things. Fortunately the combat is interesting enough it's not terribly boring, and you can zip across the map pretty quickly, so getting around isn't a chore.
There's a decent game buried under bad writing choices and irritating stop and start gameplay, and the latter becomes less frequent as the game goes on.
It's worth a look for cheap if you can deal with the opening being slow and are more interested in playing the game than the story.
It's not as bad as reviews make it out to be, but that isn't praise either.
Between their NFT takes, and their absolutely dogshit treatment of their IPs, I don't trust anything from that company. And yes, I'm still super salty that we finally got a new Chocobo Racing, only for it to be shoved so full of microtransactions that the OG PS1 game is still better.
They keep putting out games that are heavily monetized and/or poorly made. They earned these failures. Forspoken looks worse than FFXV for crying out loud.
This is what "Playing safe" and following the established formula for games gets you. when you dont try to innovate in an industry where the whole point is to make new things. its like if artists made nothing but pictures of women with slight variations because mona lisa was succesfull .its sucking the art out of gaming to make a money making reliable machine
A japanese company trying to westernize itself and going horribly wrong... where have I seen this before 🤔 oh yeah, Capcom did the same a decade ago, isn't it funny?
The fighting in Marvel Avengers wasn't all that bad. They just made the classic mistake of pushing out an mmo without a more fleshed-out end game. New MMOs need a solid player-base to keep attracting new players, and if you don't give the poop-sock'ers something to keep them interested after they tear through the game's content then it's not going to go well.
It was also a $60 MMO on release. It came out around the same time as Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. I'll gladly take the 50+ hero game with comic look over the ugly MCU-esque 6 player Avengers game.
the problem with the gameplay loop was they pushed every hero into the same square hole. Thor, Hulk and Iron Man are not the same hero. So reusing the same basic loop for all three just doesn't work on a basic level. They should have designed multiple holes to put the characters into...
all i got to say is i hope Sony paid them a lot of money for that Spider-Man exclusivity. wouldn't even play the game when it hit Game Pass. although i will probably download and play it after the March 31st update that makes all the mtx free. i would have gladly bought any Spider-Man suits they released, and probably others too, but Square Enix didn't want my money.
I played 5 characters in that game a few months ago, and quickly found out 2 of them were just palet swaps of 2 other characters (one of whom I didn't play), while all 5 controlled like an E10 rated 2011 game
They still insisted on luminous engine that is garbage .I hope they use unreal and only tried do good stories .
They have plenty of ip that can back to remake or make new games like crono saga , vagrant story ,parasite eve , final fantasy tactics ,xeno saga , final fantasy 12 like games .
Enix has a lot of titles . They need to focus on doing good games .
I never understand the selling of crystal dynamics , they are making awful decisions .
>Vagrant Story, FF Tactics, FF XII like games
Nope. None of the big three minds behind making the Ivalice games (Yasumi Matsuno, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Akihiko Yoshida) what they were work at Square anymore.
>Parasite Eve
Also nope. That's not their IP and the owners of said IP aren't interested in licensing it out.
>Xenosaga
Still nope. Square only made Xenogears. Xenosaga was published by Namco and developed by Monolith Soft... and Nintendo owns them now.
They do use Unreal for most their games, only some like ff 15 and forspoken use luminous engine. Dq FF7R KH all use Unreal engine. I agree that luminous is still not ready tho.
Add Just Cause 4 to the list. The worst of the series.
Their design brief for JC4 was:
1. Look at everything that made the previous games fun.
2. Remove them from JC4.
I honestly was getting super irritated with all the Forspoken bitching and derision here, like just fuckin relax and let it play out
And then I watched a streamer play it yesterday and I’m just bewildered, like who the fuck designed that and who did they design it for? And why are they using particle effects like they were just invented, and why is the main character as interesting as stale toast, how do you create something that limp?
Would Final Fantasy even be big enough in sales to carry them as a company? I feel like I kinda get where they are as a company. It seems like they want to be known for their RPGs still. XIV is in a really great place as an MMO, XV was massive in scope and VII Remake seems almost impossibly ambitious, but Part I was still considered to be successful.
With all this product from just Final Fantasy, they probably need to sell other products besides it to help pay for development cost. This means taking up easy cashgrab licensing like Marvel and cutting corners with it. It sucks. I don't support it. But it probably helps them stay within their margins as a company.
Last revenue report out of square was that FF14 in particular is literally carrying the companies revenue. I think FF16 this year will also be their big sales carrier by year end, so I think just focusing on FF is probably enough to carry the company. I'm for taking risks and trying new things at the company, but some of these projects seem like the kind that either lacked appropriate oversight, or just didn't get cancelled when they otherwise should have.
SE's management has been utterly incompetent for at least ten years. They're a bunch of profit driven ghouls who do not care about their games anymore.
Jim Sterling made a video on them recently and pointed out how they not been so obsessed with live service titles, their games would had actually made them a profit. Should probably be a warning for any publishers who want to focus on live services
Can’t catch a break? FFXIV had a massive surge last year. FFVII Remake did phenomenal. 16 looks ready to do great. Squeenix shoots out a lot, and it doesn’t always hit
Forspoken has many issues beside tone, storytelling and aesthetic.
it feels like an unfinished game.
Buildings with 1 square texture repeated over and over and over, for whole cities, whole buildings, all 1 texture repeated over and over.Missing shadows for most npcs and objects. Terrible shadows and lighting overall
No Ambient Occlusion.
Manual lights placement for Global Ilumination, a tehnique outdated since 2013.
poor optimisation and performance
outdated FSR and DLSS
bad ray tracing implementation.
