Square Enix will be "aggressive in applying AI"
(nichegamer.com)
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I remember when Square games were an auto-buy.
The '90s were great.
Same, brother. I was a diehard fan while growing up. I played virtually everything under the Squaresoft label, and it was almost all gold. Even the weaker entries were still good. People have mixed opinions on FF9 and 10, but I think after those two games Square plunged off a cliff into bloated melodrama, horrific writing, dipshit characters, and jank, unfun mechanics.
FF10-2 fucking sucked
Square Enix also went in hard with their plans for NFTs, even long after it was clear that that train had left empty.
They just keep hopping on every bandwagon that comes up each year, but always just a smidge too late for it to be ahead of the curve. Likely out of fear it'll fail, but always too late for it to not have run its course anyway.
Even Forspoken was clearly woke just a few years after woke could sell a game.
Square-Enix looking to be the next Konami. The future is in Final Fantasy pachinko machines.
And right after I was gushing so hard about Star Ocean: The Second Story R.
Granted, Square Enix didn't make that one. They just published it. Gemdrops developed it.
Tri-ace, who made the original game, was formed by original Enix employees. So the majority of games they make were always published by Square, and are probably still majority owned by them in spirit if not actuality.
But Japanese publishers seem considerably less involved than Western ones, as being published by X company rarely seems to hold any actual effect on the game outside the localization.
How did I never know that about Tri-Ace? No wonder pre-merger Enix published the PS1 release.
Yeah the "tri" in the name was meant to represent the 3 major Enix employees who left to form the company in the first place. In a lot of ways they were basically just a 3rd party studio for Squeenix until around 2009 when the big guy behind Star Ocean left the company.
Blockchain is just the shitty get rich quick version of the public-facing servers Square Enix already has. They don't need it, so the only reason to jump on that bandwagon is to sell magic beans to gullible "investors."
AI has its uses. As a new alternative to procedural generation it could be used to create more assets, cheaper and faster than by using human artists, and it does have the unique property of allowing you to create arbitrary voice lines, which would be cool for RPGs.
And the cloud... depends on how much they want to keep server-side. Online games are better if you have a dedicated server to handle sensitive information rather than enabling wallhacks by trusting the client to not tell the player where the enemy is, but you also want to be able to do all that stuff client-side if you're offline/the servers are down.
I just misread the word as "blockstain" and now I really like that term.
"AI".
Call of Duty has implemented AI to fill lobbies on account of their dwindling playerbase, and to police the speech of what's left of said playerbase. I'd say Activision has also utilized it to aid in design and development. They've resorted to this because just about every competent employee capable of actually creating something has departed from Activision-Blizzard, leaving only unskilled labor on the payroll. Among this unskilled labor are troons, diversity hires, and liberal white women who work to undermine heterosexual white males. AI has enabled and emboldened these people. I do not expect it will be any better in the hands of Square Enix. It doesn't lead to increase in quality. All AI will accomplish is serve as yet another safeguard for unskilled, subversive individuals.
God damn square enix. Just rent out tifa to gacha games.
They already do that with 2B.
"We will not be engaging in creativity or quality control".
Why in the world would you ever think telling people you are going to use a shortcut is ever going to work in your favor. Fucking insane. Cutting corners is not an act of pride, it's a sign of desperation. And in a world filled with share holders that shit themselves every time a CEO catches a cold... very strange.
I'll be honest I don't think this is as despair-inducing as you guys seem to think it is. A lot of their money at this point comes from the MMOs and Gachas, so it will most likely just be applied to Gacha stuff. Yoshi has already said multiple times that NFT/Blockchain won't be coming to the MMO so that isn't much of a concern.
FF16, while it's pacing and story did kind of fall off, I thought was quite fun. It's not going to be a contender for best FF of all time or anything, but I enjoyed the game and the combat system so it wasn't too bad.
The second installment of the FF7 remake looks absolutely beautiful but I fear the story will continue to unravel and become worse, so maybe take that with a grain of salt.
Other companies have done us so much worse over the past several years, that considering using some new technology (and hearing from a CEO doesn't mean much to me honestly) as opposed to becoming as hyper woke as western studios is not much of a concern for me yet.