FINAL FANTASY XIV: The Rebirth of A Failed MMO (Documentary) | Asmongold Reacts to Noclip

this is a it's time [Music] what's the music square is very deep into the culture of japan originally a spin-off from masafumi miyamoto's father's power powerline construction firm for over 30 years its games have helped power the rise of japanese games there are no shortage of games that live under the square enix banner but not as big as final fantasy from our western perspective there's an air of mythos around the company the accepted truth behind the series title is that it was named give me one second final fantasy as it was square's make or break game to avoid impending bankruptcy and even if the real answer has more to do is creating an acronym that could be pronounced by both eastern and western audiences it's that first story that gets told that's the legacy of this series stories about adventures that get passed from generation to generation as nearby as the arcades of akihabara and as far as the playgrounds of europe as the final fantasy series has moved from numeral to numeral there have been high points and low but with each new game comes the promise of a new story a new myth the story of what happened with final fantasy xiv is one such myth what we know about it comes from old reviews archived messages through conversations with those who were there the reason for this is that the original version of final fantasy 14 doesn't exist anymore unlike the vast majority of other old games there is no way of playing it it was redacted painted over where once i like how like with a lot of the old games that like there's not an old version for it people have like a private server for running somewhere as far as i know nobody has a private server for the original final fantasy 14. nobody has it it it's it's okay aimed at threatening to sink the final fantasy brand forever now stands the second most popular subscription mmo in the world and as the years pass us the myth of that original version and its incredible redemption story are at risk of disappearing how did it all happen how did the same studio that shipped a broken mess turn it all around in two years why did they make the decision to keep the old version still alive while secretly working on a brand new game and how did they manage to make all of this the redesign and rebirth part of the game's lore we knew this was a story worth telling not only for those who were there to see it all go down for the millions of you who have never heard about this who never knew the extraordinary lengths the development team went to to save this game so we did just that pack your bags friends noclip is heading to tokyo here we go holy [ __ ] this is a real ass thing oh my [Music] god i hate flying an airplane so much this is the worst [Music] is that what japan looks like [Music] wow [Music] yeah you should go to japan maybe one day [Music] damn that reminds me of like new york where they have like signs up everywhere it's like super crowded is that it [Music] this [ __ ] was cool [Music] [Music] what the [ __ ] when tokyo was pretty crowded yeah i have no idea [Music] dude this this [ __ ] cinematic was [ __ ] awesome the ending of it oh my god this is one of the best [Music] it was lit yeah hello and welcome to tokyo home of godzilla restaurants full of dancing robots and square enix one of the most prolific video game companies in the world for the past few months i've been playing catch up with this story playing the latest version of the game talking to players and watching i remember i did this series like the speakers network's fantastic fall and rise of final fantasy xiv my goal to make sure we asked the right questions when we sat down with the team next time here in shinjuku we're going to talk to everyone from the engineers who worked on the original game to localization leads community managers and even the ceo of the company oh wow to allow them the opportunity to tell their side of this fascinating story holy [ __ ] the fallen rise of final fantasy 14 happened in real time in front of millions of people around the world that made it happen that led to its terrible launch and ultimately its incredible rebirth my name is uh michael christopher koji funks um i am the english localization lead for final fantasy 14. and my middle name being koji it's not something i gave myself it's a name my father gave me my father was stationed uh in japan for two years of the navy when he was young went back to the states my mom had me um they wanted to give me a japanese name the family was having none of that so they kind of snuck it in the middle name but then they always called me koji and so i guess the go you know the joke was on the rest of the family you know my dad being in the navy that's cool i like it that's interesting about japan other than he really liked japan but he didn't like the language so i always knew that my name was japanese but beyond that i really didn't know anything about japan but there was always that little seed in there and then when i got into high school there's a japanese class and i like games oh they make games in japan they let me study japanese if i study japanese i can play all those cool japanese games that never come out over in america that's the way it used to be yeah i graduated from high school um i took a trip to japan for three weeks homestay type of thing and i fell in love with it and during that period i got to visit a lot of schools and a lot of english classes in those schools and i thought wow i could probably do i know english i could do this this will be easy it wasn't as easy as i thought it was going to be but i studied a couple years at a university in america then transferred over to japan started over four years at a university in japan wow got my teaching license and uh yeah it's hard work holy [ __ ] i mean i loved it but it's a lot of work yeah and that's why pretty much after you'd go to school six in the morning for morning basketball practice because i was the basketball coach because as my principal said hey you're tall you're the basketball coach get into classes i mean i'd have my homeroom class yeah volume okay i'll turn it up a bit other classes teaching things yeah he leveled up twice so all of a sudden it's oh there's after school basketball and then you'd get home and correct so i was really always at school every day it was very draining and i would go home and i would play ff11 it was how i was able to relax and being able to go into my little room and turn off the lights and put on my headphones wait so this guy could have played with ninja there is a chance that he could have played with ninja oh my god get into that world of van a deal was something that helped me escape from the stress and then it just happened to be you know one day i was online you know checking for 11 related information and they saw that square enix was hiring looking for a translator and it just kind of wow that would be really cool you did it damn that's interesting koji wasn't alone final fantasy 14 was launched in 2010. i have to say like this face it just looks so dumb to me what it reminds me of is like remember whenever that old crazy lady painted over etchie homo and they painted she painted jesus's face back onto him and