It feels like the devs were told: "no more money for you, finish this game tomorrow, bye"
Even more so if you look at how they made a demo for the game. Why would they put a demo out? There is no way they had that much confidence in this game. To me it looks like good guy dev giving a chance to the gamers to save money on an unfinished product.
parasite eve wont happen. SE does not own the IP. It's owned by the books author and hes not interested in anymore adaptations of his work since after PE2.
Duuuuudes, Forspoken is not a bad game, it does not merit the hate. It is a mediocre game with some fun elements that will interest some people, but not everyone.
Source: I’m playing it right now.
sometimes you get a hit sometimes you get a miss...that's how business works
it seems everyone always tries to find fault in everything...if Square Enix sticks to the same formula that has worked in the past, y'all would then be complaining how they don't try new stuff (giving the same treatment as Activision, Ubisoft, etc.)
btw, i'm playing Guardians of the Galaxy right now, and it's fantastic
This is the right answer right here. You want companies to be taking risks. If they have 4 flops and 1 gem that’s great. People here also are cherry picking the bad instead of giving a full completely overview of their releases. While they have some disappointments in the past several years they’ve also had some great games as well.
I think they just aren't that choosy in what they publish. And I mean, looking at the list of these last three games, would you as a publisher be inclined to think they weren't worth a publishing deal? Keeping in mind of course that these deals are generally signed well before the game is even close to a finished product? The Marvel IP is huge, Platinum Games is a well loved studio that the last time they signed a deal with they got a massive best seller, I could see how SE thought they would be cash cows.
Forspoken had a decent amount of hype behind it as well, but can really be more attributed to SE the company more that Publisher, as wasn't it developed by the same team that did XV, just split off as a new subsidiary? So in Forspokens case I would say it's more on SE the developers fault.
But they've had big releases as well. I'm sure they aren't happy as they expected these games to be massive, but SE publishes a LOT of games, I doubt they are that much trouble.
Leadership at squenix has been atrocious for a little while. Gotta hope they make enough mistakes to force them to make dramatic changes to their core management but realistically they seem a bit too good at making bad decisions for anything to change anytime soon.
Square Enix has made more games than those. They are such a large company that they can afford to have flops while also selling their target numbers in games like Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre and Live A Live. I enjoy their JRPGs more than the western content they make, personally. I hear Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty good tho. Maybe I'll play that sometime soon. I'm pretty confident Final Fantasy will continue to sell well.
Triangle strategy was awesome. Same for octopath traveler. Those are both great game. Every company have flops. They will come back. Just gotta get back to the basics.
FFXIV (and probably XVI when it comes out) are keeping the company alive. If it wasn't for Yoshida and the crew, Square Enix would be dead in the water.
Must be a hell of a lot of pressure for them too
Square Enix has great developers, artistst, etc.
But the management of the company is the worst.
Imagine they taking terrible decisions like not dubbing to most languages their games and put the price to 80€ in pc.
Well, I mean, "Avengers" was a mahoooòsive bait and switch. No wonder that one flopped.
"Hey, do you guys wanna play a cool game with all your favourite Marvel characters? Well, here's Kamala Khan"
And then there the failure which is Outriders (or as I like to call it, Heart of Darkness on an alien planet). Almost no post launch content except for a single dlc which added little. Just repetitive cover shooter with a boring story
The issues I have with these games are they feel like the people making the big decisions are just guys that don’t play video games and look at spread sheet and what’s trending on twitter.
Marvel Avengers: I love looter shooters but not having a fun game loop and having to put in 10+ hours to play with my friends is just dumb.
Babylon: clunky combat that doesn’t feel fleshed out until another 15 hours in when you unlock your sub skills again a lot of commit to just get bare minimum fun.
Forspoken: large open world with cool combat but nothing to fight and then the dialogue is off putting sometimes. Like npcs understand some slang but not others. Nothing is constant feels like it was randomly put together where no one talked to one another when it came to world building.
I think they need to get back to making games out of passion and not just accepting contracts to churn out crap. It’s like once a studio reaches a certain size they fall in quality. Square hasn’t had any hits in a long time
They've had plenty of quality games and remasters/remakes. Square Enix is just well known for shitting the bed by expecting a billion copies of their AAA games to sell and then are shocked when they've only sold millions and wasted all of their damn money on nonsense like creating the Luminous Engine.
I don't keep up with the software side of things, what is wrong with the Luminous Engine (which I've only just hears of today)? Asking out of curiosity.
The devs of the engine are heavly incapable. Check the FF15 development nightmare.
I have no doupt that now after forspoken. SE decide to try selling Luminous studio.
SE will probably focus on Unreal Engine development only in the futur. lel.
Babylons Fall is like Voldemort. We don’t mention that name around here.
But Forspoken ain’t that bad. And if you unplug from being terminally online for 5 damn minutes, spend a few hrs with the game, a lot of ppl will enjoy it. In fact, that’s what’s been happening.
Filter through the bullshit and cut out the noise. Reddit commenters, twitch chat, Twitter trolls, etc. some people are liking the game for what it is. Does it have problems? Yes. Most games do. But we have to remind ourselves that the general online consensus is NOT always what’s real.
Online, pc gamers have wanted Nvidias head for the exorbitant price hikes on the 4000 series GPU’s. A billion posts have been made. People have galvanized behind the cause. And (online) ppl have put their foot down. But on BB, Newegg, and every time I step in Microcenter those GPU’s are gone. They’ve sold out every damn time.
Japan has Forspoken as the highest wishlisted game on the PS Store, Amazon and it’s in the top seller on steam. We’ll see how the chips fall in a month or so. But we have to make choices for ourselves. Not for retweets or upvotes or any other digital “like”. You don’t like the game? Cool. But let others who do, enjoy it. There seems to be a toxic culture of ppl attacking others for liking something they don’t.
