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Final Fantasy XV Impressions: Mark All Spoilers

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Wasn't Versus story supposed to span multiple games and then Tabata had to condense it down into just one game?
Yes and the funny thing is I'm questioning why because in the first few chapters the story is really sparse so if it was supposed to span multiple games where did all of that content go?
 
Media Markt in Germany already sells the special edition. Didn't pick it up, though. 70 bucks. :/

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Yep, just visited my local german Media Markt and bought it too for 70 euros
 
~Footprints in the Sand~ - A Beautiful FFXV Poem

One night I dreamed a dream.
As I was walking along the beach with my bros.
Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life.
For each scene, I noticed four sets of footprints in the sand,
One belonging to me and three to my bros.

After the last scene of my life flashed before me,
I looked back at the footprints in the sand.
I noticed that at many times along the path of my life,
especially at the very lowest and saddest times,
there were only three sets of footprints.

This really troubled me, so I asked my bros about it.
"Bros, you said once you decided to Stand By Me,
You'd walk with me all the way.
But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life,
there were only three set of footprints.
I don't understand why, when I needed you guys the most, one of you would leave me."

Prompto whispered, "My precious Noct, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only three sets of footprints,

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Why in the blue fuck is the save file one big 629MB file on PS4?
Jesus, thats gonna take a fucking AGE to back up to the cloud in rest and out of rest mode.
 
So this game is just proving to me that Open World and strong narrative is really hard to pull off. MGSV tried and failed miserably and this seems to be doing the exact same thing. I understand changing the formula to gain new fans, but when you change things that much on the story side of a game it's just so damn disappointing to those that loved how those things worked in the first place. Witcher 3 is the only game to me that was able to pull it off and even then it wasn't that great.
 
Crickey. How many slots used?

I have the following:

Slot 1: Save File I cant overwrite
Slot 2: Save file I cant overwrite
Slot 3: My own personal save file I manually saved.

Slot 1 and 2 were saved automatically without any input from me and I cant save over them.

They both state their Autosave slots as well as Chapter One and ones 1 minute 52 seconds playtime, the others 8 minutes 22 seconds playtime.

I've literally just started, my own save file I manually saved is only 11 minutes long.
 
Those who have finished the game. I'd like to know one thing!

Is there any mention of Nomura aside from character concepts in the credits?
like "Original Director / original concept" etc.
 
Just had my first bug.

Picked up the Regalia and after they take that group photo the game stayed on a black screen with music playing.

:(
 
So this game is just proving to me that Open World and strong narrative is really hard to pull off. MGSV tried and failed miserably and this seems to be doing the exact same thing. I understand changing the formula to gain new fans, but when you change things that much on the story side of a game it's just so damn disappointing to those that loved how those things worked in the first place. Witcher 3 is the only game to me that was able to pull it off and even then it wasn't that great.

Yeah, this is why I act damn near allergic every time one of my favorite series tries to suddenly go open world. The philosophies seem to be at complete odds with one-another and I play primarily for the narratives.

I actually enjoyed Dragon Age: Inquisition's critical path overall though so GAF might just tell me I have no real standards to speak of. But on the other hand MGSV disappointed me remarkably. So, if I luck out and find FFXV's core plot to be as well-presented in the final telling as DAI's then maybe I'll be alright. If I end up concurring with you that it's just as atrocious as MGSV... well... damn.
 
so, sounds like the combat is great and there's a ton of optional content. Party member interaction is good, story outside of that, not really.

I'm looking forward to playing it! For a while now, that's honestly the most I thought would have been possible, given the troubled development.
 
Yes and the funny thing is I'm questioning why because in the first few chapters the story is really sparse so if it was supposed to span multiple games where did all of that content go?

We don't know anything beyond the fact that there were significant changes made. I think its a simplistic thing to state that the game as it is now is just Versus saga story put into one game.

Versus was canceled and many changes already made by Nomura himself in the jump from Versus to 15 to 'make it suitable for a mainline title'.

Then when he left, Tabata was in charge of doing whatever he could to the story to bring it out as quick as he could.

I think that the combination of Tabata having to significantly cut and restructure the game already left no time to explore sequel or multiple game content, but in general, he rewrote things, so its not as easily as fitting them back together as a puzzle piece.

Most importantly, as the deadline loomed, we can see that many things in the trailers did not make the cut either. So on top of what had already been done, a lot of things just had to be cut entirely, restructured or changed.

