The great Final Fantasy XVI Staff Debate: Who do you want?

[LeonBlade]

And also Sony-insider Verendus responded strangely to my theory and I'm not sure what to make of it (maybe it has been in development and was cancelled now?):

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=156372415#post156372415

Yeah, don't bother with that guy... He tries to sound all cryptic and stuff for attention, like Infest says he's full of crap.

Also, I'm okay with the idea of Agni having her own game, but honestly, I think that XVI should be something brand new never before seen. I don't like the idea of the past few FF games being all predictable... I want something where I see a character I've NEVER seen before.

 

[Lulcielid]

What i can actually see happening is Agnis having her own game,said game wont be a FF, and (maybe) being develop by EIDOS.

 

[Lulcielid]

Also Yusuke Naora art (and his general art) of Agnis is gorgeous . Better than Amano lmo.

 

[LeonBlade]

What i can actually see happening is Agnis having her own game,said game wont be a FF, and (maybe) being develop by EIDOS.

I just don't see that, they've said multiple times it's not going to be its own game. Even giving it to Eidos just seems pointless, they have their own line of games to work on. You have to keep in mind that they were specifically asked about if Eidos could make a future Final Fantasy game, it's not like they brought it up. Basically, it's not really a confirmation of them actually doing it, more like that they've considered it before internally within the company and they give a response that says nothing at the same time.

If Eidos was to work on a Final Fantasy game, it wouldn't be for many years, by that time, Agni would be a thing of the past as she honestly is today. I know people like her character design, I think she looks nice, but honestly there's nothing to go on here, and it just seems best to leave her in her own universe as a tech demo at this point.

 

[APZonerunner]

The thing about Agni is that the guy whose 'baby' she was left Square last year, and really wasn't with the company very long at all - he joined them from SEGA (where he lead designed their gorgeous 'Hedgehog Engine' that powered Sonic Generations etc), did work on Luminous, and Agni as a part of that, and then left. He left (a real blow to Square) immediately after Square shut down a bunch of projects because money was tight and took a bunch of his team with him, so I've been assuming that whatever he had campaigned hard to move on to after completing the Agni demo was one of the five or six early-stage projects that got canned. Some of them would've been canned naturally, of course - SE does speculative early development, so they might early-dev 5 projects but only 2 will make it to full dev anyway.

The Christmas card featuring Agni, however, came after he and pretty much most of his team left, so who knows?

That aside, I think there's a pretty strong chance, given the Nomura situation, that Naora (the Agni card) or Yoshida (FFT/12/14) will be the art lead for FF16 anyway.

RE Eidos: The thing is, Eidos' teams are arguably too busy to work on such a game. Deus Ex, Tomb Raider and Hitman are all running at full tilt right now. I expect more Western influence - because they've been hiring a lot of Westerners over into FF15 in an attempt to diversify - but I don't expect a fully-Western developed FF any time soon. I can see them assisting Japan, but the smartest way to do that would probably be to set up a small studio for that specific purpose, like Sakaguchi and the Hawaii office for FF9. FF9's refreshing European-style of fantasy really came from the fact that the lion's share of its CG artists were Westerners, even though the concept art was coming from Japan. It made for an interesting mingling.

As far as FF16 goes, I increasingly think people should also consider outside the typical names, outside the box. What if it's somebody new to FF from a high-level position?

 

[yeah_93]

As far as FF16 goes, I increasingly think people should also consider outside the typical names, outside the box. What if it's somebody new to FF from a high-level position?

Kojima? D:

 

[Lucina]

Kojima.

 

[LeonBlade]

Kojima!

 

[buddhafied]

Kojima...

 

[Jenova]

I'd purchase a Kojima directed Final Fantasy game day one. No questions asked.

 

[Lulcielid]

• Katsura Hashino
• Hideo Kojima
• Fumito Ueda

Those are my wishlist of people (outside of SE) i wish at some point in the future they'd cooparate/work with SE in future FF regarless if it is in XVI or not.

 

[Lulcielid]

I'd purchase a Kojima directed Final Fantasy game day one. No questions asked.

It would be interesting to know how he would wreck the 4th wall in a FF game.

 

[AnGer-dono]

From the list? Ito.

My personal wish would be either someone new who's also willing to go a bit against the wishes of the higher-ups at SE or - and this is as unrealistic as it can get - Yasumi Matsuno.

 

[LeonBlade]

If Ito does work on XVI, hopefully he doesn't pull the shit he did with the Zodiac Job System for XII, his reasonings behind that were completely stupid and it made for a terribly flawed system.