it was all like [ __ ] up and [ __ ] that's what it reminded me of the story of this game starts eight years earlier with the launch of final fantasy eleven yeah they made the cracks way hot the early days of online many of the team who worked on 14 started on 11. one of those was kasugasan who joined the company in 1999 to build a network infrastructure for this fledgling mmo they all have such good hair [Music] yeah this is the guy wait was this the guy that wrote all the stuff about nfts no shot this was the guy oh my god there he is oh man this is president of square enix am i allowed to say more looks at pr and laughs yeah that's about [ __ ] right what [Music] 11 was my first mmo i hadn't played one before dude i didn't even realize like like i just thought final fantasy 11 was just like some dumb old game i didn't realize it was like probably the first console mmo holy [ __ ] man yeah dude i had no idea it still runs yeah like i i just i didn't even understand the the perspective of it we're purchasing the playstation 2 broadband unit because they were all sold out i ended up paying double on like some yahoo auction or something like that ridiculous but i had to play it we got a new internet connection we were on a regular moto module dude in 2001 128 you know but yeah it was definitely first cross platform something that was that's completely new to me but always fascinating and ever since then i've you know been into mmos like it was that was the gateway too for me you know going in from like that you know some of the western mmos as well getting into world of warcraft seeing the days between the two personally i think it's very different i mean here in japan from the western market because yeah it is for everyone in the globe i mean its very first uh mmrpg on the console precision two and also i mean it was the first ever cross-platform mmo between precision 2 and xbox 360. the obvious one is the most japanese people don't really like to speak i mean chat in public right so i mean in the world there's a lot of characters but it's very quiet because people are telling using a a tail instead of a say or a shot and then but if you want if you go to western world game world i mean everyone every single one is shouting around so yeah that's a huge difference you know while that's crazy i had no idea about that because yeah you go on any american server and it's like i remember like any any of them there's just people popping off constantly yeah baron's chat you have your everquests and you had your ultimate in japan there was none of that and then so final fantasy 11 was really one of the first mmos in japan and so getting to work never shut the [ __ ] up the pioneers of the japanese mmo um was really exciting on the other hand i mean you could also say that it was possibly kind of a curse in the sense that um they were all you know doing their own thing they had their vision of what an mmo should be and what a japanese mmo should be um and then me again not having played an mmo before getting on this team and thinking okay this is an mmo and translating away and working in that project i kind of you know started thinking okay this is what an mmo is this is and then that one day i start playing wow and it's like oh oh yeah seeing the differences between the two and saying like okay what i thought was the norm in final fantasy xi you know the grinding for 20 hours to go up one level and then only to have your level drop when you you know pull too many crabs and it shows yeah i lost five hours work i thought that was normal and then like that's not normal is it the japanese i'm glad they added that bit of context in there because like wow was like yeah wow was a huge departure from like old games wow was considered the super casual mmo and that's why it was so good that's why it was so popular base game final fantasy 11 had already released and they were working on the first expansion pack uh rise of the zlart i was part of the team that was working to get um the base game and rise of zelda all translated before the japanese rise of the lord was finished that's why it was so good get it on time i got it on time i haven't missed i haven't missed a deadline yet that's that's one thing this is recorded before final fantasy 11 was a huge success for square enix it established a concurrent user base of around a quarter of a million players for years square soft that's the old school [ __ ] like that's what i remember seeing at the beginning of my games back in super nintendo was squaresoft it was the most wow final fantasy game ever and at one stage was the sixth most popular game of xbox live more than that it established the japanese style of mmo and when the decisions were soft was like the from software of the 90s like any game that they put out was a banger like every single one was good it was finished it was well designed it's made in 2005 to start work on a sequel the new mmo was built around things that made eleven successful focusing like most final fantasy on beautiful graphics and an interesting battle system this new game was to be directed and produced by the same duo that shipped 11. series veteran hiromishi tanaka and noboaki komodo final fantasy 14 was announced for windows and playstation 3 in 2009 but behind the scenes the development team was struggling to put the pieces of its new world bro you couldn't even jump wait you couldn't even jump oh my god matt whenever i found out you couldn't jump in the original guild wars i said uh uh nope i'm out that's it you can't well if you can't jump in a game i'm out dude had this problem i feel like the uh the style the art and everything and like the extravagance of final fantasy art like that's really like at the core of what the game is so like if you don't have like that extravagant [ __ ] crazy art style is it really final fantasy like i mentioned before again localization being in a position where we get to see all the parts come together first we were some of the first to realize that you know houston we have a problem uh that type of situation i mean you know you had the battle team they're like yes we have this great battle system you know with stamina and these things that you could do and then you had the story team i guess we have this story oh hey we have these guild leaves and all of these parts and everyone was really really proud of their parts you know look at this grass it's so beautiful look at this barrel it's the you know the most beautiful barrel ever to be you know represented in graphical form it's got as many polygons as a character yes and all of those parts you know all of these teams again very very proud of their work i mean you have the team was you know put together some of the best minds in square enix you had people that were you know leads that could probably even you know create lead their own projects were all come together and it became sometimes that can be a bad thing whenever you have a lot of people that all are supposed to be like you know they're like really experienced and like you never know really who's in charge right because you have like yeah too many cooks too many cooks bro out of just tiny little groups making something that was really great yeah but once you put it together it was kind of a mess and