Game development is very complicated. Like Bioshock infinite, i doubt many of the things that Ken Levine as his team wanted to do when they started on infinite as the base concept ended up being anywhere in the final game due to multiple reasons. We can only speculate.
 
I'll give you an example of the plot/story/whatever falling apart. At the end of Chapter 1, you travel to the harbor where you spend the night.
In the night there is a cutscene of the talks failing and the king being murdered. There is no lead-in into the scenes as the game just throws them at you. Not to mention it's not even a coherent scene but essentially a series of highlights. It's jarring as it switches point of view to some weird third person thing since nobody there except maybe Corr would have been able to see all these events in this detail. There's no tension in the scenes and it comes across as SE's CGI department wanting to see you watch them wank off on screen. Now besides the poorly directly CGI cutscnes, Noctis and crew decide to head back to Insomnia to see for themselves. So why did the game even bother showing you what happened then? It ruins the surprise for the audience and undercuts the tension of seeing the military ships flying above you.
That's a lack of confidence on the part of the director in that he felt he needed an action sequence to spruce things up even if it goes against the atmospheric storytelling and doesn't make sense.
 
Yeah, this is why I act damn near allergic every time one of my favorite series tries to suddenly go open world. The philosophies seem to be at complete odds with one-another and I play primarily for the narratives.

I actually enjoyed Dragon Age: Inquisition's critical path overall though so GAF might just tell me I have no real standards to speak of. But on the other hand MGSV disappointed me remarkably. So, if I luck out and find FFXV's core plot to be as well-presented in the final telling as DAI's then maybe I'll be alright. If I end up concurring with you that it's just as atrocious as MGSV... well... damn.
It's not as bad as MGSV. Like, objectively.
 
If anyone is interested: Munich, Germany Saturns sell the Special Edition Steelbook for 47,99 EUR. You get 20% discount on the MSRP.

Fuck, that's cheap. Well, I think the €52 I paid for the D1 Edition is still an ok price for a new FF game. I'll get a used PS4 special edition in a few months.
 
Spoilers: This is a video I came across on Youtube which summarizes some the hardcore FF fans opinion of FF XV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAsSxnWovPM

Not my opinion, I just found it interested looking at his huge Final Fantasy collection and his impressions of the game


I think after an hour most final Fantasy games would be lacking. 10ish I think really is the point in a jrpg where if you don't like it things won't change much
 
Yes and the funny thing is I'm questioning why because in the first few chapters the story is really sparse so if it was supposed to span multiple games where did all of that content go?

Just making assumptions, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first game would've been mostly Noctis and co. escaping Lucis. Kinda like what we'll probably be getting with FFVIIR-1! XD
 
I'll give you an example of the plot/story/whatever falling apart. At the end of Chapter 1, you travel to the harbor where you spend the night.
In the night there is a cutscene of the talks failing and the king being murdered. There is no lead-in into the scenes as the game just throws them at you. Not to mention it's not even a coherent scene but essentially a series of highlights. It's jarring as it switches point of view to some weird third person thing since nobody there except maybe Corr would have been able to see all these events in this detail. There's no tension in the scenes and it comes across as SE's CGI department wanting to see you watch them wank off on screen. Now besides the poorly directly CGI cutscnes, Noctis and crew decide to head back to Insomnia to see for themselves. So why did the game even bother showing you what happened then? It ruins the surprise for the audience and undercuts the tension of seeing the military ships flying above you.
That's a lack of confidence on the part of the director in that he felt he needed an action sequence to spruce things up even if it goes against the atmospheric storytelling and doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I found that pretty jarring. That scene
where the king is murdered I'm pretty sure is footage from the Kingsglaive movie. Haven't seen it, but it looked so out of place and slap-dash montage-like that I can't believe it was original cgi for the game. It would have been more effective if they nixed that part entirely
 
I'll give you an example of the plot/story/whatever falling apart. At the end of Chapter 1, you travel to the harbor where you spend the night.
In the night there is a cutscene of the talks failing and the king being murdered. There is no lead-in into the scenes as the game just throws them at you. Not to mention it's not even a coherent scene but essentially a series of highlights. It's jarring as it switches point of view to some weird third person thing since nobody there except maybe Corr would have been able to see all these events in this detail. There's no tension in the scenes and it comes across as SE's CGI department wanting to see you watch them wank off on screen. Now besides the poorly directly CGI cutscnes, Noctis and crew decide to head back to Insomnia to see for themselves. So why did the game even bother showing you what happened then? It ruins the surprise for the audience and undercuts the tension of seeing the military ships flying above you.
That's a lack of confidence on the part of the director in that he felt he needed an action sequence to spruce things up even if it goes against the atmospheric storytelling and doesn't make sense.