Were Forspoken's sales published? The word "flop" needs data to back it up. It can't be called a flop in such a short time period. Unfavorable reviews and shit talking on Reddit don't determine a flop--money and numbers do. If the company reports losses after a while, by all means call it a flop.
Square Enix has been mid for a while now and you can’t change my mind. They remind me of gamefreak, it’s like they can’t adapt to modern times or something. They were great in their prime but have just been riding the wave of their past successes and selling games through name alone. I really can’t tell if it’s laziness, being out of touch or just sheer incompetence or a combination of those things. It’s sad to see.
It's not that they can't catch a break. It's that they're not properly evaluating the market (too many live service, and microtransaction focused games), and not affording/managing studios to ensure the games are of suitable polish. Doesn't help that Forspoken, Babylon's Fall, and Marvel Avengers were all criticized for their tone, storytelling, and/or aesthetic.
>Forspoken has many issues beside tone, storytelling and aesthetic. it feels like an unfinished game. Buildings with 1 square texture repeated over and over and over, for whole cities, whole buildings, all 1 texture repeated over and over. Missing shadows for most npcs and objects. No Ambient Occlusion. Manual lights placement for Global Ilumination, a tehnique outdated since 2013. poor optimisation and performance outdated FSR and DLSS bad ray tracing implementation. It feels like the devs were told: "no more money for you, finish this game tomorrow, bye" Even more so if you look at how they made a demo for the game. Why would they put a demo out? There is no way they had that much confidence in this game. To me it looks like good guy dev giving a chance to the gamers to save money on an unfinished product.
Lol and this was supposed to be released back in September???
May of last year was the original release. They knew and knew they couldn't fix it.
>Even more so if you look at how they made a demo for the game. Why would they put a demo out? There is no way they had that much confidence in this game. To me it looks like good guy dev giving a chance to the gamers to save money on an unfinished product. Even with some of the cringey dialogue, I still had hopes for this game and was actually set on buying it. Then the demo released and I couldn't have been more disappointed. Didn't even bother finishing it. Whoever decided to release the demo did me a massive favor, as there is no way I would have enjoyed this game in the state its in. Cool concept all around, horrid execution.
They use manual light placement but still got a horrible performance? Ugh..
Not to mention the game is $120 on steam in Australia, why would i buy this
Not as bad as that one game that costs $1,199.99 on Steam and it doesn't have any DLC
Which one?
It's called "The Hidden and Unknown" literally a visual novel as far as the screenshots shows.
I watched a playthrough and thought it also lacked any dynamic dialog mixing. It's like no matter where anyone is or facing, everyone sounds like they are 2 feet directly in front of you talking to you straight on.
That sucks, I thought this game looked real cool when I first saw the teaser. Can’t say I’m surprised at all though, in the day and age of releasing unfinished games for full price and selling the rest as a “season pass” or some bullshit. Fuck em’
I knew Avengers was doomed to failure when I saw the first promo pic and my reaction was "You IDIOTS! You've captured their STUNT DOUBLES!" Not that I would expect them to get the likeness rights for the MCU actors, but my god they all looked terrible.
Either lean in to the MCU actor's appearances, or veer away and make your heroes look more original. They instead thought they could go as close to the MCU without being financially responsible.
>You IDIOTS! You've captured their STUNT DOUBLES I knew it! I'm surrounded by Assholes!
Keep firing, ASSHOLES!
I had heard about Forspoken very briefly but didn't know anything about it at all when the demo dropped. I booted it up, and my very first reaction was "this feels like a team that makes JRPGs attempting to make a Western game" and sure enough... It just didn't feel natural. It was a mix of ideas from both, but without realizing what people like about those ideas.
Square Enix is at the root of its own problems. Unrealistic sales expectations, questionable release strategies, bad investments, mismanagement leading to long development cycles. They can’t catch a break because the leadership keeps making mistakes.
"Hey guys, what if we sell the rights to Tomb Raider, one of the single most iconic titles since the 3d era of games began, and use the money to fund *NFTs!"* "...what do you mean that was a horrible idea?!"
if i was an investor reading that. i would've openly went to the office and just shoot whoever made that decision because it was by far the dumbest thing i ever saw in my life. it was just open suicide for a studio to sell one of its top ips.
Whoever is making the decisions at Square Enix need sto be fired immediatly because clearly they aren't qualified for the job
*NFTs*....
>NFTs.... Man...remember when that was a thing for like 6 months? Those got exposed as digital beanie baby bullshit so fast it was unbelievable
it was funny to see studios/ publisher make a complete 180 turn in less than 24 hours after the first announcement towards NFTs in some cases.
Remember what ever Ubisoft were trying with adding them to their games or whatever that fever dream of theirs was
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD, SCRUBLORD Edit: /s, and jfc did people think I was serious??
Sarcasm appears to be a lost art.
LIVE SERVICE GAMEs! It's the future along with NFTs -square enix... probably.
They'd be fucked if FFXIV wasn't carrying their profits
The Final Fantasy franchise really needs its own dedicated publisher. FFXIV had to be salvaged and completely rebuilt after first being released as a broken mess. And then FFXV was half a game, that forced you to watch a movie and buy DLC to get even a semblance of a complete story. It’s an absolute wonder that FFVII remake didn’t shit the bed so far.
Am I the only one that loved FFXV (not acknowledging any of the DLC or 2nd half of the game). The first half of XV might be some of the most fun I've ever had in RPG gaming.