no one really knew that except for localization and probably qa as well and we're like okay this doesn't do something but by then it was one of those it's kind of too late to do anything but for us we would i would be looking at the text oh [ __ ] there's the girl she's the one you got her earring and then you bring her back to the scions of the seventh dawn this is gilfina yeah she's the one that adopted milfinov's mom yeah after after her parents got killed by the guber and uh [ __ ] all da some of it you know it wouldn't make sense or it would just be bankrupt and thinking if there's any way to make this game better what can we do well i can take this text and maybe add some more stuff into it add some more flavor to it because this one this one no maybe that will distract people from the fact that the battle graphics were inconsistent while many elements of the world were copy and pasted ad nauseum some environmental objects had as many polygons and shaders as a character model the battle system was just confusing the game didn't have elements fundamental to most modern mmos things like jumping auto attack and the ability to interact with the map using a mouse i think that's one of the things it's like wow was just like you've got to remember like wow was so far ahead of its time whenever it came out it basically put every other game that came out within five years of it into the dirt like it was just it was so good and there was nothing that even came remotely close to it like the amount of like th especially in terms of like core design right like movement menus uh you know like interactivity with the world uh interacting with npcs like all of that stuff like world of warcraft was like contextually probably the most like it was like the it was like the equivalent of the iphone right it was like whenever remember whenever apple brought out the iphone and like nobody else was even [ __ ] in the same universe as that that's what wow was like a system that nerfed hardcore players to make sure they didn't level up too fast yeah the ui was confusing crafting at the beginning took forever and simply there just wasn't enough content the closed beta wasn't going well they needed more time to fix these problems so the open beta was pushed back to within a month before the team knew there were problems and they were getting frustrated with foreign it's almost always a bad idea whenever a game gets released to the public and it's bad like pretty much every time it's a bad idea like it's like if it gets released early like cyberpunk new world shadowhands uh [ __ ] uh what are some other examples like uh immediate yeah it gets like what happens is like people's first impression is so important no man's sky right and like i don't know how that game's doing now the population i have no idea but people still have like a negative impression of it like if you release a bad game that game is bad forever that's it that and and like this isn't the shigeru miyamoto quote from like [ __ ] 30 years ago i'm talking about like it's bad forever in the mind of of people like even if it gets good it's still bad one point i was getting made was it just was the mentality that oh we're not like that's like their thing and we have our very own successful thing over here we're going to just make another one of those right and that's really what it felt like is that we're going to continue doing what we did because it succeeded before why wouldn't it succeed again and seeing that direction you know them taking that direction and knowing that you know having worked on 11 that yes they were very successful seeing the success that they had with final fantasy 11 seeing these great creators you know creating something that was i mean revolutionary um but then on the other hand knowing that what they were doing was yeah but maybe that might not that worked six or seven years ago but a lot of things have changed since then and that's kind of what happened i feel like with cyberpunk is that cyberpunk what my understanding was is like they just kind of assumed that it would be good because they made witcher 3. it's like well we made witcher 3 i mean how could this be bad uh you found out i mean i think there was even one guy on the localization team uh that got to that point where he just got so frustrated that he just wrote this scathing mail and sent it out to the whole team before telling anyone else on localization he was going to write it and we all get it at the same time the dev's team we're reading it's like wow this is really terrible i hope he doesn't oh he sent it to the whole team my man because he just got really frustrated because him i mean they were being very stubborn they weren't um you know they hadn't moved on whereas the rest of the world had moved on and and adapted um you know wait so he literally was like so he straight up said like y'all doing the old the old [ __ ] game this is not the way the game should be anymore oh my god i love that that's amazing and what they had done yeah whereas no we're going to stick with what we know and that's good enough then start feeling more about more concerning the situation i mean this is not fixed not fixed yeah now fix oh then oh you announced the launch date but it's not fixed so but still the some major portion 2011 still thinking still uh believing it's better still better better face last space yeah also you got to keep in mind like at that same time 2011 this is like right on the heels of like wow and it's like absolute peak of popularity right i mean this is like 2010 2011 [ __ ] like rapid a lich king is out arthas is getting killed like it's the the biggest [ __ ] thing man still better so it could be i mean uh fixed or that changed not that much timing kind of went from thinking okay this project's going to be great to oh there might be some problems can we get can we fix them can we fix them okay we can't fix them is there anything we can do i don't know it was yeah it was a very taxing experience the team crossed their fingers and hoped that the game's beta problems were simply that the same issues that most mmos have ones that could be fixed with patches once the game entered live operations and so the that's what they all say yep that's what they all say they're like yeah we know it's [ __ ] up but by a time whenever it comes out we'll fix it eventually right it's like that was the cycle the wow cycle oh they'll fix it in alpha they'll fix it in beta they'll fix it in a live game they'll fix it in the first patch they'll fix it in the second patch oh wow they finally fixed it and the new expansion comes out oh they'll fix the new thing in the next expansion the first alpha then the beta and it's like yeah finally this is what happens new world yeah they'll get it eventually right final fantasy 14 online launched on september 30th 2010. it sold well its first week and after a month had over 600 000 players swarming into its world but it didn't take long for the cracks to appear the problems in the beta were echoed by new players the game was sluggish the servers crashed and the orsians quickly ran out of things to do quests were limited and the fatigue system even made grinding for xp next to impossible it's crazy how something like this could happen and then new world could