If FFXIV Fails... What Does That Mean For FFXI?

Harsh but the truth... exactly what I asked for. Thanks Jaerik lol. Do you think its worth dumping money to upgrade to a good comp just to play 14?

Not at this point, no.

Give it a few months and see how the game is doing, then make a decision about what to do with your money.

I don't think it will have much impact on the fate of ffxi whether or not 14 succeeds.

As long as ffxi is making a profit on server costs / overhead they will keep it up and running with occasional game update that makes money.

Hell look at games like ultima online and everquest.. they are still putting out occasional game expansions after 10+ years.

As long as people pay their subscriptions and the game is profitable it will continue to run.

Same with 14.. if it makes more money than it costs to keep running it would be silly to shut it down.

^ This.

I say SE sends me a super computer with FFXIV installed and a seven mithra nation army ready at my disposal. :3

I'll do my best to be objective here.. But it should be noted that I'm quite fond of FFXIV, and I see no difference in the complaints that some people who are still holding on to FFXI make about XIV.. One of the key ones being that "there's nothing to do, there's no content, it's just grind grind grind or craft craft craft, etc etc".. XI was no different when I left (which was 9-05-10) Most quests/missions are done, all that was really left for me to do was farm gil, grind xp or grind crafting. Anyways... Most of this will probably be broken down by individual statements, so that I can remain objective.

I have 0 patients, I'm well known for this fact, I still quite enjoy XIV. It's not without it's problems, but 'so vast you could spend hours' is a gross over-exaggeration. The interface isn't that horrible, it's not the best and it does take some getting used to (it's already been sped up significantly however). Whatever 'recycled content' is in the game, is still a refreshing experience from XI, no denies that there is a serious limit to the different things you're can do at this time, but that doesn't mean it's just the same thing over and over either. If you're doing it alone, you're probably going to find it dull and boring. Not sure how the maps are useless..

Unless the maps in XI were even more useless.. Seems like someone is just grasping at straws and trying to find stuff to add to this list he could go on for hours about.. The market wards as is can be a bit over bearing and tedious, yes it's flawed, no system would be perfect. I think we should reserve judgment on the system until the overhaul though.

"This isn't fun, it's work", personal opinion, I enjoy the battle system, I enjoy the crafting system, *** I even enjoy the distant walks sometimes (and I couldn't stand to walk ANYWHERE in XI, even when it was brand new to me) As for his next statements, about not knowing what to do or where to go, well that's what the *** a journal is for, how you find stuff, that's what the *** those 'useless maps' are for.. This sounds like WoW syndrome, there's no big fat arrow direclty on the screen pointing to exactly where to go each and every step (but if you're on a quest all you simply have to do is open journal, go to quest, click on map and it shows you EXACTLY where to go with a nice colored dot and the name of whoever or whatever you're supposed to be looking for) As for what vendors sell what items.. I don't recall any MMO ever telling you that.. at least not before talking to them where they introduce themselves.. It's not different in XIV. You find out what vendors sell what items by browsing their wares. This is just another instance where he's trying to add beefiness to his 'beefs' with the game.

The inventory point he brings up, does suck, and I don't like that either.. With as often as you need (at least I) need to check inventory, I'd like to be able to open it with 1 button. I'd also like to be able to reprogram they keys completely, not just allow me to use certain keys for certain functions. The part about him bitching about macros, no different then XI, probably another lazy *** WoW inspired comment. As for the story map being awful and giving you no sense of where you need to go, well the areas it takes you to are quite well traversed, if you spend more then 5 mins playing the game before shooting it down, you might actually know where this area is and recognize it.. They aren't off the beaten path hidden from site.. You can also scroll the map FROM THE STORY MAP THAT'S SHOWING YOU WHERE TO GO and figure out where you are in relation to it.

Action House is ***, too many idiots undercut everything to hell, leaving no margains for profits unless you devote many many hours of your life to farming.. Same goes for crafting.. I'm not sure where he's getting this idea that an AH is on the way, I highly doubt they'd be putting all this work into the retainer/market ward system if they just planned to ***on it with an AH. "It doesn't save your recipes" Cry me a river, he goes onto say that a game doesn't have to do everything for you to be good, but he's making the same complaints that my WoW friend made about XI, because the game didn't play itself.. He literally has WoW playing itself pretty much.. All he does is input the commands, the game tells him everything to do, where to go, what to do. To me, that's beyond HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE.

