Don't just stand on the sidelines and be a spectator. Get off the bench and help the effort. Seriously now. How can we make this happen? I'm only one man. It takes atleast a couple hundred or a thousand at least to get heard by a big company like that.
You are right, I will dedicate the coming four weeks of my life to this matter. I will be on every Square Enix DLG forum page, Facebook fan page, and review site to get this across. I will arrange a meeting with the likes of congress to have this matter addressed properly. I will travel to the residence of every subjected member of the Square Enix brand to hold them each personally responsible for this otrageous decision to not include multiplayer features. I will become a part of their everyday world and torment them accordingly for the matter at hand. I will travel by night, stopping only to eat with no rest whatsoever until this corrupt decision, to not include asynchronous multiplayer features in a game perfectly suited for it, is abolished. This is my pledge, this is my oath, this, IS. MY. MISSION.
I applaud your drive and enthusiasm, and hope your plea gets some traction. I am not being argumentative, but the multiplayer aspect simply has never interested me. Maybe if it was asynchronous, I would play, but playing online with a game like this would take a time investment I personally dont have. With life and everything else, it would be difficult to be able to get myself and one other player to be able to just be playing FFT to complete a whole match. With many people likely to be playing this on a phone, what happens when someone hits the home button, responds to a text, or gets a phone call? Will the other player get a message saying that the opponent has disconnected? That would be a frustrating experience. If I had to wager, I would say reasons such as those are why SE decided not to implement multiplayer. Again, I mean no disrespect, but I am trying to play devil's advocate here.
Yea, I guess I didn't consider that, but if it were like Words with Friends, etc. Where you can go out and return and have many open multiplayer matches going at once (I'm guessing thats what asynchronus means?) I don't see how that'd be impossible to do. It is a turn based game, so it shouldn't be that difficult. I think they'll wait and see how well it sells, and then consider it. If it sells over 10,000, then maybe they'd consider it themselves. I'm sure people will flood the ratings and reviews with comments such as "Great game, needs multiplayer support though", and things similar.
Yes, asynchronous is what Words With Friends is, where you can take your turns whenever you want. I imagine further changing the coding to allow for such play would be a massive undertaking, since this game was not built from the ground up for this platform. I imagine having the autosave feature was a difficult thing to program in considering the code was not originally made for such a thing. If they could make the multiplayer asynchronous, I would definitely be interested then! What I would be more interested in would be additional battles and characters being introduced, which would take far less programming time and skill to implement. I would even buy it as DLC!
What happens is one of two things: 1) A timer kicks in, allowing the other player some time to get back to the game. 2) The game is saved, to be resumed at a later date, in the manner of most multiplayer sessions since save games were invented. Since both these methods are standardized (the second method has been used when a player drops from online/networked games for 20 years, in everything from Starcraft to the Civilization series, and in all asynchronous iOS titles), I find it extremely unlikely such a minor obstacle, one we overcame two decades ago, would stop Squeenix from implementing multiplayer. Their reasons are probably far less technical, and of a nature either economic or based in a traditional mindset. Yep. That's why I suggested it would be so well suited for Tactics
Unless you actually know that's how FFT works, we can't be sure adding such a thing would be so easy. I would definitely agree that a more traditional mindset is more likely the cause. The programming is probably the excuse to justify the traditional mindset. SE is not exactly known for their innovation these days :-/
Yer right, I can't know for sure in this particular case, with this particular product. But I do know enough programming and game development to know that adding either the timer or the auto-save on player drop IS easy in the vast majority of cases. Extremely easy, even. FFT would have to have a code base messed up beyond belief in order to make at least one of these mechanics problematic to implement And yer probably absolutely right again, about both the programming excuse, the mindset, and the lack of innovation. It is a bit peculiar to think that the FF games were once considered groundbreaking. The fact that SE has continued making upgraded iterations of the same basic game structure for more than 20 years suggests that their original creativity was not rooted in a desire to introduce a new RPG paradigm, but in the fact that the Final Fantasy series just happened to be different from western RPGs by pure chance Yet another reason to look forward to Tactics
You *are* aware that we are discussing how to handle player drops in multiplayer, nothing else.. right? Such a waste of good irony
It's fairly old, but Tactics Arena Online is a pretty good example of what we're talking about. It doesn't have the same RPG depth as FFT does with jobs, though. Still, it shows that it is indeed possible. I think the addition of asynchronous battles would be even more awesome.
I don't think the problem for multiplayer is how to sync it up, but balance. Honestly I don't even know how you could rebalance the game to make it a decent multiplayer experience. I for one am glad to not have the option to battle someone else's party of maxed calculators with Hamedo.
Hi guys. I've been quiet for some time, since SE disappointed me with all the delays. But finally the day is coming. I remembered how frustrating was to be tied to my tv set and PSOne in order to play FFT, and I never had any interest on mobile gaming devices until the iPhone. I really believe that turning a game that was originally conceived as a single player experience to multiplayer, would not generated what we would expect. Looking to FFT gameplay right now, I believe that a rushed multiplayer mode would create a few new problems: - How they would balance the jobs and characters? - How they would create a match-making game, considering that they would have to implement a ranking system to match newbies with newbies, pros vs pros, etc. IMO, a rushed multiplayer mode would not suffice. I'm still waiting for Lost Company (this is the old name, don't remember the new), a game that was created with the multiplayer aspect in mind since day one. Putting multiplayer in FFT, for me, would be like putting a half-baked multiplayer in Aralon, for example.
I agree, the only multiplayer option I could fathom being added is local Bluetooth/WiFi. We are talking about a very deep and complex game and to add matchmaking global server would be a fricking headache and a half. Plus lets be honest, the fun factor would die very quickly once you start facing hacked level 9999 Cloud parties.
As long as all players have access to the same set of units/characters, balance is not a necessity, as players will always be on equal footing, even if individual units are not. However, inter-unit balance certainly makes the game far more fun, and yer probably right, it would probably be a gargantuan task Well, when irony is squandered, the situation becomes a bit ironic. Which means that logically and deductively, you DID succeed! Jobb well done, good sir! Of course, this also means that the irony was never squandered in the first place, and that's not very ironic...
The game is all ready balanced. Especially if you have 2 teams of fully maxed characters. The whole concept of the game is strategy and 'tactics' isn't it? So the more strategic approach would win. It's just up to you (the player) to put your best team out there and use them to their full potential. It's your own fault if you get owned by a better team. Every character and job has a strength and weakness. That's the balance.
I saw all the heated debates like the correct way to write 5's and 7's, and I wanted to be a part of it