come out and do the exact same thing wrong like new world did the exact same thing wrong fixated alive too let's go right down to it unless you've got the patience of job or some kind of masochist you shouldn't play final fantasy 14. its problems are so vast that i could spend hours talking about them the awful interface the recycled content the stringent limits on questing these useless maps the stupid market ward these issues and dozens more constantly have you asking that age-old question what were they thinking so yeah i like seeing public reaction not good i bet yeah not [ __ ] good people [ __ ] hate it like i the thing is like i was so balls deep in wow at that point like i had just graduated high school like a year or two before then so like i was chilling with the boys [ __ ] playing wrath of the lich king i wasn't thinking about no [ __ ] cat girls i was thinking about the lich king and deathwing that's it and so i i wasn't really keeping up with this whenever it happened yeah it was it was very i mean very disheartening um because i better you wanna you'd wanna look at those and you'd wanna say no no they don't understand they don't know what's going on here or you know but deep down you'd know they were right and that was what kind of you know that dagger in your heart and twisting because you want to defend what you worked on i mean the people that i worked with are the greatest people i mean i still you know work with a lot of them i had worked with them before in ff11 i consider them not only co-workers but friends but you know and then you see people on online you know bashing the work they did and i know how hard they worked i know how many hours they put and i know that like in the last three or four months people were basically living um at work all putting their 100 percent that's nuts people working so [ __ ] hard on that [ __ ] like people always talk about it here in america like you know the uh what's it called crunch time or [ __ ] like that but like yeah they sleep at work yeah they just work all [ __ ] day japan work ethic is nuts the thing is like it's also the uh it's like the culture a lot of the culture is is different and like you do have uh companies that work this way here in the us but uh it's it's like there's a good there's like a good part of it and like a bad part of it right it's like you know working hard and like a dedication to like stay late and like really make sure the job is done like that's good but like then it goes too far and like people do die from getting overworked and [ __ ] like that too the game that was you know destined to call it death march it's kind of crash and burn but and then to have people online just say oh that sucks this person is a piece of [ __ ] and their work is terrible it it hurts but it hurts more because yeah if i was not here and was a user and had played that game we probably would have said the same thing yep i do find that little part of it to be a little bit um isn't that interesting that this guy used to be the cfo and he's the guy that's promoting nft's little little bit of uh fine print there that is very illuminating you know very very illuminating nice our president no longer investigated [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] i mean the first few months it was just an endless stream of translating apology mails from you know producers and directors and and finding out um let's try to figure out different ways of saying we're sorry um because yeah the more you say it the less weight it has but japan being a very a company or a country where you know people apologize a lot that's part of the culture but then trying to translate that it's like okay this is the tenth time i've said sorry in this one post and then from you know the american myself yeah people are going to look at that as insincere you know the more you apologize the more and then trying to explain that to the team like no we have to apologize like yes you have to apologize but and it just became we weren't talking about the game anymore i remember this same thing happened whenever yoshi p recently uh apologized for the delay on end walker and like everybody here was like yeah i mean because at this point right i think a lot of people like i think we're just kind of tired of like having a game come out and like it's not ready or it's bad so it's like yeah take all the time you want i think most most gamers would rather wait and play the game as it's good even though some of them might say like oh no it's fine we'll fix it later i just want to play it right now no you don't we're talking about how to translate apologies and it seemed like that lasted for you know a couple months actually we see a huge drop i mean after right after the launching launch timing we got a some good number of the subscribers again that fall fall i mean as you can imagine so i mean it was failure and we announced a failure so we see uh lots of decline i love seeing this and then thinking of like all the other games like remember whenever ian was like oh yeah they just didn't understand as right we'll fix it whenever the game comes out and then they bring out bfa and it's awful like when has this ever actually happened we're like oh it comes out and they fix it very soon after release and everything's okay and people don't have a bad impression of the game pretty much never that would make sense yeah it was bad like today everything that i've heard about like the original final fantasy 14 was like it was just garbage like everything about it was bad was just a horrible game like graphics were bad gameplay was bad everything was bad that sucks is based across multiple floors in a modern office complex in shinjuku tokyo it's a company that is often designing multiple projects at once and while final fantasy 14 was being developed in another part of the building a different game was being made produced by a final fantasy fan his name naoki yoshida [Music] [Music] the [Music] it's crazy to think about that because like i mean obviously he's a bit older than i am and a lot of us are so it's like i remember like how crazy it was whenever the internet came out right and like how big of a deal that was i bet for people like video games probably were like that same level of [ __ ] like holy [ __ ] like i'm actually moving [ __ ] around on the television you know like that's nuts [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] like most japanese players at the time yoshida-san played all the early final fantasy games he holds them in high regard though he still holds the bitter memory of not being able to save before the last dungeon in final fantasy 3. but when he was 11 years old a brand new type of gaming experience arrived at home his uncle gave him a pc on this pc the young gamer learned how to program basic his first video game centered around trying to break into a bank fault but this pc also exposed him to a spectrum of gaming that eluded most japanese players how old is yoshida yeah how old is he he's 49. holy [ __ ] okay so i'm just trying to do the math like wow that must have been like pretty much pretty much the first [ __ ] pcs holy [ __ ] western role-playing game wow he fell in love with games like diablo and was stunned when he first went online and played