The Final Fantasy VII Remake is a Fantasy
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
Recommended Videos
No. A hundred hours of work is a couple of writers putting in moderate overtime for one week. One does not write Final Fantasy VII from "Hey let's make another Final Fantasy game!" to "Done!" with two guys and a week.
The overall thrust of your argument is fairly sound, but there are quite a few hairs (like that one) to split.
The main objection I have is not that they're nearly done because of the work on Final Fantasy VII. My objection is that we have current games that have already accomplished the technical feat that Square says is nearly impossible.
What exactly is supposed to be harder than any other current gen game? The presence of an overworld? Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age Origins found elegant solutions to travel between locations. The variety of the environments? I can sort of grant this, but then again, I may as well point back to Lost Odyssey.
Hell, forget it. Lost Odyssey *is* a current gen Final Fantasy VII. If Mistwalker can do it, why can't Square?
EDIT: Incidentally, Lost Odyssey gives a fair idea of what it would take, too. It's not fully voice acted. When you talk to random townspeople, you get text bubbles. It makes heavy use of a third person fixed camera like FFVII did. How does it handle the overworld? Well, you can literally fly a little ship around a representative 3D model, just like with FFVII's airship. I'm guessing Square thinks these features would be unacceptable in a current gen game. Personally, *I'd* find them acceptable. When I picture an FFVII remake, Lost Odyssey's gameplay is basically what I picture.
Funny. Many sandbox games manage to deal with it. Although at the price of graphics. And let's face it, Mr. T HAS to be Barrett.twcblaze said:
Still Square would have to take in account EVERY LITTLE DETAIL or else the fans will go berserk and etc. So in a sense it's a lot more difficult than making a Big game on something new, where's you're not bound by a code.
"This feature too difficult to make? - Let's not do it" won't roll with the fandom.
"Let's leave this for the sequel." - can't do it already was in FFVII.
and the list goes on.
So it's easier to make an FFXV bigger than FVII, rather than a faithful recreation of FFVII's world.
The thing is not that it would be "impossible" but that it may not be feasible, as in, they would spend a lot of money and is not certain that they would recoup it.
The fanboys then say "but it would sell millions upon millions!". Well, I'm sure you believe it, but if this would really come to pass, that's another story. The same fans that cry now for a remake would find things to complain about it. Some say "don't do full-blown next-gen graphics" but other fans would say that a FF7 with less-than-next-gen graphics would be just a rip-off. And so on.
Companies WANT to make money. If the people at Square thought they would make much more money than they would spend doing it, they would certainly remake FF7. The rest is fanboy speculation and wishful thinking.
(I don't care about a remake. FFVII was fun, but that's it. Lots of other games to play.)
The fanboys then say "but it would sell millions upon millions!". Well, I'm sure you believe it, but if this would really come to pass, that's another story. The same fans that cry now for a remake would find things to complain about it. Some say "don't do full-blown next-gen graphics" but other fans would say that a FF7 with less-than-next-gen graphics would be just a rip-off. And so on.
Companies WANT to make money. If the people at Square thought they would make much more money than they would spend doing it, they would certainly remake FF7. The rest is fanboy speculation and wishful thinking.
(I don't care about a remake. FFVII was fun, but that's it. Lots of other games to play.)
I'm less "angry" with Squeenix (excepting Dirge of Cerberus, which is pretty much anti-thought put into a video game and sold for profit), and more "disappointed". I certainly don't lose any sleep at night over their products.Rodyle2 said:
As a matter of opinion, I hated Advent Children's story. They took FF7 and turned it into Dragonball Z, cramming in as many cameos as they could just for the sake of it. It was at that moment, I started to think that remaking FF7 was not such a great idea.
Dirge merely cemented that belief. In Rebar-reinforced concrete.
Crisis Core was excellent...if you cut out the shoehorned-into-the-game-because-we-needed-a-bad-guy-for-you-to-fight Genesis silliness. That's really my only major complaint with Crisis Core besides the incredibly easy and boring combat system (but not a bad system in theory).