Overall, he just sounds like a WoW-*** to me, and that's my honest opinion. He's obviously not played the game enough to give it a serious review, just as a prime example for that basis was his comment about the marked story maps not giving you any clue where to go, I figured out within about 45 seconds I could scroll that map as well and find out where the nearest city/landmark was. But that's not the only basis for my reasoning.

While I'll agree with you on the basic principle that as long as people pay and they're not losing money both games will be up, to say the failure of FFXIV would have no impact on FFXI is missing a key point.

I'm sure Jaerik would be able to find more statistically correct numbers.

There are a lot of people who quit FFXI to play FFXIV. Since FFXIV is new, potential new users have a choice of FFXI or FFXIV in theory. Given that choice it seems like FFXIV has a larger influx of new users. Whereas the population of FFXI is steadily declining.

The key point you guys are missing is if FFXIV is shut down, where would all its users go? Would users new in general go to FFXI? Would the people who quit FFXI go back if it's shut down? Could SE entice them to go to FFXI?

I don't see how that scenario would not have an effect on FFXI.

Idk the effect a failure of ff14 could have on ffxi could go many ways and would be crazy to even try to predict all the outcomes.

They could try to put out a bunch of rapid fire expansions and add ons to make money on ffxi.. (more content = good for the most part)

or they could just try to keep the game running the way it is for a while and just make a profit on it.

They could sell ffxi to another company who could do either of those things.

I dont see any of those really having a negative impact on the video game for the most part. (some might argue more content is bad: see all the arguments against abyssea threads)

Worst case.. say square enix goes bankrupt (yah right) they wouldn't shut the game down.. the banks or w/e would sell it off to another company to make money.

Bottom line ffxi will keep on chugging along.. happy little money train for somebody.

So basically all we in ffxi have to wonder about is what the next big expansion will be and if ff14 failure will speed it up or slow it down.. can go either way for various reasons.

That would be interesting if FFXI was sold to another company, lol!

yah maybe we'd get better customer service and billing practices.

Imagine if it was sold to Valve. And then they decided to use the half-life 2 engine for FFXI's graphics. That would be sick!

I know steam's customer service is a lot better than SE's for sure too.

That would be win win all around, do it SE!

FF14 isn't as bad as people come across its Not perfect, and as post above me state i personily find that revierwer baised, like many other who trying 2 justify there reviewer by saying WoW, only review that i thought was intresting was www.cheatcc.com review what wasn't baised, and even stated with a few tweaks could come ontop of WoW,

The game has alot potential, and has a great core system in place, All that left is to build around the system to make the game great

A friend of mine first few day said he hated that there was no AH, Now he like it great it kinda give the game new demision of doing stuff, hangling bartioning, and even doing work for items, this make the game lil more fun and intresting,

But there is alot of things that need fix'd but its no where as near as bad as game reviewers say

Yah i really don't see 14 failing at all.. i could see it not living up to shareholder's profit expectations... but being a flat out failure / shutting servers down... no way.

Was just speculating on what the effect of the highly unlikely failure of 14 would have on ffxi... or lack there of.

Agreed. It would take more than how they released it to even began to cause this.

Who know knows maybe a year from now FFXIV could become so successful that SE decides to sell off FFXI. Could look at it from that perspective too.

I don't know what this means, but I didn't buy ffxiv, and I wasn't in the beta, so that's probably why.





jk jk, just thought it was funny

Ya the game has lots of potential. Its just SE has to do something quickly. Im pretty sure once they piss off the customers they wont go back.

Alls they need to do is:

Add an AH
Add faster travel(seriously running back and forth is *** annoying)
Add Anima faster regen
Add Questlines off NPCS

Just those 4 points would be the game 10x better

you can self teleport, i 'm pretty sure that's fast enough traveling..tho lack of anima makes that tough

so basically ff14 can expect to stagnate and lose players if it doesn't improve. If it does improve it will flourish and will grow. The question is does SE see this...

btw you mean "fail more than he ALREADY did" no ?

WHERE DID THIS PROJECT GONE ???
why they did'nt go out with all this new contents, instead of put in "maw-areas" over the same areas? can't understand... if SE come out with all of this, no one will quit the game and so many people will come back...

anyway
if abyssea was released 1 year ago, so many people would have remained and all this new improvements (job boosts, level cap increase) they would have been better absorbed, instead of 3 big enhancement in so little time after 7 years of immobilism

Any actual numbers in SE's case would be completely out of my ***, because being a foreign company, I don't have as many friends or networked industry connections that I'd have with other companies. I used to have a lot of dev friends there, but they've all since quit after the Enix merger. So I would be speculating. They would be educated guesses, but still guesses.