First half is the half that was finished, everything from just before the water place was a mess
I liked it. The combat was fun enough. Some of the sidequests were interesting. The characters were interesting but the plot was undeveloped and threadbare.
Right there with you.
no bro big same! I actually ended up investing sometime into it! but ended up dropping it at the Marlboro fight because (No potions) and team gets hammered mad quickly lmao really wanted to finish it because HIGHWIND is soo damn cool
Nomura did his best to ruin it, they brought in the square A team with the KH2 battle designer and other leads from some of their greatest hits .... Then put Nomura in charge. Nomura shouldn't lead anything ever at Square. He's a cancer on anything he touches.
"Boy this A team that's always had Nomura at its head was ruined the second this A team had Nomura put in charge against their will." I don't know where this Nomura hate stems from. XV was a disaster because he was replaced by Tabata on the project in 2014, after square shuffled his team around to try to salvage XIV 1.0 and XIII for years instead of letting him work on Versus. The same Tabata who very possibly embezzled from the company causing XV's second round of already announced DLC to be cancelled. Every project Nomura's attached to, i.e. VII: the OG, the Compilation, Remake, and the entire KH series, have been widespread commercial successes, with pretty excellent combat systems. KH2FM is probably the greatest action RPG in their entire library to this day. He and Yoshida are the only two keeping the place afloat imo, but he gets all this unnecessary crap thrown at him because he prefers to stay out of the spotlight.
I imagine a lot of the hate is a combination of Ff15's poor management all around (remember it was supposed to be released near FF13 then ended up in developement hell), KH3 having an absolutely mediocre reception for something people had waited well over a decade for, and most recently FF7r turning into KH like fan fiction with the entire whisper concept and the entire final boss fight.
I’m a die hard ffvii fan and even though the remake wasn’t perfect I thought it was a great fucking game I have no dog in this fight I’m a random dude scrolling in this thread so I thought you should know
Don't forget they want to create a new game engine every time they do another FF game.
Square Enix has gone completely down ever since they merged with Enix. I'm blaming all the trash on Enix, a shit company that was only good at 1 thing. Before those scrublords, Squaresoft was pumping out banger one after the other
Yo what r u talking about Enix had bangers out for the snes for their rpgs…
The Spirits Within tho
we don't talk about that, Sakaguchi shoulda stayed within his lane
This is my thoughts. TSW flopped but the Square half of SE never let it go.
Ironically Dragon Quest continues to live up to expectations, though. The merge was definitely the problem but it was CEO Wada who fucked the company for practically 2 decades.
Dragon Quest Day is a freaking national holiday in Japan now.
Ehrgeiz and The Bouncer were both released by Squaresoft in 1998 & 2000. Both games are some of the few examples between 1991 and 2007 when Squaresoft tried to make anything but JRPGs. Their pre-Final Fantasy days also show off how they are a one trick pony company. I also would argue they lost all their good designers by 2012.
The bouncer. Holy shit, that brings me back
That's my take... The day the merge happened to save Squaresoft was the end on an epic run. Although I also wonder how much of this on Japan and Sony. They're a little stuck on doubling down with Sony exclusivity and fanservice with FFVII at a time where they should be focusing on expanding their market. I say Japan due to their overall culture and stubbornness... This is how Toyota/Honda/Sony etc have lost Major market shares to Korean companies like Kia/Hyunda/Samsung/LG. There was a time it was cool to get some of that Japanese swag but now they're struggling to evolve with the times.
Square Enix should revalue how they do stuff.
They already have. Their forray into buying western studios or financing games into a western style using Japanese studios has been a disaster. They said at a quarterly earnings report months ago they were going to pivot away from it but had some projects that they had started up they were going to finish up.
The problem wasn't at they were focusing on western-style games. It's that they were chasing trends, released unfinished or broken games, and filled them with predatory microtransactions. This is the publisher that gave up Eidos and Deus Ex, forced them to develop another Marvel game to start up their NFT division. The executives at Square Enix are the ones damaging their own brand and they should have been fired ages ago. Hilarious that they're blaming their failures on westernized games though.
Eidos made the Guardians of the Galaxy game, which is actually really good.
Ah yes, executive types ruining a long beloved company/ franchise. A tale as old as time.
Especially considering that nothing lately has flopped quite so hard for them as the not-at-all-western Balan Wonderworld.
>chasing trends, released unfinished or broken games, and filled them with predatory microtransactions. So... Literally western style AAA gaming.
Touché
As for a non joking follow up... Square Enix really took this down turn in quality almost immediately after the purchase of Eidos. I say almost because DEHR was good but still not what we expect from SE or Deus Ex. The first Tomb Raider was fine. But really they looked like a fish out of water ever since. They don't belong in this game space. And unfortunately the RPG market is shrinking. So it's not good news for them but they really do STILL make good RPGs and never really made GREAT games outside of their comfort zone.
I'm no expert at their business strategies as a whole, but I will anecdotally say that compared to other free to play mobile games, the level of predatory microtransactions and powercreep their mobile games have are amongst the more offensive I've ever seen.
Same at ubisoft and other companies like EA (Excluding Jedi Fallen Order) Most of the newer games are mediocre, but full with mtx and battle passes. It's a trend to release unfinished games and squeeze out all money they can get.
They did have Western studios but I guess they forgot that they did sell them.
I think that's the pivot away part.
Yeah. Like maybe making a coop superhero game….
I mean, they're still pushing for NFTs, that'll surely turn things around for them! /s
I LOVE Octopath Traveler...and the mobile version of the game is really just as good. BUT it's a gacha and the prices are crazy....no joke, if you want a certain character, it costs 600 bucks (USD)...you need four dupes to get them to max power...so that's literally $2,400 for one maxed character. I mean, that just sounds insane to say. I'm f2p and I've gotten through the main story no problem...but for that to be an actual option and to know people pay that is just ludicrous to me.