That part was so incredible bad, glad I am not only one being thrown off by that.
 
Yeah, this is why I act damn near allergic every time one of my favorite series tries to suddenly go open world. The philosophies seem to be at complete odds with one-another and I play primarily for the narratives.

I actually enjoyed Dragon Age: Inquisition's critical path overall though so GAF might just tell me I have no real standards to speak of. But on the other hand MGSV disappointed me remarkably. So, if I luck out and find FFXV's core plot to be as well-presented in the final telling as DAI's then maybe I'll be alright. If I end up concurring with you that it's just as atrocious as MGSV... well... damn.

Yup, and to be fair I am still very early on, but seeing comments in this thread I am not that encouraged. When people say I should be pulling story from radio stations and banter it just seems to me they didn't do a good job of marrying a Final Fantasy with more Western ideas. It's fine to use radio and banter as supplemental things to story telling, but when those are used to derive most of your story that is just straight up shitty.
 
Everyone: don't stay out at night

Me: ignores everyone, it's 10pm, nothing happens

Me: gets ambushed by demons on the road on the way back to Hammerhead

Shit was scary!
 
Can you have multiple save slots or only one which autosaves.
Multiple. Around 10 or so slots.

I'll give you an example of the plot/story/whatever falling apart. At the end of Chapter 1, you travel to the harbor where you spend the night.
In the night there is a cutscene of the talks failing and the king being murdered. There is no lead-in into the scenes as the game just throws them at you. Not to mention it's not even a coherent scene but essentially a series of highlights. It's jarring as it switches point of view to some weird third person thing since nobody there except maybe Corr would have been able to see all these events in this detail. There's no tension in the scenes and it comes across as SE's CGI department wanting to see you watch them wank off on screen. Now besides the poorly directly CGI cutscnes, Noctis and crew decide to head back to Insomnia to see for themselves. So why did the game even bother showing you what happened then? It ruins the surprise for the audience and undercuts the tension of seeing the military ships flying above you.
That's a lack of confidence on the part of the director in that he felt he needed an action sequence to spruce things up even if it goes against the atmospheric storytelling and doesn't make sense.
I got news for you.

The CGI scene was added in patch and this is from the Kingsglaive movie. It serves no purpose whatsoever and the reason it comes off as badly directed is because they cut and edited a 1+ hour movie in 1 short snippet

SQUARE ENIX IS BACK
 
Yeah, this is why I act damn near allergic every time one of my favorite series tries to suddenly go open world. The philosophies seem to be at complete odds with one-another and I play primarily for the narratives.

Agreed. But they do it because people are vocal about it and they feel like it's a standard everything needs to abide by. I'm not saying XIII's linearity was handled right, but it's not solely why it frowned upon.

I'm okay with XV's being open, but I don't need it either. Hopefully VII remake doesn't feel like it needs to be all or nothing.
 
The CGI scene was added in patch and this is from the Kingsglaive movie. It serves no purpose whatsoever and the reason it comes off as badly directed is because they cut and edited a 1+ hour movie in 1 short snippet

Oh I know it's from Kingsglaive and it's dead obvious that's the case. I was expecting that to be a lot better integrated than how it actually was.

It's clear they shouldn't have done it.
 
Oh I know it's from Kingsglaive and it's dead obvious that's the case. I was expecting that to be a lot better integrated than how it actually was.

It's clear they shouldn't have done it.

They added it at the eleventh hour because focus groups didn't understand what the hell was happening, there is 0 exposition as to what's going on in the world. Too bad they didn't have time to make it coherent.
 
BTW, anyone has idea of the involvement of SIE (Sony) in FFXV. They are listed at the end credits as partners or something. I was surprised to see their name.
 
So searching the thread I guess I'm not the only one with an un-shipped Amazon copy. My tracking page has changed from shipping the 25th to "shipping soon," but still says it's due on Tuesday. Hopefully only three more days of dodging spoilers. D:
 
Those who have finished the game. I'd like to know one thing!

Is there any mention of Nomura aside from character concepts in the credits?
like "Original Director / original concept" etc.

I haven't finished the game but I sat through the entire credits during the first stream.

Not only did I not find Nomura, Nojima's name was there either. I might have missed them somewhere else tho.
 
It's not as bad as MGSV. Like, objectively.

