Famitsu Exlusive with Tanaka and Komoto
Awesome people on this post - Hiromichi Tanaka and Nobuaki Komoto.
Hello again Fantasy fans, today we take a look at the interview with Producer Hiromichi Tanaka and Director Nobuaki Komoto of Final Fantasy XIV.
Firstly we'll start with the positive side of things! Alpha 1 is going great, opinions, bug reports, everything is coming in hot and they are tackling the issues head on! They seem to be getting quite lots of feedback, mostly from the North American Region. As stated in the interview, the possible reason behind that fact is the NAR players tend to be more about "listen to me!", and noticing every little thing. This is GREAT for testing. Leaves me curious though as to why the Japan Region hasn't had the same impact on feedback. Could it be that the JPR are more understanding of limitations of Alpha tests? Or maybe they just don't care and WANT to play the game so badly they forget? Haha.
Firstly we'll start with the positive side of things! Alpha 1 is going great, opinions, bug reports, everything is coming in hot and they are tackling the issues head on! They seem to be getting quite lots of feedback, mostly from the North American Region. As stated in the interview, the possible reason behind that fact is the NAR players tend to be more about "listen to me!", and noticing every little thing. This is GREAT for testing. Leaves me curious though as to why the Japan Region hasn't had the same impact on feedback. Could it be that the JPR are more understanding of limitations of Alpha tests? Or maybe they just don't care and WANT to play the game so badly they forget? Haha.
The main things to look for right now is the end of Alpha 1, and the possible start of Alpha 2 as Tanaka stated might happen. I'm going to go ahead and put a prediction out there, Alpha 1 will end by June, and Alpha 2 will begin, along side with 12 hour server spans. Alpha 2 would finish by Mid July, and Closed Beta will begin. Why do I think this? Well judging by the Alpha test site forums, just about all the issues are being resolved, quickly. What remains are certain issues with Nvidia drivers, SLI setups, and CrossFire setups. So if you have either setup, go ahead and disable it if they don't end up fixing it. I hope they do, there really is no reason to have issues with SLI or CrossFire with this kind of graphic intensive game. It will abuse your video card if its not new enough to run solo.
Server stability is still an issue, but they are working on it, and looking forward to 24 hour spans when the world is up. I personally look forward to this, 4 hours is nowhere near enough to get any particular region all online and playing. They should have foreseen this happening and causing the huge queues and disconnects. At random moments during my testing, everything would stop except for the text box. I could still type in it but there would be no response from the NPC. A few minutes later, it would all go back to normal like nothing ever happened, not even a crash.
Graphics are finished, but may come minor changes, the playable groundwork of the game is complete, just some quest related issues and UI issues are being looked at and resolved, according to Tanaka. Currently 10% of the game is playable says Komoto, and with 10% of an MMO game, that is still quite a bit!
After it's all said and done, they state the game is 65% complete, which is a conservative statement but I imagine its a bit farther along than that. Beta testing rarely has much to fix thanks to throughouh Alpha testing, and they are doing a great job right now on resolving our issues. I can't imagine it will be that much longer before more of you awesome Fantasy Fans get to enjoy the beautiful world of Eorzea.
That about wraps it up folks, until next time we dive back into the crazy anticipation of Final Fantasy XIV!
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