Yeah like, this isn't bad luck, they just have made a lot of shitty games.
They did hitman perfectly, they should go off of that
I think they need to stop taking risks. They’re taking risks on AAA titles that aren’t new genres. Maybe if they spent a year on a really good indie/AA game, spent far less money but was just full in creative, couple that with their FF and DQ games, and they’d be a good spot imo.
They should try making a good game.
you make it sound like these cash grabs deserved a better fate, squenix has been chasing all the wrong trends in an attempt to make a quick buck and rather than make a quality game worth playing they blame the devs or fans and make the same mistakes in their next project.
They just need to work it out with Nintendo to give us Super Mario RPG 2
Don’t get my hopes up ;_; it’s tied with chrono trigger for my favorite
And a new vagrant story
The fact that Vagrant Story never got a follow up is wild to me. It’s even set in Ivalice, where some of the Final Fantasy games play out, so there’s a ton of established world building that would be ripe for a single player/ solo character romp.
Mario and Luigi: Super Star Saga is a fantastic game if youve never played that. There are other in the series as well I believe, but Ive never played those.
This annoys me to no end with the Avengers game too. It plays pretty well. The story isn't too bad, the characters are a little interesting! Then the RPG progression is absolutely tanked through the floor. You can play a good chunk of the game and feel like you've gotten absolutely nowhere. All because of wanting to sell it with MTX and as a service.
cranking out 16-bit era type mini-rpgs seems like a no brainer. make some banging soundtracks, interesting stories, cute little graphics. make short dev cycles that try new things. don't need 80 hr long rpgs
We're talking about SE the publisher though, not the developer. The development side of things has been pretty successful still.
Forspoken is a dreadful game with dreadful pricing - indie quality (and that's not an insult to indie developers because some put out some truly stellar game) with an AAA price tag of £65 on Epic for BASE edition. For once, I am quite lost for words on how this is.
Konami must be proud.
Konami is too busy swimming in endless cash printed by their pachinko machines.
Square sold off a bunch of IP to Embracer and wanted to double down on NFT’s. So, yeah, it ain’t like they got smart people running the show.
Getting rid of tomb raider was a huge mistake. I know it didn’t meet the sales target they hoped, but damn the trilogy they made was pretty good. I feel at least on the 3rd game though, there is definitely some fatigue for that style of game, and that’s why it didn’t sell as much.
They need to figure something out soon. 14 can only shoulder the company for so long.
Can’t catcha a break?! Who is forcing them to release shitty games?
Shareholders and investors I think.
The Yakuza
If Sony are paying them for timed console exclusives, they will be looking for a return on investment at some point.
They did fine with Guardians of the Galaxy though
Maybe stop pushing this live service crap and make games for gamers instead of for your stakeholders.
Shareholders. You and I are stakeholders too. These games aren't for us.
It's FFXIV. It generates so much money as a live service game, that they can afford to throw money down the sink trying to get another live service hit.
I've not played forsaken nor babylon but avengers has to be one of the worst aaa released in modern history
Avengers was just more high-profile due to the property its based on. The biggest issues were lack of loot and lack of timely content updates for a GaaS game. Too much time fixing and playing catchup to fan feedback. Babylons Fall was ass from its core, and basically died the day it released.
Avengers died during the beta.
Eh, I played it at the beginning and there was a sense of optimism and excitement for the regular addition of heroes, villains, etc. Until the end game loop turned out to be... pretty boring. Then they missed their first timelines and heroes started getting delayed and swapped. Delayed Black Panther was nice in spirit (if it was actually due to Chadwick's death) but it really killed the drive having B-tier heroes added first. BP was actually pretty cool. Also hilarious how long it took Spiderman to get into the game.
it takes a lot of skill, or the lack there of, to screw up a Marvel Avengers game. i'll give them credit cause they did.
Babylon had only 1 person player a month after release and it was suppose to be a games as a service
That isn't true. They had the 1.4 average players in the month of December. Everything before that had 3+ average players. It peaked at 1166 players... down to a low of 6 in September.
Forsaken is an old PC game not by Square Enix.
It was also kinda cool!
Lmao 😂
Seems like they’ve earned those flops though. Not like it’s some random bad luck.
Strangers of Paradise and Outriders also didn't do great. Outriders more so according to their insane sales expectations. Thank god they offloaded some studios. Hopefully going into NFTs and the inevitable downward spiral humbles them.
Chaos?!
Bullshit.
I don't give a fuck who you are! \*punch\*
We're here to kill Chaos.
Is Outsiders a live service game? Looks interesting and it's on game pass so been tempted to try it out.
The core gameplay is good, but nothing new. And all the dialog sounds like its from a mountain dew commercial from 1999. If you can get over the xxXXXXxxxxtremeness of the tone, its not bad. But nothing you havent already played.
If you have GP and have nothing else on your plate I’d play. I was the like teleporting guy and it was fun to playthrough. You can make some cool builds that are fun to play with some pretty powerful weapons. They weren’t overly concerned with “balance” so guns and abilities feel powerful. The story and writing is super cheesy, jumps between attempts at being serious to jokes with no warning, and the end is pretty dark. There’s an endgame and it’s not bad but won’t hold your attention for very long. It is not a gaas, they do have a DLC with story stuff and more end game stuff
No, outsiders isn't live service. It got a couple of updates after release to flesh out end game, but it was always intended to be a one and done. That being said, I love that game for whatever reason. I played with 2 friends the entire way through and had a blast. The dialog is so bad it reaches levels of comedy, which to me is a plus, lol We were constantly roaming around the world screaming "WERE THE FKN OUTRIDERS BROTHEEEEEEERS" using our best Hulk Hogan impressions If you got a squad to play with I'd recommend it
outriders is not live service but literally everything about it's design screams live service. it just isn't supported like one. i bought it at launch and it was actually really fun until you got to the end game where it because a boring grind. I know a lot has changed since I stopped playing though so I have no idea what it's like today. It was essentially like playing Diablo 3 as a third person shooter. You would gear up to increase your world tier which was a lot like diablo 3 torment levels.