The story was actually compelling for once, and the main character had human emotions/motivations; something that is virtually unheard of in any mainstream game today.
As for other Squeenix titles...
Well, I had a post for a topic, but discarded it due to time constraints. Fortunately, it's still in my clipboard, so I'll just paste in what I didn't use then. Enjoy.
Oh, and my last bit of beef with Squeenix's other titles: Thanks for carting the Mana series to its grave.
A true disappointment is a waste of good style and lore.
The fans. For every fan that wouldn't mind less than state-of-the-art graphics just for having a newer FFVII, 10 would say "I didn't mean this CRAP when I cried about a remake. Squeenix just wants my money". And wouldn't buy it.Yvl9921 said:
People don't understand that it's quite a risky undertaking. There are few things harder than trying to please the fans.
Usually I agree with Shamus. Speaking as a game development student myself, though, I've done my research on this, and...
#1: Game budgets haven't ballooned by a factor of ten.
The average game budget still sits around $30,million, with even the most expensive games of the current generation being just upwards of $50,million and rarely climbing over $60,million, unless you include the extensive and lavish marketing campaigns that publishers like Activision and Microsoft use to practically brainwash the public into purchasing their games. Those few cases in the top ten tend to include games like Too Human, which have ludicrously long development times due to indecisive design and bad direction more than the cost of the graphics in the game. People make assets, get forced to re-make them when the platform specs change halfway through production, the entire script changes about three or four times due to some whim the director has about adding a new character, the whole game gets re-built from the ground up because they didn't prototype it properly and decide that it sucks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Final Fantasy 12 in particular suffered from a few of these problems, with Vaan and Penello being added in at the very last minute of preproduction and huge changes in the team's upper staff in mid-stream, and I imagine 13 didn't benefit from having cross-platforming foisted on it midway through production either.
#2: These environments aren't that impractical.
The average environment in Final Fantasy 7 is no more complex than any given Unreal Tournament 3 deathmatch map, many of which take place in extremely detailed, highly urbanized locales that have a way of faking a larger scope than they actually represent; something environment artists are or should be well-practiced at. It's not all that unreasonable to expect Square to be able to produce these locations, especially since viable blueprints exist in the artwork for the original game--not useable assets, mind, but blueprints. Speaking from personal experience working on environment art myself, I can tell you that the blueprint really is the hardest part of the work, even when you're working on HD models. What they don't have the blueprint for is all the stuff you don't see on the top-down perspective--the cityscape in the distance, that sort of thing, but as I say, if UT3 has taught us anything it's that you can make even a tiny map feel like it's part of a big city with some clever fake-jobs.
Meanwhile the overworld's an antiquated means of exploration at this point, Square would probably have a rough time finding a way to make that look good, but most folks probably wouldn't care and it's kind of their jobs to figure out how to solve problems like this. Frankly, on the scale of design problems, "how do we make the overworld not look like ass?" is pretty low on the totem pole, somewhere beneath "what's a good alternative to this crappy planet-scanning minigame?"
A lot of Square's problems developing environments, I think, stem from their overdependence on unique assets. If you haven't heard, basically they make environments the same way they do characters--they just model it from the ground-up to be completely unique. This worked well on the PS2, giving games like FFX and Kingdom Hearts a lot of memorable setpieces, but it's a terrible pipeline for making any volume of content. Other developers use "whiteboxing" to block in the layout of an environment first, balancing it in sheer level design terms while environment artists work on the pretty parts. Usually these consist of a lot of reuseable assets: cliffsides you can stick up against walls, rocks that you can shrink and grow and rearrange to create pebbles and boulders alike, smokestacks you can stick through rooftops, chunks of houses, segments of skyscrapers, repeatable textures that tile seamlessly, et cetera. Using this scheme you could easily re-create a lot of the environments in FF7 in no time at all; I can literally pull out my strategy guide and pick apart all the modular pieces I'd have to build in less than an hour. Building them, texturing them, and assembling them into a single one of those environments would take me a few weeks, but probably no longer than it took them to produce the original environments for FF7 with the junk tools they had at the time.
