New Year 2024 Event

Truly feels like SE is tired of being a gaming company.

I'm sure it'll go just as well as the NFT idea

I smell a Konami play

*** sad...

Guess the next SE game I play will be a poker machine

at the Gold Saucer during FFVII re-re-re-re-re-re-remaster on the Playstation 75 in 3071

Depends on whether they use AI as an art tool or a business one.

Having their artists learn and use generative AI to be more productive would be a good strategy. When it's got a skilled hand on the wheel to direct it and pan through the mountains of garbage output for gold, it can enable wild productivity gains. Would let them spend less time per game making art, or minimize delays when changes have to be made ("the design team says it needs more wings").

This sounds more like a business thing, laying off the artists and trying to replace them with an intern and a AI content hose, which is the worst strategy. It's maximizing short term gains at the expense of everything else.

Can still get it from trading the random items, got one from the Ambitious Arnold worm in grauberg (S) (F-11).

best npc in the game btw, an even rarer pepe than Cornelia

They were hurt worse than they let on about with their recent games. They cutting back on most things

For me, Abyssea was a failed attempt by Square Enix to simplify the game. The bosses, areas, empy weapons, and items were good, but where they went wrong was:

Allowing people to enter at level 30 and "leech" experience. This undoubtedly ruined the leveling process from level 1 to 75, which was already fast due to the ability to spam Fields of Valor (FoV) and Grounds of Valor (GoV), along with having the option to use /DNC as a subjob. No issues, you could solo to level 75 in two weeks, but you still had to "play."

The ATMAS with extreme buffs. If they had been like those in Voidwatch, enhancing but not with absurdities like reaching 50% Critical hit-rate, Critical hit damage, and 15% Triple attack, it would have been acceptable. This destroyed all LS (Linkshells) larger than six players. In fact, the same thing started happening as in Sortie-Odyssey: people were farming their "Empy-weapons" with dual-tri boxing. A Vereth's MNK in Abyssea was the best tank and top damage dealer, totally ridiculous.

The era I appreciate the most and consider superior to FFXI-CLASSIC and Abyssea was:

LV99 with Neo-Dynamis, Voidwatch, Legion, and upgrades for level 99 weapons that actually required effort. I loved the shouts for Voidwatch, enjoyed solo farming Dynamis, and playing Legion with my LS. If I had to rank them, I would go with LV99 > Escha post SoA era > Dynamis Dirvergence era > FFXI classic level 75 > SoA > Abyssea."

Abyssea is the dividing line imho, between haters and lovers, and can hardly find anything in between and it's easy to understand why.

I think they went into extreme a bit too much, probably because when they planned it they didn't think the game would've survived this long and wanted FFXI to go with a bang?

About the points you raised:
1) Levelling experience / leech
I think you're a bit biased about it. Soloing was still extremely tedious and time-consuming and we were already in a time where standards in MMO were changing a lot compared to the old FFXI grind-style.
I agree the style they offered with the leeching/opening boxes etc was a bit... too much, hard to disagree with this.
I disagree with the fact that MMM/soloing/DNC before abyssea was enough.
Also, while there were several negative aspects in this system which we already mentioned, there were also positive ones.
So ultimately yeah, I agree it wasn't forward-thinking enough and with serious issues, but every cloud has a silver lining.


They clearly, clearly over-did it. Mostly Razor Ruins but several atmas were too powerful. They tried to fix it with the third expansion but it was too late.
Despite some atmas were clearly too game-breaking, again every cloud has a silver lining. For a while, it was so nice to feel that sense of extreme empowerment and in a game that previously had you struggle so, so, so much even to get a single +1 to a stat, it was an even more of a "powerful" feeling.


I absolutely disagree with this.
If they destroyed anything it was the anti-democratical despotic system in the hands of a few HNMLS who were dominating the previous world-based (non instanced) end-game system of FFXI.
A system that felt good for the few who were in the good groups (spoiler: I was) and felt absolutely frustrating and bad for everybody else, who were the majority.
Speaking from Asura but while it's true many LS were destroyed because they failed to adapt in the new "competition" system, many other LS survived just fine, and many others were born.
A lot of LSs were doing alliance-based content in Abyssea and the noobs soloing /lowmanning/multiboxing "hard" content in Abyssea started only late during the second expansion (Scars of Abyssea?).


