Squeenix Final Fantasy 15

[Zep Zepo]

Naga
Literate

Putting the "fag" in newfag since
Joined: Oct 20, 2016

Zep--

 

[vonAchdorf]

 

[duanth123]

awkward when your parents walk in

Your parents will have judged you

I actually felt uneasy and annoyed.

Could that be because your parents might have walked in? And judged you?

Spoiler

you're a nasty little newfag aren't ya? You like them virtual butts

 

[Jasede]

Toe sexy?

 

[Hyperion]

Classic example of Japs completely missing the ball on what a Western woman would look and act like. American girls don't have asses nearly that flat anymore since the rise of the Instagram slut. Squats 'till the end of time, man. I mean shit, even deciding to model her after that dyke from one of those shitpile Fast and Furious movies or My Cousin Vinny would have been a better example of a female mechanic.

And leave it to Japan to throw all practicality out the fucking window when it comes to outfits. Another inch off those shorts and we'd see bicycle spokes.

And the voice, Good lord. That voice could kill a hard-on from 100 yards out. At least they got one thing right.

 

[Naga]

Could that be because your parents might have walked in? And judged you?

No, I was merely refering to some developer's statement which I clearly pointed out. But I know, being nitpicky and trying to make fun of someone for what they have written is all the rage on the internet. Guess I've hit a soft spot on some people. (some reactions were actually quite funny)

This is mentioned statement by Hajime Tabata himself:

"She's actually not meant to be an erotic character," Tabata explained. "Her character is very energetic and outgoing, a very active character. With those traits paired with her appearance, we feel it wouldn't be too problematic even if, say, she shows up on screen while your parents are in the living room."

 

[---]

Infos about DLC (co-op!): http://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-xv-reveals-dlc-plan-including-online-co-1788280828

Also:

http://www.jeuxvideo-live.com/news/...de-sawatari-haru-yoshi-au-sujet-des-dlc-82488

- Their goal for the DLCs is really to focus on Noctis' friends.

- Each DLCs includes new story elements, new gameplay experiences and new locations.

- The journalist(s) saw footage of Gladio's DLC, it was in a cave and represented 20% of what the devs are aiming for, and that the animations still needed to be worked on. They saw a fight against an armored guy and it really reminded them of the Souls Saga. The footage ended with a more powerful boss.

- The length of each DLCs should be enough for every kind of gamer.

- The DLCs aren't linked to Kingsglaive or Brotherhood, just the main game.

- They won't talk about their planning until it is ready.

- The team is aware of the high demand of a DLC featuring Luna as the heroin and he said they will think about it.

- Gladio's gameplay is action oriented, it is quite different from Noctis'.

- Sawatari Haru Yoshi (the DLC director) worked on Bloodborne and he admits that Gladio's gameplay has some similarities. He is happy that the journalist noticed this detail.

- From the beginning FFXV, the main game, was focused on Noctis so they aren't worried about those who think party switching was removed to make new DLCs. The DLCs are purely additional content.

They said also that they want to craft different gameplays for each DLC: so Gladio's one will be an hack'n'slash, Prompto's a sort of TPS, Ignis' one will be full of puzzles, etc...

 

[GrainWetski]

None of them a JRPG?

 

[---]

Touché

 

[Zurat-Yarkuch]

I find it really weird that none of the guys try hitting on Cindy. They can't all be gay...can they?

 

[Luka-boy]

They can't all be gay...can they?

 

[Hyperion]

I find it really weird that none of the guys try hitting on Cindy. They can't all be gay...can they?

You might want to go and rewatch the scenes where they talk to her. Gladio and Prompto are quite clearly flirting with her, and getting shut down.

Oh look, Square Enix namedropping Bloodborne to get people excited. You know what would be nice, Squeenix? A little bit of originality. This is going to be the ugliest "safe" release of all time.

 

[Raghar]

I find it really weird that none of the guys try hitting on Cindy. They can't all be gay...can they?

Do you understand word bi?

 

[Hobo Elf]

I find it really weird that none of the guys try hitting on Cindy. They can't all be gay...can they?

Prompto is the party womanizer.

 

[taxalot]

I find it really weird that none of the guys try hitting on Cindy. They can't all be gay...can they?

Prompto is the party womanizer.

A nickname that implies speed doesn't impress women. Another clue explaining why Japanese don't reproduce.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-11-02-finishing-final-fantasy

Finishing Final Fantasy
Inside the team working to complete the most troubled Final Fantasy game ever made.