You can see where Square tried to pick this technique up in some places with FF13, but they didn't get creative enough with how they did it, opting to repeat huge chunks of their environments and often having them just floating in the middle of skyboxes without any reference points. It's as lazy an environment design as I've seen--and I've seen student environment artists at work. The fact is Square hasn't updated their pipeline in many years and it crippled their production big time. If they pursued making environment art the way they did in FF13, where I suspect they had to reassess what they were capable of multiple times after beating their brains against a wall trying to force environments the way they normally do it rather than adapting a better, smarter pipeline, they probably would take 40 years.
#3: So, I'm a student. You don't have to take MY word for it...
Maybe it aint worth much since I've never been on a production this size myself, but let's play the compare/contrast game with some of the other companies in the industry and what they've been producing lately.
Square had a team of 300 people for Final Fantasy 13, and it took them 4-ish years to make it.
Bioware, with comparable resources, produced both the Mass Effect games in roughly that time. Each game was fully voiced and developed far more complex interactions than the likes of any game Square has ever produced, creating a game of equivalent scope to any Final Fantasy.
Naughty Dog, with about a third of the resources, produced both the Uncharted games--which, while modest in scope compared to the likes of a Final Fantasy game, won unprecedented accolades for technical and artistic achievement with respect to its environments.
Finally, Ubisoft created nearly all of Florence, nearly all of Venice, the entirety of Tuscany, the hills surrounding Tuscany, and more, all while making these venues veritable jungle gyms of interactivity, populating them, and furthermore bringing that population into the gameplay itself.
Each of these examples proves something about what modern game development can achieve that Square didn't come close to with its latest entry into the Final Fantasy series--something I think you'd have to admit even if you enjoyed the game. I'm not saying "I can do better," I'm saying these three companies and others did in fact do better--each twice over, in fact--in the time it took Square to make FF13. With all due respect they have proven themselves decidedly inefficient at producing games compared with any of their competition, who've actually increased their scope in many ways as opposed to scaling back. In the case of Insomniac, the Ratchet and Clank Future series actually has more levels and content than its PS2-based predecessors, if not then just as much. In the case of Naughty Dog, Uncharted may not have the sprawling exploration-based platforming environments of the Jak series, but it has easily stronger content where it's lost a bit of volume. As much as we wax nostalgic about the games of yesteryear, I'd say we have a lot of good examples here as to how developers have managed to top themselves. Developers other than Square, I mean.
#4: Who the hell said an FF7 remake would have to be on the PS3?
What's wrong with putting it on PSP? Or, hell, even PS2? As long as fans can play a version of the game that doesn't have block-men running around I don't think they'll be all that bothered. Shoot, Final Fantasy 8 and 9 pretty well approach the PSP/PS2 standard (just with a lot fewer polys and a lot lower-res models) and have the same scope, I don't see why this wouldn't be reasonable. If you need to sacrifice stuff, sacrifice stuff. Ditch voice acting. I don't think anybody liked Cloud's voice actor anyhow.
Honestly, though, we have every reason to expect better out of Square and we have every reason to think that an FF7 remake is completely doable. The pipeline's there, they just don't use it because they don't want to spend the effort to teach their artists a new way of working. The precedent's there, they just can't live up to it. The budget's there, but they're making projections from hugely flawed productions and ignorance of their competition's techniques. We have every reason to expect this re-make can happen.
Just not by Square's hands.
#1: Game budgets haven't ballooned by a factor of ten.
The average game budget still sits around $30,million, with even the most expensive games of the current generation being just upwards of $50,million and rarely climbing over $60,million, unless you include the extensive and lavish marketing campaigns that publishers like Activision and Microsoft use to practically brainwash the public into purchasing their games. Those few cases in the top ten tend to include games like Too Human, which have ludicrously long development times due to indecisive design and bad direction more than the cost of the graphics in the game. People make assets, get forced to re-make them when the platform specs change halfway through production, the entire script changes about three or four times due to some whim the director has about adding a new character, the whole game gets re-built from the ground up because they didn't prototype it properly and decide that it sucks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Final Fantasy 12 in particular suffered from a few of these problems, with Vaan and Penello being added in at the very last minute of preproduction and huge changes in the team's upper staff in mid-stream, and I imagine 13 didn't benefit from having cross-platforming foisted on it midway through production either.