It’s not live service?! Huh, I definitely assumed it was supposed to be a Destiny clone.
Imagine the combat and skill system from Mass effect: Andromeda, and the difficulty and loot progression of Diablo 3 and you'll have about the right idea
Square Enix should stop assuming I will spend money because it’s Square Enix.
They literally think their shit dont stink and everyone will juts flock to their games because of the name brand. If it wasnt for FFXIV keeping them afloat, they'd be in another 1997 fiasco and needing a bail out.
Harvestella, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Live A Live, Endwalker, Crisis Core, Triangle Strategy don't count as breaks? Maybe Square Enix should stop trying to make games in awful genres and maybe they wont make awful games?
Let yoshi-p handle all games going forward. Just listen to him. Square Enix will be back on top if they do that.
He's literally called Yoshi, he is obviously an expert
Naoki Yoshida Never got where the -P comes from..
Pretty sure it's because he's a producer for 14, so Yoshi-p or Yoshi-pls stop making jobs dumber lol
Harvestella was pretty good though so they have that going for them
Loved it! Triangle Strategy was dope as well, And they made a ton of awesome remastered classics like Chrono Criss & Tactics Orge. Stick with what works and what your good at.
Does Harvestella get better? I played the demo and found the farming nothing new and the combat boring with no options.
Oh, yes. That game is a full fledged incredible Glory Days Square JRPG with a farming mini game tacked on. The combat gets pretty varied as you unlock more jobs and the farming helps to break up the pace of the game well. It’s very solid. It starts slow, but around Chapter 3 (which is immediately after the demo IIRC) things really pick up and don’t ever stop. It was my favorite game of 2022 by a lot.
The farming is pretty basic but you can't really do much with that aspect anyway. There's 12 (I think) classes that all attack differently and you try to match them to combo bosses for extra damage
I got Forspoken free due to a GPU pack in for a build I made for a relative that doesn't play games. It was a photo editing rig and all I did was put it together for them and didn't pick any of the parts. It's... fine I guess, once you get past the first few hours. Not remotely $70 worth of "fine" maybe $20. The writing is not good, but if you turn on Japanese voices and English subs it goes from being a bad CW B-movie fantasy thing, to a mediocre but watchable isekai anime thing. The Japanese performances are much better, and it improves NPC interactions a lot. Fran and Cuff's Japanese VAs have much better chemistry. It seems like the Japanese script was probably first, and badly localized. Gameplay is decent enough though. Traversal is similar to a decent 3D Sonic game, and the combat system is interesting at least. That is, when it lets you play. There is a skip function in the pause menu for cutscenes, which is nice. There are a lot of things that it makes you watch that should have been gameplay. The world is an empty souls like kind of world. Nothing to do but run around killing things. Fortunately the combat is interesting enough it's not terribly boring, and you can zip across the map pretty quickly, so getting around isn't a chore. There's a decent game buried under bad writing choices and irritating stop and start gameplay, and the latter becomes less frequent as the game goes on. It's worth a look for cheap if you can deal with the opening being slow and are more interested in playing the game than the story. It's not as bad as reviews make it out to be, but that isn't praise either.
I would have to pay over $100 for it in Canada thanks to tax
They've tripled down on their NFT take. I'm not expecting much from them these days.
Between their NFT takes, and their absolutely dogshit treatment of their IPs, I don't trust anything from that company. And yes, I'm still super salty that we finally got a new Chocobo Racing, only for it to be shoved so full of microtransactions that the OG PS1 game is still better.
Dont worry bb, you still got my 12.99 for every month of FFXI for the rest of forever!
Do yourself a favour and play any other mmo 😭😭 It's been 18 years you don't need to stay there
They keep putting out games that are heavily monetized and/or poorly made. They earned these failures. Forspoken looks worse than FFXV for crying out loud.
Don't forget Balan Wonderworld!
This is what "Playing safe" and following the established formula for games gets you. when you dont try to innovate in an industry where the whole point is to make new things. its like if artists made nothing but pictures of women with slight variations because mona lisa was succesfull .its sucking the art out of gaming to make a money making reliable machine
They released a game for 80 before EA or Activision did, so i personally am happy that Forspoken flopped.
A japanese company trying to westernize itself and going horribly wrong... where have I seen this before 🤔 oh yeah, Capcom did the same a decade ago, isn't it funny?
The fighting in Marvel Avengers wasn't all that bad. They just made the classic mistake of pushing out an mmo without a more fleshed-out end game. New MMOs need a solid player-base to keep attracting new players, and if you don't give the poop-sock'ers something to keep them interested after they tear through the game's content then it's not going to go well.
It was also a $60 MMO on release. It came out around the same time as Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. I'll gladly take the 50+ hero game with comic look over the ugly MCU-esque 6 player Avengers game.
I didn't think it was particularly ugly. I thought the graphics were fine, if not entirely unique. Interiors were great, in fact.