Abyssea also offered a system that allowed you a certain degree of control over drops, over pops, over jobs diversity etc.
That system grew old after several months because it was too unique, it felt like a game within the game, blah blah. I criticized it a lot in the past but at the same time I recognize it was very well thought (despite its issues) and revolutionary.

I think, as a relatively new fan (2018), what's frustrating is that SE is strangling this game to death presumably because it doesn't make all the money. I'm guessing Matsui and probably Fujito now, have pushed back against introducing more monetisation in exchange for getting to develop the game more.

For all the consternation in the EQ playerbase, it's still receiving yearly "expansions" consisting of new dungeons or zones. It's not much, but it's something. To be fair, EQ also has a cash shop grafted onto a "F2P" game whose F2P functions more like a demo, so maybe it makes just enough money that the investors who bought it feel like it's worth it.

Anarchy Online was also actively being reconfigured for a better new player/F2P experience prior to Tencent purchasing Funcom and moving them to the Conan mines. I think it's also important to note that Funcom's financial reports while they were still public, showed AO making very thin margins.

I think the investment in the "museum" side of things, as Fujita calls it, is an indication that they have some amount of money to use in some way--it's just not going to direct development.

Early statements by Matsui about low morale and SE treating XI like a career cul-de-sac or dumping ground also make me think it's an internal cultural issue. And no double that Yoshi-P, as leader of CBUIII, has something to do with it. CBU3 is clearly primarily oriented to XIV, and I don't think it's any wonder that XI is receiving the treatment it has been, given its business operations are being overseen by the producer and director of XIV.

Wrapping up, looking at the other games of the era, XI deserves better, and it's a shame to see it treated this way. I don't even have any nostalgia goggles, I genuinely think as a newish fan that the game is a treasure from its era, and one of the last ones still going.

It definitely is a treasure from it's era and definitely the last one still going.

In it's current state, it definitely is a developer graveyard. I think Fujito is attempting to remedy that, but it is probably not realistic. Converting servers and getting tools made to expand the dev's kit is the first real steps to changing that. But the reality is that it still has to play office politics with most likely the board and the current president of SE. I don't think Yoshi-P is the problem, but he's also not the solution. This game doesn't scream NFT or AI or current internet trend buzzword, so it's got a real fight to expand past it's current role.

For a while FFXI was going to be mobile game because mobile games were the new trend. And then they weren't. Thanks Diablo Immortal, don't you guys have phones said the tone def stooge.

Things like new zones, new mobs, new jobs, and a new expansion are a fever dream and they most likely will always remain that way without outside forces changing. If FFXIV players actually get interested in FFXI and they use FFXI as the offseason for FFXIVs development cycle, then we could see something happen. But still not anything big until it becomes a clear trend that there is something exploitable/leverageable about the unique nature of this game. Like the high sub cost and the low development costs. All of this is still the best case scenario, which is unrealistic.

I just hope it's still going in 5 years and they have added anything fun and interesting.

While I agree with most of the points in this thread, there is also the recent remake of Star Ocean 2 to consider when judging SE's current state. I thought they did a good job on that, and I hope to see more classic SE games given the same treatment. I'm trying to hold out hope at least for that.

It sucks about FFXI though.

Complaints aside, it's good they are trying to futureproof the game somewhat for Windows 11 and continue upgrading the servers. This is one of the problems with old games, eventually new operating systems or graphics cards drivers will cause serious problems and so doing this stuff implies they want the game to continue for a long while to come.

The black screen problems some people see seem to be specific to win10/11 for instance, from what I've seen (or not seen, would be more accurate).

I think XI would light on fire if you tried to introduce a modern cash shop to it just from a systems/backend perspective, not to mention the pushback they'd get from the community. I was lurking around when they added in Wardrobes 5-8 and there were (and probably still are) people not keen on paying up to 8 dollars a month more. All Wardrobes on one character runs you almost 30 USD a month for your total sub which is probably not a lot to most people playing retail these days (People with families and career-jobs in their 30s+, I imagine) but it probably still stings a bit.