#2: These environments aren't that impractical.
The average environment in Final Fantasy 7 is no more complex than any given Unreal Tournament 3 deathmatch map, many of which take place in extremely detailed, highly urbanized locales that have a way of faking a larger scope than they actually represent; something environment artists are or should be well-practiced at. It's not all that unreasonable to expect Square to be able to produce these locations, especially since viable blueprints exist in the artwork for the original game--not useable assets, mind, but blueprints. Speaking from personal experience working on environment art myself, I can tell you that the blueprint really is the hardest part of the work, even when you're working on HD models. What they don't have the blueprint for is all the stuff you don't see on the top-down perspective--the cityscape in the distance, that sort of thing, but as I say, if UT3 has taught us anything it's that you can make even a tiny map feel like it's part of a big city with some clever fake-jobs.
Meanwhile the overworld's an antiquated means of exploration at this point, Square would probably have a rough time finding a way to make that look good, but most folks probably wouldn't care and it's kind of their jobs to figure out how to solve problems like this. Frankly, on the scale of design problems, "how do we make the overworld not look like ass?" is pretty low on the totem pole, somewhere beneath "what's a good alternative to this crappy planet-scanning minigame?"
A lot of Square's problems developing environments, I think, stem from their overdependence on unique assets. If you haven't heard, basically they make environments the same way they do characters--they just model it from the ground-up to be completely unique. This worked well on the PS2, giving games like FFX and Kingdom Hearts a lot of memorable setpieces, but it's a terrible pipeline for making any volume of content. Other developers use "whiteboxing" to block in the layout of an environment first, balancing it in sheer level design terms while environment artists work on the pretty parts. Usually these consist of a lot of reuseable assets: cliffsides you can stick up against walls, rocks that you can shrink and grow and rearrange to create pebbles and boulders alike, smokestacks you can stick through rooftops, chunks of houses, segments of skyscrapers, repeatable textures that tile seamlessly, et cetera. Using this scheme you could easily re-create a lot of the environments in FF7 in no time at all; I can literally pull out my strategy guide and pick apart all the modular pieces I'd have to build in less than an hour. Building them, texturing them, and assembling them into a single one of those environments would take me a few weeks, but probably no longer than it took them to produce the original environments for FF7 with the junk tools they had at the time.
You can see where Square tried to pick this technique up in some places with FF13, but they didn't get creative enough with how they did it, opting to repeat huge chunks of their environments and often having them just floating in the middle of skyboxes without any reference points. It's as lazy an environment design as I've seen--and I've seen student environment artists at work. The fact is Square hasn't updated their pipeline in many years and it crippled their production big time. If they pursued making environment art the way they did in FF13, where I suspect they had to reassess what they were capable of multiple times after beating their brains against a wall trying to force environments the way they normally do it rather than adapting a better, smarter pipeline, they probably would take 40 years.
#3: So, I'm a student. You don't have to take MY word for it...
Maybe it aint worth much since I've never been on a production this size myself, but let's play the compare/contrast game with some of the other companies in the industry and what they've been producing lately.
Square had a team of 300 people for Final Fantasy 13, and it took them 4-ish years to make it.
Bioware, with comparable resources, produced both the Mass Effect games in roughly that time. Each game was fully voiced and developed far more complex interactions than the likes of any game Square has ever produced, creating a game of equivalent scope to any Final Fantasy.
Naughty Dog, with about a third of the resources, produced both the Uncharted games--which, while modest in scope compared to the likes of a Final Fantasy game, won unprecedented accolades for technical and artistic achievement with respect to its environments.
Finally, Ubisoft created nearly all of Florence, nearly all of Venice, the entirety of Tuscany, the hills surrounding Tuscany, and more, all while making these venues veritable jungle gyms of interactivity, populating them, and furthermore bringing that population into the gameplay itself.