Hajime Tabata was forced to own mistakes early into his career. A few weeks after the game designer joined Tecmo in the late 1980s, Yoshihito Kakihara, the company's eccentric founder, called his employees into his office. Kakihara was furious. The reviews of the studio's most recent Famicom game, Rygar, were in and they weren't good. The developers had neglected to include a save system, so reviewers had complained they'd had to leave their consoles on overnight in order to preserve their progress. Rygar had been in development while Tabata was still in college, yet he, along with every other Tecmo employee was ordered to visit the headquarters of each of the major Japanese video game retailers. On arrival, Kakihara explained, the staff must fall to their knees and issue an apology, followed by an assurance that their next game would be much, much better. It was, as Tabata puts it today, "harsh."

The indignity also provided preparation for his directorship of Final Fantasy 15, a multi-million pound production that, across its slurred decade of development, has been beset with problems, many of which Tabata inherited from his predecessor. In August this year Tabata, doing his best to mute his irrepressible grin, sat in front of a camera and recorded a message in which he apologised to fans and retailers for yet another delay for the game, which will now launch later this month. Delays like these may infuriate consumers, but they have more tangible consequences for that constellation of businesses that buttress the launch of a major game - the advertisers, the retailers and so on. For Tabata humility, rather than braggadocio, is the preferred posture in blockbuster video game development, where the stakes are often high enough to dash a business that missteps, and where team morale can, over the endless months of toil, be sapped and spoiled.

A scale replica of Final Fantasy 15's map, at Business Division 2's office in Shunjuku. 'It's had to change a lot, over the months,' said Kenichi Shida.

A month after he made his apology, I visit Tabata and his team, who together occupy an entire floor at the company's glass-encased office in Shinjuku. There's a marathon-closing atmosphere in the studio, whose staff seem weary yet emboldened by proximity to their goal. "When you've worked for so long on something like this, the thought of launching with something that's in any way unfinished is terrible," says Tomohiro Hasegawa, an art director who has worked on the game since the earliest days, when it was directed by Tetsuya Nomura. "While we've had to apologise unreservedly to retailers for messing up their plans, we've been so thankful for the extra weeks."

The office, cavernous, brightly lit, with endless phalanxes of desks arranged in orderly rows, is full of the sound of muted chatter. Here and there staff test the game at seemingly random points of the adventure. Lines of debug code flit in front of the images, providing a kind of programmer's narration of the action. Around them mock-up advertisements designed to deck out a subway train carriage line the walls. Next to them, a series of widescreen blackboards scrawled with encouraging messages from the series' fans in silver pen.

On one sideboard, there's a model reconstruction of the game's world map, complete with pins to show the locations of the major town and cities, and carefully painted miniature mountains, to show the topography. In a black frame hanging on the wall there's a many-legged centipede caught, according to the inscription, in Chiba in December 2012. In death the insect has provided inspiration for the clattering monsters that fill the game's countryside. Final Fantasy 15 is, like any video game that had demanded this much of its makers - the long nights, the spoiled relationships, the incoming RSI - a labour of back-ruining effort, and of heart-swelling love.

This much is surely true of many a major video game development - but it's rare for a studio to show its workings to an outsider, especially, in Japan, to a foreigner. Such openhearted access is almost unique in contemporary blockbuster game development. The typical studio visit to which journalists are invited is a heavily chaperoned affair, with a gaggle of public relations officers steering visitors through specific, possibly posed areas of the production, occasionally jumping in during a talking-point laden 15-minute interview with that conversation-rupturing refrain: "We're not ready to talk about that yet." Why the openness? "That's our philosophy," says Hasegawa. "We've had to be open and honest with each other, so it makes sense we'd do the same with others. If we want to speak to people around the world, how can you not be open, admit your flaws, try to point out your victories?"

Tabata was inspired by a recent trip to the British Museum and The Tower of London. 'I was amazed by the designs of the Elizabethan jewellery,' he says. 'The reality of these objects seems so much richer than what we imagine in fantasy.'

The team is not so open to tell us the story of what went wrong with Final Fantasy Versus 13, the game that morphed into Final Fantasy 15 in 2012, however. That may never be known (one Square employee tells me that Tabata and Hasegawa began telling him the story, over a drunken dinner, last year, and didn't stop talking for three hours) but there are obvious clues. In 2001 Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, a Hollywood film that borrowed the video game series' title and little else, lost approximately $94 million at the box office. In the aftermath, the film's director and Final Fantasy's originator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, was first side-lined, then shunted from the company. Senior staff, whom Sakaguchi had hired, soon followed.