Then, from my perspective as someone that also started around 2019-2020, XI's community has never felt terribly attracted by cosmetics. If they did, things like Master Trials would probably see more participation for show-off cosmetics like XIV has with Ultimates. The perception over here seems to be that if it doesn't increase your character's power, it's not worth it. So I don't see how a cosmetic cash shop would appeal to people either especially since you're somewhat limited by the models that XI can render (even if it has really good character graphics for its age). Can't get too fancy with outfits like in more recent MMOs, don't have any minions/pets to sell, mounts have been established as login reward freebies, etc.

So I don't see how you could monetize XI more than it already is without strictly offering some form of power for it. If you count versatility and convenience as power, Wardrobes already sort of do this. The only other avenue that makes sense to me would be official RMT like OSRS Bonds or the WoW Token where Player A spends 40-50m gil on a sub supplied by another player getting 40-50m gil for putting 20 dollars into the system. Given how meaningful gil in XI is though that's a bit on the nose, even if unofficial RMT is fairly rampant and largely unpunished. I don't know how legalizing it and offering it officially would go over, even if I think it would produce a lot of revenue (again, given the game's demographics).

All the other pre-WoW MMOs that are still going are doing so by virtue of being heavily monetized in a way that affords some level of power for that monetization, and I don't see them doing the same thing for XI necessarily even if it would bring in a lot of money.

I don't think it requires much critical thinking to just pivot to a buy to play model and slap on a subscription service that is buy for convenience, slap on packs that can be only purchased with crysta to give additional character slots and wardrobes. This is literally done with most if not all retro mmos. Your challenge is coming up with a pay for convenience model that makes sense and is appealing.

Triple silver vouchers.
All home point/geo teleports are free of cost.
Re-entry on content reduced from 24hrs to 3hrs.
Permanent 25% movement speed.
Double login points.
Auction House slots increased to 36 slots.
Wadrobe #9 & #10.
Automatic Delivery of currency type drops (BC, KS, KC, HKC, Rem's, Etc.) to their respective NPC.

I'm sure you all could dream up more crap that could be tacked on and possible split into multiple tiers of subscription.

Yea, I saw this when I briefly looked at playing EQ2 again, you can buy a bunch of in-game stuff with real money but it's mostly things to ease crafting, boost exp briefly, mounts, etc. I think they have some once or twice per account items you can buy to boost your characters level to a higher level. The mechanics are very different than 11 that result in this making slightly more sense compared to XI (e.g. in EQ2 you have varying tiers of ability and they share a cooldown, once you reach a higher tier, there is no use for the lower tier). Somewhat interestingly, back during the SoE era, they were the first game to have an official RMT auction house with web interface and all, but you were limited to certain servers and it was a huge failure. They've experimented with official RMT for a while, although I don't think there was ever an option to buy currency and buying levels wasn't a thing until a little while ago AFAIK.

I suspect SE will never do this for a few reasons. There has to be a technical implementation for doing something like this and I don't think they have the resources to do it. Yes it'd bring revenue in to compensate, but I imagine the work of implementing the web interface, then the backend componentry to modify in-game character states is something beyond what they can feasibly do at this point. It's not impossible, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some technical limitation or problem. If you draw parallels to what these other MMOs are doing, some of these things would be non-trivial to implement.

I also partly wonder if there is a cultural element, but given how SE operates, probably not. Do they do anything like this for 14? Maybe they don't want to admit that RMT won in the end after spending so many resources trying to fight it over the years.

What I really think it is, especially after some recent decisions, they are completely divorced from reality on how people play the game. I'd be shocked if they were aware that the majority of the playerbase is buying PLs from 1-99, then buying JP for master, and then botting or buying MLs. I wouldn't be surprised if they thought the playerbase was still grouping for exp/cp/ep and don't have a full grasp on how rampant RMT/botting is on servers like Asura. I would suspect this more widely plays a role in how necessary or beneficial they would see this sort of thing.