Each of these examples proves something about what modern game development can achieve that Square didn't come close to with its latest entry into the Final Fantasy series--something I think you'd have to admit even if you enjoyed the game. I'm not saying "I can do better," I'm saying these three companies and others did in fact do better--each twice over, in fact--in the time it took Square to make FF13. With all due respect they have proven themselves decidedly inefficient at producing games compared with any of their competition, who've actually increased their scope in many ways as opposed to scaling back. In the case of Insomniac, the Ratchet and Clank Future series actually has more levels and content than its PS2-based predecessors, if not then just as much. In the case of Naughty Dog, Uncharted may not have the sprawling exploration-based platforming environments of the Jak series, but it has easily stronger content where it's lost a bit of volume. As much as we wax nostalgic about the games of yesteryear, I'd say we have a lot of good examples here as to how developers have managed to top themselves. Developers other than Square, I mean.
#4: Who the hell said an FF7 remake would have to be on the PS3?
What's wrong with putting it on PSP? Or, hell, even PS2? As long as fans can play a version of the game that doesn't have block-men running around I don't think they'll be all that bothered. Shoot, Final Fantasy 8 and 9 pretty well approach the PSP/PS2 standard (just with a lot fewer polys and a lot lower-res models) and have the same scope, I don't see why this wouldn't be reasonable. If you need to sacrifice stuff, sacrifice stuff. Ditch voice acting. I don't think anybody liked Cloud's voice actor anyhow.
Honestly, though, we have every reason to expect better out of Square and we have every reason to think that an FF7 remake is completely doable. The pipeline's there, they just don't use it because they don't want to spend the effort to teach their artists a new way of working. The precedent's there, they just can't live up to it. The budget's there, but they're making projections from hugely flawed productions and ignorance of their competition's techniques. We have every reason to expect this re-make can happen.
Just not by Square's hands.
If the fans are interested in keeping the script and gameplay... why not just play the original game? This rabid desire for better graphics confuses me, as I always considered them the least important part of any game.
Wow, I haven't checked your facts (I typically don't, when I agree with someone, and that's my failing), but that is an impressive post.NickCaligo42 said:
I thought about pointing out what other developers have managed to accomplish in the same time as Square, but that seemed like a lot of work to possibly answer all of the hair splitting objections people here will inevitably have. Though I have to applaud your UT3 example. I was trying to think of a good example of something with the variety of environments of an FF game (since that is the stock objection to someone bringing up Fallout 3 or Oblivion), and that's an excellent one.
So...no remake? Sigh. I will still hold out hope till I die, but it's a very small hope. Hm...how about if they make a movie out of it? They might be able to get away with that. Oh! Or, they could make another Chrono game. One that actually ends on a happy note instead of C.C.
On another note, there seems to be a lot of barely-contained rage in this thread. People yelling at each other, "I know more about this than you do," even though I'm pretty sure no one on here has the full picture. Do posters normally tell the author that he's plain wrong? Seems a little rude.
On another note, there seems to be a lot of barely-contained rage in this thread. People yelling at each other, "I know more about this than you do," even though I'm pretty sure no one on here has the full picture. Do posters normally tell the author that he's plain wrong? Seems a little rude.
Pfft. If they tried to make THE ENTIRETY OF MIDGAR explorable the way the Elder Scrolls games do with their environments, which is what I THINK they're trying to project on, then I'd say it'd take them a million billion years. That'd entail a complete re-design of the game, which'd be stupid, but it's the kind of stupid thing they'd try to do. Let's not forget this is the same company that thought "what would Half-Life be like as an RPG?" and came up with Dirge of Cerberus.Labcoat Samurai said:
I doubt I'll get a response here, but when you get past the whole "fanboy" thing, you have to realize that what they are saying makes absolutly zero sense.
Simply put graphics technology upgraded because the new stuff was better than the old stuff. It built on that foundation.
It is total nonsense to say that current generation technology cannot produce something that was done two generations ago at a higher quality level. If this was actually the case, I doubt the current tech would have become the standard, as it would have been deemed impossible to work with.