with other players already thinks about diablo immortal sympathy [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] see like i love the fact that like because you you think about it it's like who really knows like how to make sure that people don't get [ __ ] within a game are people that used to [ __ ] with people in games yeah like they're the ones that like really understand it because they know how to [ __ ] with people in games exactly that's what it's gotta be [Music] [Music] everquest was a pretty big step up too like i mean you got to keep in mind like before everquest like you didn't have it where you could move around like this it wasn't like it wasn't the fluidity like everquest was a big step up now i wasn't i wasn't into everquest i did not like the game however i can respect the fact that it was a tremendous increase like it was 3d yeah it was massive they told [Music] yoshida-san would embark on a career in games that would eventually see him joining square enix to work on the dragon quest series though he wasn't working on the final fantasy team he was part of the umbrella group that was allocating programmers to various projects he didn't have granular visibility on ff14 but he knew the team was struggling i asked from his perspective as a producer where he thought the game's problems were coming from well he started [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah like i'm telling you like final fantasy 10 was like that was like i'm trying to think of a game it's like the next game that was like that big of a jump is like like i don't even know about like half-life 2 maybe but like it just completely took graphics to a whole another level yeah crisis like yeah maybe crisis or something like that it was massive man [Music] [Music] that's what happened again like that's what cd projekt red was i think that's also what happened with wow it's like after you succeed so many times uh you know like you just kind of get used to and assume that like things are gonna be fine and then eventually they're not fine you you know like the uh uh looking at you yeah there's a lot it's complacency you can't be wrong anymore exactly it's too big to fail and then people fail okay technology [Music] [Music] that's what happened with a lot of like the thing is that graphics this used to be a really big issue like now i feel like a lot of people have like better pcs in general but like even back 10 years ago one of the biggest problems with games is whenever a game had really good graphics it was effectively unplayable for a large amount of people people just could not yeah they just they were not ready for that and like you'd have games come out and it's like this is a great game but nobody can [ __ ] play it because of just like how high the uh the options were um crisis you know another big one was half-life 2. half-life 2 was [ __ ] massive like that came out in what 2004 no people still didn't have graphics cards by then you know they were still running they were still trying to boot this up on a windows 95 pc it was brutal who is [Music] focus on things that [Music] [Music] yeah he's gonna say wow [Music] this the same [ __ ] [ __ ] that happens with so many other games is that it it gets developed by people that don't [ __ ] understand the genre they just make their one game and that's it like you have to always be looking at what other people are doing you have to always be like innovating it's like like i go and i look at like for example uh it's like i thought wow is like the norm then i go and i play final fantasy it's like wait a minute no i don't have to do a [ __ ] 30 second you know 30 minute run back you know like like whenever i was doing c'thun right i don't have to do this like oh i don't have to like rebuff every time like my mouth just stay on it's fine it's like a lot of the things that you you just take for granted as like a this is just the way it is other games say wait a minute why right and like you have to look around and say like this is actually take a step back deconstruct it and say like what really matters like blizzard used to be the best at this blizzard one of the things that blizzard was better at than any other company in the world was taking a good idea and making it better straight up like that is what their strength was was taking like you know any time a good mmo came out and everybody'd be happy i'd be happy i bet great blizzard's going to steal all their good ideas and put them in wow okay how whenever mr pandario was out like wow was in full swing it was the game still even with mr pandaria it was a still game no way no research at all well they probably thought that they were making better games or they were you know high off of their own success so they never really thought [Music] [Music] um so just at the the launch stage then of 1.0 what was the feeling within square enix the beta was quite close to launch were people anticipating that there would be negative feedback or [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] it's just really surprising like i again i just i can't get over like how much this reminds me of new world like i feel like this is like one for one what happened with new world like am i crazy here like i think that's exactly what happened it's exactly like new world yeah final fantasy [Music] [Music] that this wasn't usual launch problems so they called on a few select members of the team to create a task force this task force would research what changes the game needed and the resources the development environment would require to do the work i don't know why companies don't do that here in the us like this is a smart thing to do because you've got a massive [ __ ] product you've invested like you know millions of dollars into this and it's like what what i feel like we do i feel like it doesn't happen a lot of times it's like the game comes out it's not good and it's just like uh well well you know it is hey you know it is what it is i just i don't understand why that happens it's so frustrating and like i'm mainly talking about wow but like it's like how did how did this not happen with shadowlands and bfa you know like it just frustrates me so much because like it's just common sense of course you should make a team to decide like why it's messed up right especially if it's a live service game [ __ ] as if that team would talk to yoshida-san about their worries after hours his thoughts were that the current organizational structure would need to be modified if the team was going to make the changes required in october of 2010 yashidasan talked to the then square enix president yoshiwara and suggested they initiate a company-wide emergency to get the team the resources they need holy [ __ ] spent a few days talking to the 14 development team about their concerns and while a lot of the team had suggested that the current task force was in fact up to the task some members of the 14 team had pleaded to have yoshida-san join the project to help and so it transpired that in late november corporate took the decision to remove hiromishi tanaka from the team and move noble aki komodo from director to lead designer both of their vacant positions would be filled by yoshida-san damn at that time he was leading a team that was working on