Tetsuya Nomura, the artist who designed many of Square's best-known characters was promoted to the role of director on one of the company's next major titles, Final Fantasy Versus 13, to plug the gap. Despite his studied nonchalance in interviews, Nomura, now one of the company's most senior staff was reportedly an anxious director (during one event in Tokyo a few years ago, when early footage of the game was shown to fans, Nomura sat backstage in front of a monitor relaying live footage of the crowd's faces, so he could watch their reaction in real time.) The game lunged in different directions and, at some point, Nomura was removed from the project. Presumably to recoup sunk costs, the game was retooled and retitled as the next entry to the company's flagship series.

Tabata, who until this point had only worked on relatively minor projects, was promoted to director. He arrived to find an exhausted and fretful team. The new director's treatment was severe and controversial. "The entire staff was 'deconstructed' in a sense," explains Akira Iwata, a senior artist at Business Division 2. "Tabata created a flat environment; he got rid of the hierarchy. Everyone was put on the same level and had to make the argument for what they should be doing on the game. Some were freed up to do things that they'd longed to do but had previously been unable to take on. Others felt like they'd been demoted."

'Blockbusters are really hard,' says Tabata. 'I feel jealous of independent developers. I do have a desire to create something of a small scale. But I'm starting to feel that may not be feasible, or allowed.'

Such unplanned promotions and demotions are highly unorthodox inside a major Japanese company. It's a disregard for convention that Tabata learned early in his career at Tecmo. During his first ever job interview, Tecmo's founder Kakihara asked the young Tabata what unique quality he would be able to bring to the company. Rather than suggest a clichéd virtue (a willingness to learn, perhaps, or a talent for problem-solving) Tabata replied that he was good at giving massages. Kakihara ordered the young designer to come around to his side of the desk and give him a back rub on the spot to prove it. After a while Kakihara asked Tabata how his back felt. Tabata told him that it was tight and perhaps Kakihara was sick. Speaking physiological truth to power was a risky gambit. When Tabata left Tecmo that day he worried that he'd blown the interview. A few days later, a job offer arrived.

This openness and disregard for Japanese corporate convention proved essential in uniting the team that Tabata inherited. A few days after announcing the major team changes, the director booked a retreat in Tokyo for his new clutch of team leaders. There, the director told his staff that they weren't going to leave the room until they had come up with a list of golden rules by which they would all agree to abide. When the team finally emerged, they had settled upon a defining philosophy.

As we sit together while Tokyo's sweaty September rain falls outside, Iwata pulls a small piece of card from his wallet, like a well-thumbed photograph of a child. On it, printed in Japanese and English, are the six commandments that he and the other staff designed:

1. Don't put the brakes on others' work.
2. Recognise others' core values; welcome all ideas.
3. Make goals clear, and share information with transparency.
4. Speak openly and honestly with everyone.
5. Go beyond the scope of your duties.
6. Cherish your health and your loved ones' happiness.

These guiding principles were, according to Hasegawa, followed by a tangible shift in attitude across the team. "Suddenly we had this sense of being underdogs or challengers," he explains. "We were allowed to recognise that we had so much to understand in terms of the tech we were working with, in terms of the open world design, in terms of learning how to broaden the game's appeal beyond its niche." In this way, Tabata changed the atmosphere in the studio from one where everyone was afraid about what they might lose, to one where everyone was enlivened by the prospect of what they had to gain. "We became something closer to a task force," explains Kenichi Shida, an artist on the team. "You could be a task leader. Then a few days later you'd join another group as a worker. We're constantly changing desks. The rearrangement had an amazing effect on the team," I think. "By physically moving, it stops you from getting entrenched."

The team carried out a lot of research to get the road trip feel of the adventure right, filming time-lapse movies of sunsets in the desert among other things.

Tabata is not a faultless boss (one project manager, who sits close to Tabata's desk, mentioned that, if he comes into work in a bad mood, she's guaranteed to have a difficult day) but his unflinching belief in the power of togetherness clearly inspires those around him. "I place a lot of importance on people," he tells me. "That comes from the understanding that I can't manage this on my own. What I can do is to try to create an environment where those who have the necessary skills are able to shine. I love helping bring people's skills out to their fullest. I hope I'm the kind of leader who does that. I hope that, if you ask them, they see me in that way."