That being said, let's look at Everquest and Everquest II. EQ was hovering down around 200k users (having fallen from 500k or so over time) when EQ2 was launched. It was a debacle: similar to XIV, it was a mess at launch and got awful reviews. At the time, EQ was on its 4th or so expansion. The parallels between XI and XIV are striking.

Everquest II's launch development budget was ~$30,000,000. Budgets have ballooned drastically since then -- mostly in art -- so it's reasonable to assume that XIV could have cost 2-3 times that or more.

EQ2 flopped. Sony Online (SOE) had lots of money (just like SE) so they kept improving on the game over years, instead of pulling the plug. Eventually, they managed to get the game decent enough they could break even on a stable 200k users or so, but the awful reviews at release meant it would never be a smashing success. The project itself was a financial mess, and SOE never regained their place at the top of the MMO industry.

What EQ2's horrible launch did do, however, was keep EQ1 alive. It did not result in people going back -- in general, people do not go back to old games they have since moved on from. Once they've said goodbye, they are more likely to "bounce" and go to another, new game like WoW. But it kept the core EQ fanbase in that game, and for many years, EQ's subscriber numbers remained higher than EQ2's.

Both games were barely getting by. There was no massive resurgence or even small increase in EQ1's subscriber numbers. But it stopped losing users, and it made it worthwhile for SOE to continue pumping out expansions -- 17 of them! -- even if they didn't have big enough budgets to do anything major beyond more places to grind and more items to grind for.

this leaves me wondering how SE general lack of advertising in any major form would effect this though?

They should seriously focus on expanding the world and adding cities and zones to those parts of the world. AT LEAST work on the far east empire and ship it out as not an add on but full blown expansion. I'd pay 30 bucks for even 1 more job and new areas. Maw zones are fine and all and the quests and armor are keeping us busy I understand thats the best they could come out with while trying to fix ff14 for release (lol fix) but since theres two teams, one for 11 and one for 14 they have no more excuses in my book.

More substantial content please. With level cap increase I can see the areas of the world being home to the lvl 99s. Like TOAU was to 75s meriting, I'd like to see the far east and the far south home to 99s. Bigger NMs, bigger problems and quests, and lvl 99 gear.

Who's with me?

Definitely a good parallel here. I don't know much about EQ, except it's huge. The question now is would the FF community act the same now as the EQ community did back then? If FFXIV flops just jump ship to a new MMO.

If we base FFs' MMOs off of this parallel, then a flop of FFXIV would not mean a resurgence of FFXI, but merely a signal that it would stay alive for years to come.

Are there any other MMOs that had sequels that were successful enough to shut down the previous one?

If not it seems that SE tried to create uncharted waters, but instead just repeated history.

This honestly ends the thread because the similarities on everything said here apply 100% to FFXI/FFXIV just for the simple fact Final Fantasy is a much more household known name than everquest in all honesty. That being said this will easily hold true for FFXI/FFXIV. If they keep making expansions such as abyssea ect... i don't see why anyone still left standing today would quit now unless it was pure real life circumstance.

XIV can bounce back but the premature launch and horrible reviews and SE screaming "noooo dont review it yettttt" Is NOT a nice mark on its permanent record.

I agree with Kaioshin on this ~

There is so many parts of the world left to explore (SE you hearing us??)

Also, selfishly I would love to see them repackage /revamp 11 with 14s graphics

even if it was 90$ I would buy it

favorite game but better graphics hell yea!

Honestly FFXI's graphics are not bad at all... even still. Sure upgrades would be nice but for me... new graphics killed quite a few games i used to love.

Command and Conqueror games as well as older classics died off on sequels because it lost focus on what mattered and concentrated too much money on development of graphics.

To each his own but i just feel like they focused too much on "pretty" in XIV and not enough about the main essentials (heres looking at you auction house building).

Personally I don't mind the graphics that much

That being said ~ I myself would have rather seen a repackaging of 11 with new expansions/jobs etc available (think of that huge map we have yet to finish covering)
Rather then a pretty but completely bombed new game

Word!

Graphics are by no means a selling point, for me anyways. I don't understand why people keep calling FFXI's graphics Atari like. Have they even played Atari?

Hell I still enjoy playing FFI on my NES emulator to this day. I haven't and probably never will play any of the rehashes they did with any of series.