an original ip for square enix all right yeah two guys leave that team but excited for the opportunity to work on one of the company's crown jewels a numbered final fantasy game yeah it's huge he got right to work if i you don't like it you can get the [ __ ] out that's what it is yeah there it is holy [ __ ] yeah then you can leave but just give me three months and then let me know what you think by then the thing is you got to keep in mind is like final fantasy is like such a big thing with square enix this is like their main game like that's like the main thing that's like you think of square enix you think of final fantasy right so like if if there's an l final fantasy that's going to be like there's an l expansion like if blizzard if if wow is bad blizzard is bad if wow is good blizzard is good that's just the facts 13 i saw both reactions i saw the oh my god we just went through a year of hell and now he's asking us to go through a year and a half of hell to get this point that might you know be another failure because you know no one had taken a game wait that was soaking holy [ __ ] i don't think he mentioned his name god damn so he was there ever since the beginning holy [ __ ] he did i didn't see that maybe i looked away for a second silken was a sound mic dude yeah i just didn't know his name i didn't see the name we built it holy [ __ ] in this manner before that's so cool like yeah you just have to trust me and yeah you could you know waste another year and a half of your life and it could be a failure and you know but you're gonna have to believe me on this one um and so yeah a lot of people were like i can't do this anymore i don't know and i can understand that because again it was a gamble but then on the other hand there were i mean a lot of us um you know myself included but i mean a lot of people on the team that were like no i mean we worked so hard on this and we did our jobs the best that we could but for a lot of you know reasons some circumstances that were out of our control you know decisions made by higher-ups decisions made by other teams that have you know affected our work and nothing that we could do about it but we had put our all into it and we were invested in the project and we still believed in the project to have someone from the outside come in and not just come in to say okay you know forget it we're just going to do it my way or the highway he's like he you know he asked our opinions he laid out a road map he gave us a vision and a hope and it even though it seemed like it would be difficult to achieve it didn't seem inconceivable yoship knew one of the things that's really important whenever you actually are like in charge of people is you can't just tell people what to do like you can't do that like it's just you have that [ __ ] happen and like nobody's gonna [ __ ] listen to you it's just not gonna remember this is what i said before like with that last video it's like you can't just like [ __ ] people over and expect them not to turn around and bite you on the ankle you know and like maybe it's not going to take you down but it's just going to make it's going to make your life more complicated it's going to be annoying right and that's it lead by example no well you you treat people the thing is like you treat people like you're not in charge of them right you treat them like you're responsible for making sure that everybody succeeds it's like you view yourself not as a position of power but as a position of responsibility i i think that's kind of like that's how i would put it it's a big responsibility to be in charge of [ __ ] like this it's not just like oh i'm in charge i get to tell people what to do nah this shit's hard no time to wait he worked with corporate to make sure the team had time off both for them to relax but also to give him time to build his new vision to do research playing other mmos and to help draft his plan to deliver the vision and how the team was going to do it they had very little time to fix this game so once they started the specifications document would have to be watertight and as captain of the ship he needed to be able to answer every question the team may have quickly yoshida-san was now at the helm of his first final fantasy and as an avid mmo fan he was looking forward to getting in there and fixing it what he couldn't have known at this stage was the scale of the job ahead of them that no matter how much they patched finally it was [ __ ] design they couldn't ever fix it what they'd have to do was something that no developer had ever done to rebuild an entire mmo while the original version was still running i don't think that this is what i should do with wow immediately that it was something that couldn't be solved via patches i think they still believe that you know if we patch it it'll be fine and it wasn't until they reevaluated and then brought in you know the new blood yoshasan came in and told him okay yeah this is not something that can be patched if we want to fix this that's one thing that's like really important that i think a lot of people don't realize is that it's actually super important to have new people come in and have new people like really have a fresh look at things not just go and [ __ ] have the same [ __ ] [ __ ] rehashed over and over and over you know you have to have a new perspective new people to see things take a drastic step yoshida spent seven weeks researching and returned with two options for corporate it was then he realized that it would be impossible to convert the current game into an mmo that could last the test of time ultimately though this was a decision that corporate had to make so he returned with not one but two plans plan a and plan b during this meeting he explained that plan a would be to patch the game and make it more playable but that ultimately the game would never really satisfy players and though screenix may make their money back the damage to the online brand would be catastrophic and then there was plan b original final fantasy that's big that's the red pill i don't think any other game had really done something like this before like i'm i'm trying to think about like has this ever really happened like at that point in time like i'm pretty sure that was basically never what had happened like no man's sky that's like [ __ ] like 10 years later man that was like way later and so like lost ark yeah way way later i'm talking about like a new game and uh or sorry a game at that time uh so like this like that that just just saying that is like crazy like wait what the [ __ ] because like nobody had thought of doing anything like that yeah it foreign that's one thing that's like also really a factor is like final fantasy was always like a game that pushed limits like a final fantasy 7 huge game i think final fantasy 10 was like probably like the one that most people can remember where it's like this one just like [ __ ] went above and beyond that's a big dick move for them to just say like yeah [ __ ] remake the whole game you know what let's let's bet on it going well yeah no western developers would choose b a lot of people would not choose b they would just say like let's make the money back let's move on do the next one yeah reputation yeah the reputation matters a lot