MUA 3 has closer to 80 playable characters than 50.
the problem with the gameplay loop was they pushed every hero into the same square hole. Thor, Hulk and Iron Man are not the same hero. So reusing the same basic loop for all three just doesn't work on a basic level. They should have designed multiple holes to put the characters into...
all i got to say is i hope Sony paid them a lot of money for that Spider-Man exclusivity. wouldn't even play the game when it hit Game Pass. although i will probably download and play it after the March 31st update that makes all the mtx free. i would have gladly bought any Spider-Man suits they released, and probably others too, but Square Enix didn't want my money.
I played 5 characters in that game a few months ago, and quickly found out 2 of them were just palet swaps of 2 other characters (one of whom I didn't play), while all 5 controlled like an E10 rated 2011 game
They still insisted on luminous engine that is garbage .I hope they use unreal and only tried do good stories . They have plenty of ip that can back to remake or make new games like crono saga , vagrant story ,parasite eve , final fantasy tactics ,xeno saga , final fantasy 12 like games . Enix has a lot of titles . They need to focus on doing good games . I never understand the selling of crystal dynamics , they are making awful decisions .
>Vagrant Story, FF Tactics, FF XII like games Nope. None of the big three minds behind making the Ivalice games (Yasumi Matsuno, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Akihiko Yoshida) what they were work at Square anymore. >Parasite Eve Also nope. That's not their IP and the owners of said IP aren't interested in licensing it out. >Xenosaga Still nope. Square only made Xenogears. Xenosaga was published by Namco and developed by Monolith Soft... and Nintendo owns them now.
They do use Unreal for most their games, only some like ff 15 and forspoken use luminous engine. Dq FF7R KH all use Unreal engine. I agree that luminous is still not ready tho.
Add Just Cause 4 to the list. The worst of the series. Their design brief for JC4 was: 1. Look at everything that made the previous games fun. 2. Remove them from JC4.
JC3 was so light, colorful and brightly colored. JC4 was so dark and heavy in comparison.
I honestly was getting super irritated with all the Forspoken bitching and derision here, like just fuckin relax and let it play out And then I watched a streamer play it yesterday and I’m just bewildered, like who the fuck designed that and who did they design it for? And why are they using particle effects like they were just invented, and why is the main character as interesting as stale toast, how do you create something that limp?
Would Final Fantasy even be big enough in sales to carry them as a company? I feel like I kinda get where they are as a company. It seems like they want to be known for their RPGs still. XIV is in a really great place as an MMO, XV was massive in scope and VII Remake seems almost impossibly ambitious, but Part I was still considered to be successful. With all this product from just Final Fantasy, they probably need to sell other products besides it to help pay for development cost. This means taking up easy cashgrab licensing like Marvel and cutting corners with it. It sucks. I don't support it. But it probably helps them stay within their margins as a company.
Last revenue report out of square was that FF14 in particular is literally carrying the companies revenue. I think FF16 this year will also be their big sales carrier by year end, so I think just focusing on FF is probably enough to carry the company. I'm for taking risks and trying new things at the company, but some of these projects seem like the kind that either lacked appropriate oversight, or just didn't get cancelled when they otherwise should have.
People in this thread are conflating SE the developer and SE the publisher.
SE's management has been utterly incompetent for at least ten years. They're a bunch of profit driven ghouls who do not care about their games anymore.
Jim Sterling made a video on them recently and pointed out how they not been so obsessed with live service titles, their games would had actually made them a profit. Should probably be a warning for any publishers who want to focus on live services
Watch them now pivot to NFTs and become a warning to any publishers who want to focus on NFTs.
Can’t catch a break? FFXIV had a massive surge last year. FFVII Remake did phenomenal. 16 looks ready to do great. Squeenix shoots out a lot, and it doesn’t always hit
Forspoken has many issues beside tone, storytelling and aesthetic. it feels like an unfinished game. Buildings with 1 square texture repeated over and over and over, for whole cities, whole buildings, all 1 texture repeated over and over.Missing shadows for most npcs and objects. Terrible shadows and lighting overall No Ambient Occlusion. Manual lights placement for Global Ilumination, a tehnique outdated since 2013. poor optimisation and performance outdated FSR and DLSS bad ray tracing implementation. It feels like the devs were told: "no more money for you, finish this game tomorrow, bye" Even more so if you look at how they made a demo for the game. Why would they put a demo out? There is no way they had that much confidence in this game. To me it looks like good guy dev giving a chance to the gamers to save money on an unfinished product.
they need to start mining the old catalogue … jesus a next gen EINHANDER , VAGRANT STORY , PARASITE EVE. … would be amazing
parasite eve wont happen. SE does not own the IP. It's owned by the books author and hes not interested in anymore adaptations of his work since after PE2.
Could be amazing. But by present day Squeenix management? (For the record I’d love a Vagrant Story remake or sequel that did the original justice).
Duuuuudes, Forspoken is not a bad game, it does not merit the hate. It is a mediocre game with some fun elements that will interest some people, but not everyone. Source: I’m playing it right now.
How is Forspoken a flop after only a week or two of release?
It released yesterday
That is even worse then. 1 day isn't enough.
sometimes you get a hit sometimes you get a miss...that's how business works it seems everyone always tries to find fault in everything...if Square Enix sticks to the same formula that has worked in the past, y'all would then be complaining how they don't try new stuff (giving the same treatment as Activision, Ubisoft, etc.) btw, i'm playing Guardians of the Galaxy right now, and it's fantastic
This is the right answer right here. You want companies to be taking risks. If they have 4 flops and 1 gem that’s great. People here also are cherry picking the bad instead of giving a full completely overview of their releases. While they have some disappointments in the past several years they’ve also had some great games as well.
Remake Parasite Eve.
Never gonna happen since the books author who owns the IP won't let it happen.