 

[Lulcielid]

What was the zodiac job system like? I never got a chance to play it out nor heard any details regarding it. I've only played the original.

It was FFXII but with the Job System incorporated and some more extra tweaks in gameplay.

 

[LeonBlade]

What was the zodiac job system like? I never got a chance to play it out nor heard any details regarding it. I've only played the original.

The job edition itself just adds jobs to the game, the implementation is the problem. With each character you need to chose a job for them to be. Unlike previous job systems implemented in Final Fantasy games, you could not change your character's job at all unless you wanted to restart the game from scratch.

Ito had this to say about it:

With the International version, I was determined to get players to experience that "flavor", focusing on a different style for each player. Thinking about how to implement that, a different license board for each job seemed to be the best. I didn't want to have a kind of [forgiving] 'suspended sentence' system where players could make changes in midstream; I wanted to make it so that they couldn't advance without making a decision at each point.

This doesn't seem like a bad thing really when you look at it from this perspective. Creating a more challenging and engaging system that requires you to think about your actions, how is that bad? Well, the problem is that there are many jobs that become useless at higher levels like the Red Mage. I think the system would be fine if they would let you switch jobs at a great cost, but the fact that you cannot is a big problem.

The biggest problem though is that some characters are better at certain jobs than others. Ito said he wanted players to have to make a decision that they couldn't go back on, and all this means is that you have to hope that you pick well or you'll get fucked over. This just leads to players asking which jobs are best for which characters, you see discussion for it online from when it was more topical to talk about. It's nice that people can discuss these sorts of things, but what it comes down to at the end of the day is numbers. Who is more effective at what job, and maybe a little bit of freedom in certain areas.

Ultimately, while the Job System isn't game breaking, I really don't see it as a positive change. I've seen players argue that being limited makes for a better experience because you can't just steamroll everything with a character that has everything. However, I would argue that a self imposed limitation of your characters would work just the same.

One final thing to add, you can chose not to set a job, but you just won't be able to learn anything. Personally, I think in the HD version they should allow you to chose to put your characters in a Job if you wish but have the freedom of the original system by not selecting a job as well in some shape or form.

 

[Sora96]

The job edition itself just adds jobs to the game, the implementation is the problem. With each character you need to chose a job for them to be. Unlike previous job systems implemented in Final Fantasy games, you could not change your character's job at all unless you wanted to restart the game from scratch.

Ito had this to say about it:


This doesn't seem like a bad thing really when you look at it from this perspective. Creating a more challenging and engaging system that requires you to think about your actions, how is that bad? Well, the problem is that there are many jobs that become useless at higher levels like the Red Mage. I think the system would be fine if they would let you switch jobs at a great cost, but the fact that you cannot is a big problem.

The biggest problem though is that some characters are better at certain jobs than others. Ito said he wanted players to have to make a decision that they couldn't go back on, and all this means is that you have to hope that you pick well or you'll get fucked over. This just leads to players asking which jobs are best for which characters, you see discussion for it online from when it was more topical to talk about. It's nice that people can discuss these sorts of things, but what it comes down to at the end of the day is numbers. Who is more effective at what job, and maybe a little bit of freedom in certain areas.

Ultimately, while the Job System isn't game breaking, I really don't see it as a positive change. I've seen players argue that being limited makes for a better experience because you can't just steamroll everything with a character that has everything. However, I would argue that a self imposed limitation of your characters would work just the same.

One final thing to add, you can chose not to set a job, but you just won't be able to learn anything. Personally, I think in the HD version they should allow you to chose to put your characters in a Job if you wish but have the freedom of the original system by not selecting a job as well in some shape or form.

Alex's idea for the HD remaster is that they have both versions available.

 

[Azuardo]

...

Damn, didn't know it had severe implications behind it. Mixed thoughts on the HD version now... Option for both systems might be the best idea.

 

[Sora96]

Sounds like a pain in the ass. Hopefully the HD remaster will give us the option for either systems to use like what FFX HD did with the normal & expert sphere grid....

The Sphere Grid options were in the original PAL & International versions though...

 

[LeonBlade]

Alex's idea for the HD remaster is that they have both versions available.

Yeah, I would hope they would do that because it would make the HD version of the game THE definitive version allowing everyone to be happy. The other changes in the International version are fantastic.

Damn, didn't know it had severe implications behind it. Mixed thoughts on the HD version now... Option for both systems might be the best idea.

Take what I say with a grain of salt of course, I think it's always best to try out a system before forming an opinion, but I think it's safe to say that the job system doesn't really add anything to the game that makes it more enjoyable that you couldn't already do with a self imposed challenge of sorts.