it's something that's like it's like you don't read the record fantasy 14 1.0 was in a state of disarray square enix had decided to suspend subscriptions to help ease the negativity around the game while the ps3 version was indefinitely postponed for the next two years yoshida-san and his team would work tirelessly on not one but two mmos patching the original 1.0 to fans expectations while secretly working on a brand new version of final fantasy that is 14. that's nice next episode we focus on that two-year period and tell the incredible story of the falling moon of dalamud the death of 1.0 and the birth of a new aorzia holy [ __ ] man holy [ __ ] [ __ ] wow my game come link video i'll link the video real quick okay um we we can watch it but we got to watch it quick i can't do too many pauses all right because we got all craft coming up right after that so we'll we'll do part two uh part two is 36 minutes we might pause it or like you know not finish it today but if we don't we'll just finish it next time 100 but yeah there is a part two and we'll go into it that is just nuts man holy [ __ ] [ __ ] like yeah yeah let's go yeah we'll we'll watch part of it at least right and then we'll go from there i'm gonna have to say like it is like it's like obviously like yoshida everybody thinks about like the fact that like you know he kind of saved the [ __ ] but you've got to think about it like the corporate people at square enix they were the ones that really made the call to do this you know it was like it was him that made it happen but they were the ones that funded the [ __ ] right like that's a big dick move absolutely those are some real gamers bro yeah exactly they had to agree with it oh my god all right let's see it here we go it's the second part uh i think i got this [ __ ] set up right let me see if it is uh what's this here okay we got it we good we good crazy monetary risk yeah exactly imagine bobby making that decision i could not yeah so what did you think i could not perspective as cfo to fix this problem that's a no-shot situation it's going to involve creating a new game it's going to involve keeping the other game still running did you think at that time that that was a solid investment that that's what square enix should be doing or did you think that it was a risky adventure [Music] [Music] like that's the perspective that like a lot of a lot of people somehow don't seem to have is like whenever your reputation is damaged it's not something that you read on like an accounting ledger it's something that's like it's like like the hong kong thing with blizzard that's going to happen to them people are going to bring that up in 10 years okay yeah it's just becomes part of your while you see yeah [Music] that's the perspective that people just don't seem to have is like how much that just [ __ ] you hello and welcome back to our series on the fallen rise of final fantasy xiv online we rejoined yeshida-san and the team at square enix at the start of a long adventure and with players leaving on mass and the clock ticking it was time for them to formulate a plan but how exactly do you rebuild an mmo while people are still playing it yoshida-san set his eyes on a 2013 launch date for the new version of 14 as he wanted to have the game out for fans within the playstation 3's life cycle but to do this while still patching 1.0 he would have to create an entirely new mmo in less than half the time of most conservative estimates oh [ __ ] so before we get into specifics of what exactly was changed i wanted to know how he did it so for a moment we step away from game design and dive into a critically important aspect of video games development that we rarely talk about what's uh project management oh designing an mmo must i just imagine the timeline for something like this is at least five years for anything and you're being asked to do it in in less than half of that probably when you're designing games when we talk to people so much of it is iterative that you create something and then you refine it and you brush it and then you look at it again but you didn't have that luxury you had to make sure that the version of a realm reborn that was coming out at that date was the final package so did that change the way that you had to set up the team and the way your workflow kind of went mmrpg mmos are like the riskiest thing for like uh for somebody to develop it's like whenever you make an mmo you not only are investing like a ton of time and money in the front end you're also making an investment into the future it's like you can't just release an mmo and be like ah you know i mean well you can do that we've seen that happen but uh that's not a good idea and it's just it's gonna make the game worse right yeah it's a huge one for i remember killing this [ __ ] that's the thing is like you itemize time invested into different things and you know like how much and how little time certain takes uh like that's a big factor [Music] [Music] that's one of the big factors that like again having somebody in charge that understands what things are rather than just like looking at things and being like yeah this is how long i think it should take because this is what like a book says like yeah you like yeah min maxing your time basically that's it like min maxing time is actually like super [ __ ] important [Music] yeah like my dad uh he uh he actually did this like after he retired from being an executive uh he did consulting work and he did basically like process analysis stuff uh like this it's actually like one of the big things i i learned from him is like how to not like waste time doing [ __ ] right and like that's why i was always like very good at wow and [ __ ] and uh like getting stuff done is because i would figure out like the most optimized way of doing something and like you'll notice that like anybody if you look at like top end guilds or like anybody who's like really high up there and like you ask them like how did they actually go about solving a problem they have [ __ ] itemized down just like this yeah it's like whenever people are actually working eight hours they're in office for eight hours they're not working eight hours they're working like maybe six or five yeah it's like doing that kind of stuff burns people out a lot it's like you have to have everybody like on the same page with [ __ ] it's like i'm sure some of you guys have probably been in like a like a situation where mike everybody is working really hard around the clock and like morale is super good everybody has like a shared goal and like people are just trying to to get it done right they really care about it and then like and that feels great right but you've also probably like at least heard of times where it's the opposite people are just being worked to death and it's like there's no real point to it there's no end in sight it's just brutal yeah it's a stressful environment like morale becomes more important the uh more stressful things are so yeah it's it's really important to make sure that like people feel like they're getting heard and they you know they're not upset about things but he came in with you know this huge xl that had all these lists of everything on it what we're going to do here what we're going to do here this