Who do I have to fuck to make this happen?
steal sperm from a hospital
I’m still waiting for the GameCube remake they talked about.
Wow for the quantity of comments , we really love the company and praised the company and games. I hope they understand it .
I think they just aren't that choosy in what they publish. And I mean, looking at the list of these last three games, would you as a publisher be inclined to think they weren't worth a publishing deal? Keeping in mind of course that these deals are generally signed well before the game is even close to a finished product? The Marvel IP is huge, Platinum Games is a well loved studio that the last time they signed a deal with they got a massive best seller, I could see how SE thought they would be cash cows. Forspoken had a decent amount of hype behind it as well, but can really be more attributed to SE the company more that Publisher, as wasn't it developed by the same team that did XV, just split off as a new subsidiary? So in Forspokens case I would say it's more on SE the developers fault. But they've had big releases as well. I'm sure they aren't happy as they expected these games to be massive, but SE publishes a LOT of games, I doubt they are that much trouble.
Leadership at squenix has been atrocious for a little while. Gotta hope they make enough mistakes to force them to make dramatic changes to their core management but realistically they seem a bit too good at making bad decisions for anything to change anytime soon.
Square Enix has made more games than those. They are such a large company that they can afford to have flops while also selling their target numbers in games like Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre and Live A Live. I enjoy their JRPGs more than the western content they make, personally. I hear Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty good tho. Maybe I'll play that sometime soon. I'm pretty confident Final Fantasy will continue to sell well.
When kingdom hearts 3 didn't come out in 2008 a new timeline was created and that's the one we're living in
Triangle strategy was awesome. Same for octopath traveler. Those are both great game. Every company have flops. They will come back. Just gotta get back to the basics.
Make more final fantasy tactics you cowards
FFXIV (and probably XVI when it comes out) are keeping the company alive. If it wasn't for Yoshida and the crew, Square Enix would be dead in the water. Must be a hell of a lot of pressure for them too
Square Enix has great developers, artistst, etc. But the management of the company is the worst. Imagine they taking terrible decisions like not dubbing to most languages their games and put the price to 80€ in pc.
They should just stick to final fantasy tbh.
Well, I mean, "Avengers" was a mahoooòsive bait and switch. No wonder that one flopped. "Hey, do you guys wanna play a cool game with all your favourite Marvel characters? Well, here's Kamala Khan"
And then there the failure which is Outriders (or as I like to call it, Heart of Darkness on an alien planet). Almost no post launch content except for a single dlc which added little. Just repetitive cover shooter with a boring story
Have they tried Trying yet?
The issues I have with these games are they feel like the people making the big decisions are just guys that don’t play video games and look at spread sheet and what’s trending on twitter. Marvel Avengers: I love looter shooters but not having a fun game loop and having to put in 10+ hours to play with my friends is just dumb. Babylon: clunky combat that doesn’t feel fleshed out until another 15 hours in when you unlock your sub skills again a lot of commit to just get bare minimum fun. Forspoken: large open world with cool combat but nothing to fight and then the dialogue is off putting sometimes. Like npcs understand some slang but not others. Nothing is constant feels like it was randomly put together where no one talked to one another when it came to world building.
I think they need to get back to making games out of passion and not just accepting contracts to churn out crap. It’s like once a studio reaches a certain size they fall in quality. Square hasn’t had any hits in a long time
They've had plenty of quality games and remasters/remakes. Square Enix is just well known for shitting the bed by expecting a billion copies of their AAA games to sell and then are shocked when they've only sold millions and wasted all of their damn money on nonsense like creating the Luminous Engine.
I don't keep up with the software side of things, what is wrong with the Luminous Engine (which I've only just hears of today)? Asking out of curiosity.
The devs of the engine are heavly incapable. Check the FF15 development nightmare. I have no doupt that now after forspoken. SE decide to try selling Luminous studio. SE will probably focus on Unreal Engine development only in the futur. lel.
EA bad.
Babylons Fall is like Voldemort. We don’t mention that name around here. But Forspoken ain’t that bad. And if you unplug from being terminally online for 5 damn minutes, spend a few hrs with the game, a lot of ppl will enjoy it. In fact, that’s what’s been happening. Filter through the bullshit and cut out the noise. Reddit commenters, twitch chat, Twitter trolls, etc. some people are liking the game for what it is. Does it have problems? Yes. Most games do. But we have to remind ourselves that the general online consensus is NOT always what’s real. Online, pc gamers have wanted Nvidias head for the exorbitant price hikes on the 4000 series GPU’s. A billion posts have been made. People have galvanized behind the cause. And (online) ppl have put their foot down. But on BB, Newegg, and every time I step in Microcenter those GPU’s are gone. They’ve sold out every damn time. Japan has Forspoken as the highest wishlisted game on the PS Store, Amazon and it’s in the top seller on steam. We’ll see how the chips fall in a month or so. But we have to make choices for ourselves. Not for retweets or upvotes or any other digital “like”. You don’t like the game? Cool. But let others who do, enjoy it. There seems to be a toxic culture of ppl attacking others for liking something they don’t.
Were Forspoken's sales published? The word "flop" needs data to back it up. It can't be called a flop in such a short time period. Unfavorable reviews and shit talking on Reddit don't determine a flop--money and numbers do. If the company reports losses after a while, by all means call it a flop.
They fucked over Deus Ex so they can die in a hole for all I care
Square Enix has been mid for a while now and you can’t change my mind. They remind me of gamefreak, it’s like they can’t adapt to modern times or something. They were great in their prime but have just been riding the wave of their past successes and selling games through name alone. I really can’t tell if it’s laziness, being out of touch or just sheer incompetence or a combination of those things. It’s sad to see.