This attitude was also seeded in Tabata's early life, growing up in Sendai in Northern Japan. While Tabata enjoyed PC games like Civilization and Wasteland, he was a natural sportsman. He soon discovered that he was the fastest skier in his school. His talent took him to a regional tournament. There, however, his self-belief was pricked when he failed to win a medal. In the following weeks he watched the children who had beaten him at the regional finals lose to better competitors in the national competition. Finally, some of those national winners went on to the Olympics, where they in turn were beaten by competitors from other countries. "That stayed with me," Tabata told me. "There's always someone who is better than you. You can't ever be on top. Or, even if you do get there, there will always be someone who overtakes you eventually." If Tabata could not triumph as an individual, he decided that he could triumph by creating the best team of individuals. "I want to create a winning team," he says.

While much of the challenge Tabata has faced has been organisational, there's also the issue of what a Final Fantasy game should look like in 2016. The series reinvents itself with each new release, presenting a fresh world with fresh faces and systems, tied loosely to the franchise by way of a few unifying motifs. The reinvention helps stave off the kind of blockbuster fatigue that players of many annual western blockbusters report to feel, but presents an intimidating challenge to those designers tasked with defining each new game.

"The fight is with nostalgia as much as anything else," Tabata says. "Every player has their own memories and feelings toward different titles in the Final Fantasy series. At bare minimum, people have a graphical style they particularly like, or particular characters and universes. But deeper than that they want to feel the same feelings they had when they were kids, playing these games for the first time. They want to play a game that allows them to relive the excitement of the past, while also exceeding it in some way. But we decided early on that this game has to stand alone from all of the others; it can't just be a conglomerate of all the past titles."

Now, a few weeks away from launch, Tabata says that, even more than critics, family or peers, he will pay most attention to what players have to say about the game. But he's also keenly aware of what the series' past custodians will have to say. A few weeks after the launch of the Final Fantasy 15 demo in 2015, Sakaguchi contacted him to ask if they could meet for a drink. That night, Sakaguchi proceeded to point out all of the things he liked and disliked about the game. (In return, Sakaguchi told Tabata that he could ask him any question he wanted. "How much money do you have?," replied Tabata. "Anything but that," came the reply).

Tabata remains hopeful that he has struck the right balance of appealing to the old and to the new. "Yesterday Koichi Ishii, who worked on the original Final Fantasy, stopped by," he tells me. "It was humbling to hear him say that he was glad to see us creating a Final Fantasy that people are interested in, all these years later." It was a particularly affecting moment for Tabata as Ishii, who designed the series' line-dancing battle system, had previously criticised Final Fantasy XV's action-orientated feel. "He scolded me when that was first announced," says Tabata. "But yesterday he told me that it looked like everything was coming to life. He said that it looked like we'd found a way to make Final Fantasy into something new, while retaining something of its core essence. When he said that... I felt so happy."

 

[MicoSelva]

felipepepe has something to say about this article:

 

[felipepepe]

Of course. 10 years of development, insane budget, a tie-in movie & anime series, "it will surpass FFVII and sell 10M", multiple delays for dumb reasons like "we need flying cars!", a fucking TRAIN in Tokyo with nothing but ads with Tabata's own quotes on how awesome his game is.... and Eurogamer has the nerve to write:

For Tabata humility, rather than braggadocio, is the preferred posture in blockbuster video game development

This is why stuff like No Man's Sky and Peter Molyneaux happens. Fact-checking? REALITY CHECKING? Nah, I'll just print whatever this bloke says - it's an exclusive interview, after all!

 

[llazy77]

 

[tet666]

Final Fantasy XV mobile MMO announced:
http://gematsu.com/2016/11/final-fa...ke-developer-machine-zone#SxWUsCO8ocqCKxUV.99

 

[Makabb]

Seeing all those hair tits and ass i'm really dissapointed with latest FF, FF was never about hairstyles or ass. Luckily Last Guardian remains to original vision and is the game i will be playing in december.

 

[llazy77]

Seeing all those hair tits and ass i'm really dissapointed with latest FF, FF was never about hairstyles or ass. Luckily Last Guardian remains to original vision and is the game i will be playing in december.

What about FF7, Cloud hair was crazy and Tifas tits were huge.

 

[AArmanFV]

That was because Tifa did hand to hand combat, in anime/manga if you have warrior ladies is imperative to have at least one with huge juggs, you know "To make interesting the fight"

 

[Hobo Elf]

Too bad Tifa will be ruined in the FF7 remake. Rip her amazing rack.

 

[sullynathan]

NEW DEMO RELEASING ONLY IN JAPAN.