That's a relief. MGSV shook me like no other game. And that's despite having suspected for years it would be smaller-scale of plot than most predicted. <_>

Yup, and to be fair I am still very early on, but seeing comments in this thread I am not that encouraged. When people say I should be pulling story from radio stations and banter it just seems to me they didn't do a good job of marrying a Final Fantasy with more Western ideas. It's fine to use radio and banter as supplemental things to story telling, but when those are used to derive most of your story that is just straight up shitty.

I hear you. I'm not thrilled about this at all. Environmental storytelling may become my next big "uh-oh" PR phrase going forward. Despite having mentioned liking Inquisition, that was a serious weakness there too (although it sounds like FFXV has some side quests which feel at least marginally urgent and refined, which is already a big step up from Inquisition, lawl).

Despite my posts these morning I still fully intend to go into this game with an open mind and an understanding that the earlier half is especially sparse on the whole. Seeing posts like yours from folks who seem to prioritize the same content expectations in these kinds of games is just unfortunate.

Agreed. But they do it because people are vocal about it and they feel like it's a standard everything needs to abide by. I'm not saying XIII's linearity was handled right, but it's not solely why it frowned upon.

I'm okay with XV's being open, but I don't need it either. Hopefully VII remake doesn't feel like it needs to be all or nothing.

Yeah. I never felt like FFXIII's biggest flaw was its intense linearity. With a more diverse gameplay loop and a far more well-written main plot I'd have scored that game an 8.5 as opposed to a 4.5-5. As it stands, it's just one of the reasons it doesn't click with me at all.

Sadly, you're absolutely right. These gamer critiques against lacks of open world hooks are vocal and may well reflect sales if studios do not rush to meet the demand. And I'm not saying I won't enjoy Eos for what it is, either, or try to, anyway. Impressions on the game world sound fantastic. But the cost, for me, may prove too great. That'll still garner it at least a 6, though. xD
Scores are meaningless.

As for VII-R, I don't know. With target renders like theirs, it'd be very hard to achieve a world as open as the Kingdom of Lucis. That gives me an odd kind of extreme hope.
 
I'll give you an example of the plot/story/whatever falling apart. At the end of Chapter 1, you travel to the harbor where you spend the night.
In the night there is a cutscene of the talks failing and the king being murdered. There is no lead-in into the scenes as the game just throws them at you. Not to mention it's not even a coherent scene but essentially a series of highlights. It's jarring as it switches point of view to some weird third person thing since nobody there except maybe Corr would have been able to see all these events in this detail. There's no tension in the scenes and it comes across as SE's CGI department wanting to see you watch them wank off on screen. Now besides the poorly directly CGI cutscnes, Noctis and crew decide to head back to Insomnia to see for themselves. So why did the game even bother showing you what happened then? It ruins the surprise for the audience and undercuts the tension of seeing the military ships flying above you.
That's a lack of confidence on the part of the director in that he felt he needed an action sequence to spruce things up even if it goes against the atmospheric storytelling and doesn't make sense.

I had no problems with this though. You know the attack is a real thing, and with the addition of the CG cutscene you actually see it. It wasn't jarring at all. It's a good thing they added that so you feel a sense of scope and just what was lost.
 
So I'm about 30 hours in and currently (SIDEQUEST SPOILERS)
hunting down royal arms because I dig the dungeons in this game a lot
and I'm having a lot of thoughts about the structure of this game.

1) We're getting up against reasonable filesize limits insofar as RPG design goes. You just... can't really have several HD towns + an open world + CG cutscenes these days. I don't even think it's a "pick two" sort of thing. You sorta have to pick one if you want to avoid huge patches--and adding a handful of CG cutscenes was 7gb to begin with. You can't patch in entire towns or open fields. I don't think we're ever going to get old-style RPGs in AAA unless someone manages to pull away from openworld design.

2) This is going under a spoiler just in case:
The game itself reminds me a lot of a D&D campaign. For non-tabletop players, I say that because in D&D you typicakly have to choose two: You can have worldbuilding, you can have a sandbox, or you can have a plot. You only get two of those because of time constraints on the DMs behalf and the sheer fact of length + player interest. Oftentimes if you include a sandbox in any real fashion your plot takes a backseat. Giving the player too much choice results in the plot being disconnected--if only because it takes an incredible storyteller to keep that thread going for the players at all times. So instead of a powerful, centralized plot you're getting worldbuilding (to a degree), character development and the ability to do "more" in general. I don't think we're going to get really good centralized plots until games pull away from open world design sensibilities.
I think it's interesting that AAA RPG development is coming up against age-old tabletop RPG pacing problems.
 
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