Sort of but sort of not. XIV's cash shop offers level and story boosts that put you at the end of the previous expansion. XIV's model is linearly progressed expansions instead of XI's grab bag of interconnected stories you can engage with whenever so they can do that there. These also come with a token amount of gil and gear to get you started. The closest XI parallel I can think of would be if you could spend 25 dollars to have WotG flagged as completed on a character, or if you could spend 25 dollars to get a job to level 99 (not mastered) and get some free Bayld or NQ Ambuscade gear and 500k gil. But like I said, the different models make this a sort of very hard parallel to draw.

There is otherwise no official RMT like the WoW Token or OSRS Bonds in XIV and the cash shop is primarily cosmetic in nature, as XIV's graphics better support that and the players are more into cosmetic customization. So in both games, SE doesn't really sell power so much as convenience, as XIV boosts are about the same sort of time save and convenience that Mog Wardrobes are in XI.


There's a lot of decisions they've made in XIV over the years too design-wise that only make sense if you approach the game from an earnest, honest, and non-malicious perspective which might be how the majority of Japanese players engage with the games culturally but sometimes doesn't land quite as SE would want in the west. So it's good to see that sort of thing transcends just one game and has always been a SE-ism.

They aren't alone. There's been an epidemic of layoffs and shutdowns in the game dev industry this past year, especially larger or corporate-owned studios; Even companies doing well gotta pump those revenue per headcount numbers to keep the shareholders happy. /s


Starcraft is kind of like Blizzard's XI. SC2 was popular, profitable, and iconic, but Blizzard dismantled their RTS team and abandoned future development of the franchise in favor of chasing scummy monetization and live service games like Immortal and Overwatch "2". Womp womp.

Warcraft Rumble is a solid phone game for a new release. I know Warcraft 4 is never coming so it's the least betrayal they could have packaged on a phone. In 6 months I'll probably be saying that they sold out and it's not worth playing/paying to keep going as per phone games, but in the meantime it's a weird surreal experience to play a Blizzard game that doesn't feel like garbage after a week.

I disagree, because I think they're likely talking more about stuff like DLSS or FSR or similar (which is squarely in the realm of AI) to do things like optimize framerates, as opposed to actually wanting to generate artistic content. Of course they're gearing some of these communications toward an audience of investors who don't care about games, so they're dropping buzzwords. But realistically, they've already been working extensively with AI in stuff like the Luminous Engine and will continue to do so. Just like any other game company making AAA games and their own proprietary engines.

They specifically mention using generative AI to create new content, it seems pretty clear they aren't talking about upscaling tech or simple frame generation.

*edit: Here's the full letter on SE's site if you want to read the whole thing.

It's really smart to lean into AI heavily and pretty much all game developers are starting to use it, that is the future whether we like it or not. It will allow a company to downscale staff costs and vastly increase the productivity of the staff they do have.

It can be used for everything, from background textures, design work, speech in games, story text etc

fun fact: AI content cant be copyrighted, atleast not in the US under US law.

Only a matter of time till that changes, it's too powerful of an industry to be held back by copyright laws. The US is just not going to let China or whoever take the lead in this kind of stuff, imagine China can start pumping AAA games out with 10-20 people and the US firms still need 100-150.

AI is as big a jump as the industrial rev and computers were and it's progressing incredibly fast, what it can do today will seem tame compared to what it can do in a couple of years.

AI isn't actually Artificial Intelligence but it doesn't matter what it is, just what it can do.

Ah yes, because China, the piracy capital of the world, gives a ***about copyright law.

If you're talking about that state fair competition image, the actual copyright office ruling is not that cut and dried.

tl;dr Dudebro straight up admitted the image was a mix of elements straight from midjourney and stuff he'd fixed or tweaked in photoshop. The copyright office told him he could copyright the parts he'd altered, but not the parts that were raw AI output. They offered to let him revise his claim, he refused, and so they told him to kick rocks.

If he'd edited the whole image or lied about how much work was photoshop vs. midjourney, he'd probably have gotten the copyright. I think they made the right call, though. If raw output was fair game the copyright trolls would have a field day churning out vast libraries of random crap and waiting for someone to "infringe".

Presumably, SE would not be trying to copyright something they got from DALL-E or midjourney, but polished, human-refined output from a genAI trained exclusively on their own existing human-created works. Totally different mine full of fish.