When it comes to the expense of modern graphics technology, well I'll go so far as to say that's more an issue of the industry having to reform itself, something I've covered in other, unrelated posts. Simply put the cost of games has been skyrocketing because developers are demanding larger, and larger amounts of money. While some people will have you believe that they make very little money, or merely a hundred thousand dollars a year (as per Maxim), when you look at the development budgets for these games, subtract the cost of hardware and office space (which might cost a few million, but that's chump change compared to these budgets) and you rapidly realize that the rest of that money is going towards human resources.
Some have argued that making these piles of money is not unfair for someone "with a college degree" but honestly just about everyone has a college degree nowadays. People with degrees who do far more complicated, or dangerous/potentially dangerous jobs do not make what these guys are demanding when you look at that math.
What this means is that if the game industry is going to engage in cartel behavior anyway, it should work on doing things like instituting an industry wide salary cap on how much will be paid to people for certain jobs. If everyone does it, the employees can't just jump ship for whomever will pay the most. This would bring costs down to a much more reasonable level I feel.... but this gets into another entire arguement. Assuming of course one actually believes the bit about it being truely "cost prohibitive".
All of this aside though, one also has to look at what OTHER game companies have been doing with the current generation technology. Doing these cities with current generation technology is too complicated? So are all the character models? Has anyone bothered to look at games like "Saint's Row 2" or "Grand Theft Auto IV" where entire cities have been designed in full, active, animated 3d, and there are dozens of character models running around with a number of unique lines of voice acting apiece?
The thing is that while Final Fantasy VII might involve a number of differant enviroments, none of them were especially large. Much like how there are only a couple of areas to "The Citadel" in Mass Effect despite it being (conceptually) much larger than that. I doubt that in doing the entirety of Final Fantasy VII, that they would wind up having to create more unique buildings than exist in a lot of these sandbox games. Also being what it is, there is no expectation that on top of that everything that exists will have to be interactable and destructable a piece at a time.
The problem here is that the claims that are being made seem to be obvious lies, you look at other games and it's totally transparent. If it comes down to money issues, which other games are being made despite the massive required budgets, then really I think it's time to sit back and do some thinking. Final Fantasy VII is an incredible game and all, but if it's costing you as much money as it would probably take to have your own satellite launched, you might really want to stop and look at how much some of these guys are getting paid. Apologies to the industry, but your doing something wrong when it takes more money than the yearly gross national product of most third world nations.
-
Now, as far as the fanboyism and "Squeenix is Evil" thing goes, I'll cut past all those bits above and get down to what my inner cynic tells me.
"Final Fantasy" is a massive brand name, people run out and buy stuff with the name on it in droves because it's basically spawned a video gaming subculture unto itself. Even a giant pile of dog crap would probably sell well if it had "Final Fantasy" stamped on it. It's kind of like "Star Wars" in that respect.
Squeenix has gotten big, it's realized it doesn't have to work seriously for a while. It can pretty much coast on brand recognition alone. Put in a mediocre effort (maybe not dog poop) release the game with the "brand name label" and soon the dump trucks full of money will be backed up around the block.
I doubt that there would be any issue with doing Final Fantasy VII and making a decent profit. However I think the problem is that it's not about making a decent profit anymore, but about getting the largest possible returns for the least possible investment. A cinematic "hallway hack" like "Final Fantasy XIII" is probably easier to develop, and costs less than Final Fantasy VII... and probably will move as many units as FF VII would. Due to the lower cost it makes more money. For the cost of doing FF VII and making fans happy, they could make a lot more money by releasing two games on the level of FF XIII.
The problem here is that the claims as to why they can't do something make no sense, when other people are arguably doing most of the same things graphically. Not to mention the fact that if the current graphics technology was that hard to work with, it never would have become an industry standard, it would still be being worked on while we'd all be playing the PS-2/X-box right now.
Simply put graphics technology upgraded because the new stuff was better than the old stuff. It built on that foundation.
It is total nonsense to say that current generation technology cannot produce something that was done two generations ago at a higher quality level. If this was actually the case, I doubt the current tech would have become the standard, as it would have been deemed impossible to work with.