is when we're going to do them by and this is what we're going to do here yeah and to see that's like okay this isn't just a stop gap type of thing where president's like okay crazy here let's just change the leader and hopefully things will you know yeah things will get better it was an actual okay this guy really wants to do this he has this plan yoshida had them running like a well-oiled machine so it was time to get to work first things first they had to start to roll out of patches for 1.0 but a critical part of the failure of the first game was the poor communications quality such dog [ __ ] with their community because this is hidden from another one during this protracted period of redevelopment they had to be a lot more transparent what we explained to players very first is it was failure i mean failure so we need to restart the game but i mean you know i actually just realized this um lost ark stole the um the two keys uh the way that they organize themselves on who's the best and who's the worst they just stole that from final fantasy kobolds they literally lifted that [ __ ] straight off of it but i didn't realize that's why i looked at him there thought i thought of it like yeah they straight a [ __ ] airlifted that right off they're like yep same thing and they're both like little goofy little animals you know it's pretty much the same [ __ ] thing if it works it works yeah and that timing we didn't i mean we wronged remember is not announced but we are going to fix this game we need more communication so just list all the changes plan changes so so some i mean upper management people doesn't like this because if you show this to the players i mean player knows what we will do so i mean after that you did this you did this but you didn't do this you didn't this yeah everyone can check and check that so i mean some people doesn't really like that way but i mean when your son and myself are discussing how we deal with the community but what we need to do is to establish the trust that's a big thing is like trust matters a lot and you see that with like end walker like end walker had a lot of uh problems on release uh it did like the server cues like that was [ __ ] like if you can't play the game that's a huge [ __ ] problem but like the people trusted the developers and they realize like they're doing their best and it'll be ready when it's ready you know what i mean like that's a massive thing and it's like you see what happens whenever that trust gets eroded and like people just don't uh they don't want to hear it even if it's something reasonable is that people thought wod was going to continuously get better and to be fair i think blizzard pretty much delivered like legion was [ __ ] insane like the amount of content that legion had was astronomically more than like pretty much any expansion uh that we had had before right and so like people got rewarded they felt good about it they're like all right you know and the bfa comes out and it's an issue and it's like well hopefully it's good shadowhands comes out and it's also an issue people are not happy about that right that's whenever you you lose the trust that's what it was okay [Music] some working on the new version of 14 and others working on the updates to 1.0 what he called the guts version of the game but with so much of the game requiring fixing where do you even start it's crazy how bad that interface was oh my god she's awfully right in the context like these are all insights and experience that he's had probably some people on the team didn't even think this was a problem you know but he had that insight because he played other mmos he played wow he played ultima online and so like he knew like oh this is not how it's supposed to work that's not how the game's supposed to be played foreign you could quit the game engineering [Music] interface isn't sexy it's not something you tend to hear a lot about in video games coverage because yeah you do remember whenever all the ubisoft developers were upset and other game devs were mad because interface for [ __ ] elden ring was dog [ __ ] but nobody cared yeah it was a it's workable ah yeah is it good i know i mean it's not good but it's it's yeah it is what it is yeah i hear about that all the time that's familiar yeah people are used to this whatever really when it's done correctly you're not supposed to notice it yeah exactly so when the early patches for the game concentrated on interface and quality of life updates much of the community began to get frustrated yeah the team needed to fix it quickly so you should employ the help of a square foot i think this is kind of what's happening with dragonfly in a way is that like wow like they're trying to fix like core issues with the game like ui like base character design and like people want new bells and new whistles and sometimes you don't need new bells and new whistles you got to worry about the [ __ ] wheels and the axles and [ __ ] right you got to worry about the goddamn engine and it's like people perceive that as not being like not working on it but like they actually are one of the developers on that original 1.0 task yes yeah that's what it used to be like in the old final fantasy games like you didn't have icons like you had [ __ ] it would write down and this is like all old fantasy games that [ __ ] was just written down it's like you know elixir of power boom there it is the game has bad combat it's a bad game period that's it it's done that's all i have to say bad combat bad game yeah having back attacks i think makes it way more interesting like i'm a fan of like the back attacks and [ __ ] because like it's like in lost ark i feel like that's what makes combat interesting is you want to get behind them and [ __ ] positionals it can be frustrating positionals can be frustrating whenever you're not the only person controlling them though that's what the difference is uh all crap yeah we're gonna i'm gonna join up in the chat right probably like two minutes that's right that's the thing is that he thinks about the [ __ ] that matters like bro you can't [ __ ] you you can't ride a chocobo like that's uh i mean like come on that's a big [ __ ] deal m [Music] this is what i wish happened with new world it's like i think new world gets too much hate but like because like they do try to make the game better but i i don't know if they can get it back without a [ __ ] like a massive change you know i don't trust amazon a lot of people one dude did all the team at their site said on what needed to be changed and how they were going to do holy [ __ ] man god [ __ ] damn that's a lot that one guy made seven classes jesus this is not even yeah he's not [ __ ] around listen we're gonna do all craft um obviously let's be realistic there's no way i was gonna finish this one we're gonna watch this and also the last part next time i'm gonna watch all the rest this we have all craft guys [Music] you

Channel: Asmongold TV

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Keywords: asmongold, asmongold reacts, asmongold wow, asmongold highlights, asmongold youtube, world of warcraft, asmongold funny, asmongold tv, asmongold channel, ZackRawrr

Id: FVbHeKWkL3U

Length: 97min 12sec (5832 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022