When it comes to the expense of modern graphics technology, well I'll go so far as to say that's more an issue of the industry having to reform itself, something I've covered in other, unrelated posts. Simply put the cost of games has been skyrocketing because developers are demanding larger, and larger amounts of money. While some people will have you believe that they make very little money, or merely a hundred thousand dollars a year (as per Maxim), when you look at the development budgets for these games, subtract the cost of hardware and office space (which might cost a few million, but that's chump change compared to these budgets) and you rapidly realize that the rest of that money is going towards human resources.
Some have argued that making these piles of money is not unfair for someone "with a college degree" but honestly just about everyone has a college degree nowadays. People with degrees who do far more complicated, or dangerous/potentially dangerous jobs do not make what these guys are demanding when you look at that math.
What this means is that if the game industry is going to engage in cartel behavior anyway, it should work on doing things like instituting an industry wide salary cap on how much will be paid to people for certain jobs. If everyone does it, the employees can't just jump ship for whomever will pay the most. This would bring costs down to a much more reasonable level I feel.... but this gets into another entire arguement. Assuming of course one actually believes the bit about it being truely "cost prohibitive".
All of this aside though, one also has to look at what OTHER game companies have been doing with the current generation technology. Doing these cities with current generation technology is too complicated? So are all the character models? Has anyone bothered to look at games like "Saint's Row 2" or "Grand Theft Auto IV" where entire cities have been designed in full, active, animated 3d, and there are dozens of character models running around with a number of unique lines of voice acting apiece?
The thing is that while Final Fantasy VII might involve a number of differant enviroments, none of them were especially large. Much like how there are only a couple of areas to "The Citadel" in Mass Effect despite it being (conceptually) much larger than that. I doubt that in doing the entirety of Final Fantasy VII, that they would wind up having to create more unique buildings than exist in a lot of these sandbox games. Also being what it is, there is no expectation that on top of that everything that exists will have to be interactable and destructable a piece at a time.
The problem here is that the claims that are being made seem to be obvious lies, you look at other games and it's totally transparent. If it comes down to money issues, which other games are being made despite the massive required budgets, then really I think it's time to sit back and do some thinking. Final Fantasy VII is an incredible game and all, but if it's costing you as much money as it would probably take to have your own satellite launched, you might really want to stop and look at how much some of these guys are getting paid. Apologies to the industry, but your doing something wrong when it takes more money than the yearly gross national product of most third world nations.
-
Now, as far as the fanboyism and "Squeenix is Evil" thing goes, I'll cut past all those bits above and get down to what my inner cynic tells me.
"Final Fantasy" is a massive brand name, people run out and buy stuff with the name on it in droves because it's basically spawned a video gaming subculture unto itself. Even a giant pile of dog crap would probably sell well if it had "Final Fantasy" stamped on it. It's kind of like "Star Wars" in that respect.
Squeenix has gotten big, it's realized it doesn't have to work seriously for a while. It can pretty much coast on brand recognition alone. Put in a mediocre effort (maybe not dog poop) release the game with the "brand name label" and soon the dump trucks full of money will be backed up around the block.
I doubt that there would be any issue with doing Final Fantasy VII and making a decent profit. However I think the problem is that it's not about making a decent profit anymore, but about getting the largest possible returns for the least possible investment. A cinematic "hallway hack" like "Final Fantasy XIII" is probably easier to develop, and costs less than Final Fantasy VII... and probably will move as many units as FF VII would. Due to the lower cost it makes more money. For the cost of doing FF VII and making fans happy, they could make a lot more money by releasing two games on the level of FF XIII.
The problem here is that the claims as to why they can't do something make no sense, when other people are arguably doing most of the same things graphically. Not to mention the fact that if the current graphics technology was that hard to work with, it never would have become an industry standard, it would still be being worked on while we'd all be playing the PS-2/X-box right now.
Played 6, liked certain parts. Kefka is a great villain. Ending was better than 4's. Music was better in 6 too.FloodOne said:
But for me, 4 reigns supreme. Its the one I never get tired of playing.
